Australian corporate profits just hit a three-year high, jumping 5.8 percent in a single quarter. Yet, the same people who took those profits are now asking you to pay for their office upgrades and new machinery. And the Productivity Commission is intent on laundering that big business demand through the media to the Treasurer.

Here’s what the Productivity Commission says Treasurer Jim Chalmers should do: take $7 billion in tax payers money and give it to big business as a tax cut.

Big business and their internal-to-government lobby group at the Productivity Commission want you to believe that even more tax cuts will incentivise business investment in productivity measures.

In plain English, they want to use your tax dollars, around $7 billion per year, to subsidise corporate profits.

Business investment in productivity measures like research and development, and investment in new equipment (like big factory machines) has dropped by $80 billion a year since 2008. During that same period, executive salaries and corporate profits have soared.

The money for investment exists but it is being used to pay shareholder dividends to overseas investors and the US hedge funds that own the majority share of our largest corporations.

Labour productivity — that means how much profit workers generate per hour of work — has massively increased. Workers are working harder, longer and more effectively to provide huge corporate profits. However, wages have massively lagged.

What the Productivity Commission and the Australian Financial Review are trying to do is launder the same failed, tired neoliberal ideology to justify state subsidisation of big businesses who are already making massive profits.

They demand that the government provide “incentives,” which means the taxpayer pays for the tools the company will then use to extract more profit from those same taxpayers as workers.

When a company refuses to invest its own record profits back into its workforce or equipment, it is effectively holding the economy hostage. They are waiting to be paid a ransom in the form of tax cuts and more cuts to regulations.

The proposed “Allowance for Corporate Equity” is a technical trick to hand over taxpayer funds to the ultra-rich investors. It’s an old, re-heated idea from before 2012. It allows companies to have a tax deduction on selling shares. This would turn the act of owning a company into a tax write-off. Needless to say, this only benefits the billionaires and US-based asset management companies like Blackrock and Vanguard.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the budget is “incredibly tight” when it comes to the cost of living, but that he has an “appetite for more tax reform”.

If business profits grow at 5.8 percent while the treasurer worries about a “tight” budget, it is more confirmation that the system is designed to concentrate wealth into the hands of the ultra-rich.

In fact, the budget is only “tight” for people paying rent and living pay-cheque to pay-cheque, not for the mining giants whose profits grew by 8.1 percent last quarter.

This proposal from the Productivity Commission is yet more evidence (if more is needed!) that it will only aggressively push proposals that enhance corporate interests, not socially-beneficial policies for everyday people. The Productivity Commission’s true role is to make big business’s political demands for more money and austerity look like a neutral, scientific, non-political economic requirement.

The Business Council of Australia is also pushing to slash “regulations” by 25 percent. “Regulations” are the rules that stop big business from polluting your water, selling dangerous and poisonous goods, or stealing wages from workers.

The types of regulation the Business Council of Australia (who’s 20 largest members are all majority foreign-owned) relate to “foreign investment rules for low-risk deals and take steps to make investment more attractive”.

This is code for giving more power to corporations and billionaires to send cash and profits out of Australia, and to allow even greater ownership of Australian companies, assets and infrastructure by asset managers like Blackrock.

Australia is already a quarry state where our tax base is reliant on global mineral extraction. Doing what the BCA wants will further weaken the ability for the state to constrain financial markets, making our domestic social policy even more hostage to international capital flows.

This is the failed logic of neoliberalism.

It demands that we must make the ultra-rich even richer, and this will magically turn into greater productivity and growth for the rest of us. It’s the trickle-down trick.

Decades of evidence proves that the big business executives and billionaires don’t just keep the cash, they actively pump money upwards from workers and taxpayers to themselves. It never trickles down.

We must absolutely reject the subsidisation of corporate choices to prioritise profiteering over socially-productive and socially-beneficial growth.

If a company is profitable enough to pay record dividends, it is profitable enough to pay for its own investments. We must stop letting the corporate class and their cheerleaders get away with the trickle-down lie.