Government approves Santos Barossa pipeline and sea dumping

The Australia Institute Media Release   Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s Department has approved a…

If The Jackboots Actually Fit …

By Jane Salmon   If The Jackboots Actually Fit … Why Does Labor Keep…

Distinctions Without Difference: The Security Council on Gaza…

The UN Security Council presents one of the great contradictions of power…

How the supermarkets lost their way in Oz

By Callen Sorensen Karklis   Many Australians are heard saying that they’re feeling the…

Purgatorial Torments: Assange and the UK High Court

What is it about British justice that has a certain rankness to…

Why A Punch In The Face May Be…

Now I'm not one who believes in violence as a solution to…

Does God condone genocide?

By Bert Hetebry Stan Grant points out in his book The Queen is…

As Yemen enters tenth year of war, militarisation…

Oxfam Australia Media Release   As Yemen enters its tenth year of war, its…

«
»
Facebook

Shocked And Appalled By Where My Taxes Go… Or Went!

Now I’m the sort of person who reads everything. Well not quite everything… I rarely read the “Terms And Conditions” when updating software so if somebody one day slips in a condition that I agree to give them full access to my fridge by leaving a key under the mat and to keep it well stocked with food and alcohol, then I may be in trouble, but I tend to read things. Why, I even read the comments from One Nation supporters on a recent post on The AIMN.I liked one in particular, and not just because it was one of the few that actual used punctuation and words that approximated ones that you’d find in a dictionary. I liked the one which said:

“I have no interest in discussing the truth with left-leaning fools hell-bent on showing no care for the country’s future. I am well aware its just a waste of time.”

Apart from the obvious irony of his declaration that he had no interest in “discussing the truth”, it struck me as rather contradictory that he’d made several comments to people while asserting that he had no wish to discuss anything. I would have pointed this out, but I’ve find that when people say that they’re not talking to you, merely pointing out that they just did, doesn’t help the situation one iota.

Anyway, I recently received my tax refund and I was shocked to learn exactly where my tax went. Not only that, I was even more surprised to see a highlighted section, entitled “Level of Australian Government gross debt” which informed me:

This year: $427 billion Last Year: $369 billion Interest payments on gross debt over this year: $14.5 billion

Mm, what’s that doing there, I wondered. Is this those subversive public servants at the tax office trying to undermine the Coalition’s assertion that the government debt wasn’t growing? Or was this made a requirement back in those heady days when Tony and Joe believed that the debt was going to diminish rather than grow and they’d be able to point to it and say, “Look what a good job we’re doing, and look at that interest which is all the fault of Labor!”

Whatever, I found it interesting and so I decided to find out exactly what my tax dollars had been spent on.

The biggest line was devoted to what was labelled “Welfare” and this accounted for almost 40% of my total taxes. Using the logic of Scott Morrison and friends, I was all set to round it up to nearly half and claim that I had a mandate to attack the unemployed. But before I could decide where I could find some tar and feathers, I looked at the document again and discovered that these “Welfare” items were broken down even further and that the unemployed were the second smallest part of the welfare budget, with the smallest being “Other”. I wondered what this relatively small item was. Therapy for ex-PMs to help them deal with the idea that they were no longer relevant? No, that would be far higher than a mere two percent of my taxes.

Anyway, it was an item marked “Aged” which was the biggest item at about 16% of my taxes. I presumed this meant old age pensions rather than old bottles of wine for the PM’s cellar. This was followed by “Families” at about 10%. I guess this explains the Liberals concern about marriage equality; we don’t want to create even more families to add to the welfare bill. Even “Disability” was higher than the unemployed. Of course there are political problems with taking money off pensioners, families or the disabled, so I guess by ensuring that people can’t access the pension till they’re 70, rising to 102 by 2030, and by moving people of disability support and telling people that they’re just lazy dole-bludgers, then it’s easier to attack them as lazy no-tax leaners. This would explain recent media stories where people on disability support have been contacted to see if their brain damage has got better or whether their missing limbs have grown back.

But I was most shocked to discover that we waste nearly as much on Education as we spend on Defence. Thankfully, a few submarines and planes should ensure Defence spending soon exceeds Health expenditure.

So I’m now looking forward to next year’s tax return where I can immediately check how well the “can-do” Liberals are doing at reducing the debt like they promised. Or did I misunderstand? Did they only promise to reduce the rate at which the debt was increasing? Because that seems to be what they’re telling us now. I should dig out that old “contract with Australia” that Tony took to the 2013 election. Ah, here it is: “No. 3. END THE WASTE AND DEBT”. That seems pretty clear.

Or is that no longer valid because we’ve had a change of leader and Malcolm isn’t bound by promises that Tony made?

Yeah, silly question! With comments like: Of course, Bill Leak isn’t racist, he did a once painting of me, he seems to be more Tony than Tony lately. I almost expect him to reintroduce knighthoods in order to award one to John Howard.

16 comments

Login here Register here
  1. Peter F

    It would be good if they also told us how much tax we don’t collect from those profiting from our mineral wealth.

  2. bobrafto

    Peter

    I read somewhere that a uni professor said that corporate tax evasion is estimated at $50B a year.

    If that was able to be collected we could buy back the farm and enough left over to have huge tax cuts.

  3. Kim Southwood

    Well the government really needs to get on with its ‘Jobs and Growth’ platform and bring in an Ultra-Neo-Liberal model for welfare.

    To achieve this end, they can
    a) lower the pension age to 60 and introduce compulsory euthanasia for all but self-funding pensioners,
    b) denounce disability as a figment of our imagination and end the Disability Pension, and
    c) phase out families altogether for couples earning less than $200 000 pa while introducing a new immigration policy granting refugee status to anyone with financial assets above 10 Million AUD.

    OR … they could get real and acknowledge that they are hopelessly inadequate at the job of representing the needs of their electorates, because they’ve been distracted by big money and the needs of their masters.

  4. Ray

    Also it would be nice to see how much of our taxes are subsidising peoples investment properties through negative gearing?

  5. maxpowerof1

    They decided an inheritance tax is a great way to profit from induced suicide.
    Another one of their “win wins”!

  6. PK

    This will blow your mind then… Taxes doesn’t go anywhere or get spent on anything… Taxes actually just destroy the money that the Government issue’s into the economy in the first place as the sole and only creator of the Australian currency.

    Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve: the government ISN’T SPENDING TAX MONEY

    Dr Bill Mitchell – Professor of Economics Taxpayers do not fund anything

    Taxpayers do not fund anything

    Professor L. Randall Wray

    Ellis Willingham
    Federal taxation does NOT pay for federal spending.

    Dr Steven Hail Professor of Economics

  7. PK

    Whats more that so called Debt… isn’t Debt at all… shock and horror, they lie!! Monetary Sovereign Government debt is really just a form of ‘money’, and not ‘debt’ at all, in the conventional sense of the term. The deficit is “money” that the Government doesn’t take out of the economy, it is the “money” that is in the private sector in investments and savings.

    Professor Stephanie Kelton: The National Debt Is Actually A Government Savings Account

    Professor Steven Keen

    Mathew Forstater – Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity

    Warren Mosler: The Government Deficit = Private Sector Saving (Federal Reserve = Reserve Bank)

    Professor L. Randall Wray

    “The need to balance the budget is a myth.” -Paul Samuelson
    Paul Anthony Samuelson was an American economist, and the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

    Dr Steven Hail Professor of Economics
    https://www.facebook.com/green.modernmoneytheoryandpractice/?fref=ts#

    Professor John Harvey, talking about what should be the least controversial thing we ever talk about, but strangely isn’t.
    What he says about the US is true for Australia, too.

    The National Debt: Why Fret Over Something That Doesn’t Exist?
    http://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/10/25/2016/national-debt-why-fret-over-something-doesnt-exist

    Nobel prize-winning economist Stiglitz tells us why ‘neoliberalism is dead’
    http://www.businessinsider.com.au/joseph-stiglitz-says-neoliberalism-is-dead-2016-8

    Why America’s gigantic national debt is a good thing
    http://theweek.com/articles/618419/why-americas-gigantic-national-debt-good-thing

  8. Mark Needham

    Debt, debt., more debt.
    My Kingdom for Debt.

    Broke,
    Mark Needham

  9. Harquebus

    PK
    No fiat currency has ever survived. They have all been debased into extinction. What makes you think that this time will be different?

    Continuous inflation is the continual debasement of currency. In simple language, it is theft.

  10. townsvilleblog

    Of course L&NP policy is to assist the 1% of the global population who own 50%+ of the global economy to get to 60%+ by selling off (privatization) all of our government services to them (the 1%). If we have to suffer this L&NP govt for the whole 3 years, there will be no government services to salvage. We need a party who will levy a fair share of taxation upon the 579 foreign corporations operating within Australia, making billions and paying zero income tax.

  11. JohnI

    Kim Southwood sez, in part: “… introducing a new immigration policy granting refugee status to anyone with financial assets above 10 Million AUD”.

    We already have something like this, in two different flavours. There’s the Significant Investor Visa, where an applicant can effectively buy permanent residence for $5 million. And then there’s the Premium Investor Visa, which requires the applicant to invest $15 million. The difference between them is that the SIV buys you a four-year wait for a permanent visa, while a PIV reduces the waiting time to twelve months.

    http://www.border.gov.au/Lega/Lega/Form/Immi-FAQs/what-is-the-significant-investor-visa
    On my reading, they don’t appear to ask a lot of questions about how the money was obtained.

    The government could ditch a few public service jobs and thus save some money by amalgamating these and requiring $10 million to buy a two-year wait. They could call it the Significant and Premium Investor Visa, or SPIV for short.

  12. totaram

    PK: Nice you give us all those links. There are the usual “know-it-all” types, who will have something negative to say about your post, and there are the others who will ignore it completely, because they just can’t get their heads around it. If you have been brainwashed all your life to believe something, to repudiate the whole lot is very hard. Some people actually prefer to commit suicide. I won’t give examples.

  13. MichaelW

    It’s all labors fault.

  14. Harquebus

    totaram

    Whereas economists only think they “know-it-all”. They have no understanding of physics nor science which, explains their illogical rhetoric.

    “Despite its outlandish theoretical flaws and nonsensical economic jargon and the catastrophic empirical evidence of its failure to prevent financial downturns or “stimulate” sustainable growth, Keynesianism remains the ruling paradigm of economic thought.”
    “A number of trenchant reasons have been given for the General Theory’s continued dominance, however, one stands above all else: Keynesian economics provides the intellectual justification for economists, statisticians, technocrats, bureaucrats, and policy wonks in their exalted positions as “fine tuners” of economies the world over.
    “That Keynesianism continues to reign supreme, despite its theoretical and empirical bankruptcy, speaks volumes of the state of Western intellectual and academic life. Instead of the pursuit of truth and the refutation of error, Western intelligentsia is primarily concerned with securing privilege and power for itself.”
    John Maynard Keynes’ “General Theory” Eighty Years Later

    “Keynesian economics isn’t even remotely plausible. But it’s what is taught all over the world. They don’t understand fundamental economics. This is the problem that we have: all economies on the planet are being run by economists that don’t understand economics.” — Mike Maloney

  15. Marilyn R

    I love this article and would have found it quite hilarious if I wasn’t so angry at the way this LNP government manipulates public opinion. A productive nation is where all citizens are respected and valued and all share in the wealth. This elitist mindset and the sale of our valuable farmlands and services is driving me nuts. I want to bash arrogant heads against the wall. Why can they not see the real damage that they have done and are continuing to do? What will be left of this once proud, but now divided nation, for our grandchildren to inherit.
    I am ashamed of and afraid for my Australia!

  16. Jack

    Speaking of discussing the truth, if I may leave a link below, to a website that features all sort of truth, including the truth abouth the impossibility of the official account of 9/11, and the truth about the Port Arthur Massacre, and the truth being that Martin bryant has spent 20 years in gaol, innocent! If that doesnt interest you, perhaps some truth about the TTP, or MH17? and much much more, thankyou.

    Homepage

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The maximum upload file size: 2 MB. You can upload: image, audio, video, document, spreadsheet, interactive, text, archive, code, other. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop file here

Return to home page