By Barddylbach
Years ago, when I was young I had a Latin teacher and I didn’t like him very much. He was in fact English, least I think he was – whatever that might be – and he taught Latin. At the end of term, and sometimes on a Saturday morning, he would ditch Latin and set us some logic puzzles and twisters to figure out. This was mostly fun except when he occasionally threw in a never-ending staircase disguised as a riddle or a matrix with no solution. Illusions can be fun, but the type we are often confronted with today are deceiving. He was doing us a favour, but usually what he did was not fun, it was rather more like a smile through his beard with a gun.
And this brings me to the illusory, the wealthy but poor old ‘Jean’, and what will happen to Jean and the faeries if Labor get in, according to the Liberal corporate spin.
‘Case Study 1: Jean is retired with a large self-managed super fund. She receives $29,810 in dividends from bank shares and $130,000 from other assets. As the fund is in the pension phase, and pays $0 tax, Jean is currently entitled to a $12,775 rebate. Under Labor, Jean would lose that’.
Here’s the twister – Under the dividend imputation (tax) benefits scheme, Jean has an accountant called Peter, a stockbroker called John, a financial advisor called Scott, a bank manager called Malcolm and an industrious flurry of faeries; let’s call them Blossom, all living comfortably on coffee and coiffure in her handbag. By the way, she doesn’t read Rupert’s paper (no-one with any intelligence does), but that doesn’t stop Peter, her accountant from claiming the cost of depreciation she would be entitled to if she did. Rather like a sock allowance.
The puzzle – If she were to pay 1% of her bank dividends to Malcolm plus 10% of that in GST to John, subtract one tenth of the difference between her gross bank dividends and other assets from the remaining balance, donate 5% of her rebate from Peter to pay Paul whoever he is (but I’m pretty sure it’s Tony), allowing for additional entitlements of $1 for every day of the year in family tax benefit for each undeclared faerie in her handbag minus $4,344.34 depreciation, assuming we arrive at the same figure she would have received in the first place:
1) How big would her handbag need to be? (guess)
2) How many faeries are there actually in her handbag? (there is a solution to this)
3) How much would she lose? (hmmm …)
And the moral of the story is?
Oh, Jean you!
Now while some are cleverly racking their brains for the solution, here’s another treacherous question for the rest of us who prefer just to ponder.
Case Study 2: I have no solution for this one!
In conjunction with this story of Jean, shouldn’t we really be asking why we allow Malcolm Turnbull to give $30 million to Rupert Murdoch and News Corp so he can spend it for free on a beguiling Beatles TV advertising campaign to expand his Daily Telegraph market … you know the one that brainwashes the population with neoliberal capitalist lies, sensationalism and political blackmail. So everyone who pays for the Telegraph will obviously end up voting Liberal.
We are talking brainwashing the people, scaremongering, bought votes and bought with tax payer/public money. This is a shoring up campaign in preparation for the next general election, funds flowing the other way to political donations but get the same result. This is the treachery of this unholy alliance between media, money and the Liberals, the illusion of democracy and freedom of choice!
Why is Murdoch treated the same as Jean, so he can breed more pseudo-Jeans out there than know for their own good, let alone the good of others or the country? Why is this allowed, it’s not as if we don’t know about it?
Do we wait until the burglar points his gun at us and says “smile, I am doing you a favour”?
