Yet the first thing some people in the Coalition want Malcolm Turnbull to do is to reduce the budget deficit. If he oversees a slowing economy and rising unemployment he will be blamed. And if he oversees an increase in the budget deficit he will be blamed. Ouch.

Fortunately for our newly-elected Prime Minister there are a number of ways to boost the budget bottom line that will do nothing to harm consumer spending or the economy more generally. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, the good economic options available to him will likely enrage the disgruntled conservatives in his ranks.

So how could the Turnbull Government simultaneously deliver on its "jobs and growth" mantra in a slowing economy while also delivering on its "commitment" to "budget repair"? Let's start with some basic economic tools that might help build Turnbull a policy lifeboat.

First, virtually every trained economist agrees that increasing government spending will boost economic activity in the short term. The economic argument isn't about the existence of this effect, but its duration. Conservative economists typically argue all of the short-term gain is offset by long-term pain. While the empirical data doesn't support this degree of pessimism, facts are widely known to have a left-wing bias. But facts aside, even conservative economists agree big cuts to government spending would have adverse effects on the economy in the year or two following the cuts. A year or two might not be a long time for academic economists, but it could be all the time Malcolm Turnbull has.

Second, while "expansionary fiscal policy", such as increased government spending or unfunded tax cuts can pump money into the economy and boost employment, "contractionary fiscal policy" does the opposite. There is, however, more to understanding the impact of the budget on the economy than simply monitoring the size of the budget deficit or surplus. Indeed, the "balanced budget multiplier" allows economists to predict whether a policy that is budget neutral will have a stimulatory or contractionary impact on the economy. It works like this.

Imagine the government reduced age pensions by $10 billion and reduced the tax paid by foreign companies by $10 billion. While the impact on the budget "bottom line" would be zero, the impact on the economy would be contractionary for the simple reason that the vast majority of pension payments would be spent in the local economy while virtually none of the windfall gain to foreign shareholders would make its way back to Australia.

Money flowing offshore is a known as a "leakage", which means the short-term impact of welfare cuts are quite different from the short-term impact of tax cuts. Intriguingly, just this week KPMG released economic modelling that they say supports the view tax cuts are a better way to simulate the economy than increased government spending. Of course, with the wrong assumptions you can always find the right answer. In the lead up to this year's election KPMG even found the corporate tax cuts were so good for the economy that they would be self-funding themselves within five years, a claim so optimistic, and so at odds with Treasury's own modelling, that not even Mr Turnbull relied on it.

Thirdly, the so called budget bottom line is more rubbery than the economic modelling that is so commonly used to dress corporate interest up as the national interest. Like the "profits" declared by Enron, the Commonwealth budget deficit is as much the result of accounting conventions as it is an economic indicator.

In recent months sections of the media have fawned over state governments able to deliver "budget surpluses" while bemoaning the apparent inability of the Commonwealth to do likewise. Significantly, state governments typically exclude expenditure on long lasting capital goods and infrastructure from their "budget bottom line" while the Commonwealth government does not; $50 billion submarine projects and $100 billion Joint Strike Fighter projects are treated in the Commonwealth budget in the same way as expenditure on the pensions of retired politicians.

It is not clear if those comparing the "fiscal responsibility" of the state governments to the "profligacy" of the commonwealth government are aware of the significance of Peter Costello's decision to treat all government spending as equally "wasteful" or whether those making the comparison are deliberately glossing over the distinction. It's also not clear which would be worse.

In conflating recurrent expenditure (e.g. the aged pension, public servant pay) and capital expenditure (e.g. submarines, roads) the Coalition government, and boosters for corporate tax cuts such as KPMG, find it much easier to argue that we have a "spending problem" when what we really have is an accounting problem. You wouldn't find many economists who think expenditure on primary school education or high school education is simply "consumption expenditure", with most agreeing it is more an investment in human capital. But the economic modellers and government accountants assume the long-run benefits of education spending are no different from the long-run benefits of a CEO's entertainment allowance.

What then could Mr Turnbull do? The best way to reduce the budget deficit without reducing the rate of economic growth is to focus on revenue measures that will have little or no impact on consumer spending or total levels of investment.

Luckily for the Prime Minister his promises to reform superannuation tax concessions will both collect revenue and have no adverse impact on the economy. Indeed, while some of the wealthiest Australians may feel aggrieved that they can't park even more of their money in their preferred tax shelter, their only alternatives are to park their spare money in their second favourite tax shelter or to spend the money on a new bathroom. The macroeconomic consequences are either zero or positive. The same is true for clamping down on tax minimisation by multinational companies, reducing the 50 per cent tax discount on capital gains and scrapping the diesel fuel rebate and other expensive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.

Finally, if Mr Turnbull was really serious about boosting economic activity he could even scrap the planned tax cuts for high income earners and spend the money boosting unemployment benefits, youth benefits and other pensions. Because poor people have a habit of spending every one of the dollars they receive and high income earners have a tendency to stash a fair chunk of change in tax shelters like super there's an immediate boost to the economy when you redistribute money from the rich to the poor. Even the lefties at the IMF are now talking about the "growth dividend" governments can get from reducing income inequality.

Dr Richard Denniss is chief economist at The Australia Institute