The real value of the government’s “phenomenal” $20k asset write off

The government’s small business budget has been a big success, it seems. They got positive headlines about the Budget being stimulatory, and now approval ratings of the PM are back up.

It’s a PR success. And a lot of that is due to attention lavished on the $20,000 tax write-off for small business.

It’s “Phenomenal” apparently.

Get ready for a lot more asset write-off announcements in future. Because they buy the government a lot more headlines than they deserve.

You wouldn’t know this from reading about it, but the “$20,000” asset write off is worth only about $1000.

Here’s why:

The $20,000 is not taken off the tax bill of a small business. Instead it’s a deduction from income – same as when an individual gives to charity.

After a small business takes $20k off their income, they save the 28.5 per cent tax they would have paid on it. 28.5% of 20k is $5700.

That’s the actual value of being able to instantly write off a car or machine from your tax this year.

But here’s the thing. Businesses could always write off asset purchases against their income. They just had to do it more slowly.

Using a depreciation schedule from the ATO website, I calculated how much a small business would have been able to save off their tax under the old rules.

It’s $5700.

The only advantage is that under the new policy, a business can claim all that $5700 in this tax year, instead of claiming it in dribs and drabs over the next decade.

Here’s a graph for how your depreciation works under instant write off versus slow depreciation.

We can measure how much benefit instant access to the write-off provides. All we need to do is make an assumption about how small business values money over time. We do that with a discount rate. Lets assume a discount rate of 8 per cent.

If that is the case, the net present value of the flow of money is $4660. Only $1040 less than the value of the money right now.

(If you assume small business is even more patient, the value of the instant write-off is even less. At a 2 per cent discount rate the NPV is $5350 and the net value of the new policy is a mere $350.)

In summary, the government is getting great value from this policy in media coverage terms.

Compare it to another tax break they gave small business in the Budget – a five per cent tax cut for unincorporated businesses. You probably haven’t seen mention of that anywhere.

But this five per cent tax cut (full disclosure, I run an unincorporated business!) is worth even more to the Budget bottom line. That’s it in the blue bubble on the right side – worth $1.8 billion. This graphic was in the glossy brochures journalists got in the Budget lock-up.

It’s one of the most expensive measures in the Budget. And it has barely got a headline. The government will not make that mistake again.

Expect asset write-off thresholds to be even higher in the next Budget as governments seek a headline that says something like $100,000 Asset Tax Bonus for Small Business.