By Bob Rafto
In the 1960s and 70s there was such a thing as the American and Australian dream, things were good, in America nappy valleys accompanied with home ownership and big cars sprouted all over the country. and similarly the same experience was felt in Australia.
We had Medicare, free education, free TAFE and free university degrees that most of the current LNP members were beneficiaries of. Jobs were easy to get, and if one happened to be on the dole it was only for a very short period which I can personally attest to and later on I started 3 businesses on a shoestring.
Then came the 1980s along with Reagan espousing Trickle Down Economics and this theory was also taken up by Thatcher. Australia to an extent managed to avoid most of this theory until Howard came along and started privatising whatever he could but to his credit gave back some of the loot to the middle class.
Central to the Trickle Down Economics is the Laffer curve and at some point in this curve is the magic number of what the tax rate should be and since no one can determine the rate the corporations have taken onto themselves to be zero and subsequently have squirrelled away trillions of tax dollars in tax havens. And maybe Trickle Down economics may work if the corporations paid their fair share of tax.
And possibly what exacerbated the wrecking of economies with tax avoidance was the movie Wall St, and Michael Douglas’ character Gordon Gekko with his famous slogan ‘greed is good’, and since then major corporations went into overdrive saying that their shareholders are demanding record profits every year.
Mammon/ˈmæmən in the New Testament of the Bible is commonly thought to mean money or material wealth and is associated with the greedy pursuit of gain. Jesus used the term mammon, “You cannot serve both God and mammon,” as a reference to Caesar, because it was Caesar who claimed on his tax coin he was a god. According to Jesus, Caesar was mammon, “god of money.”
Our leaders may not call themselves God or have their mug shots on coins but they sure in Hell are complicit in feeding the unbridled greed of the corporations at the expense of the lower and middle classes.
On July 28, 2009, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone cited Gekko’s ‘greed is good’ slogan in a speech to the Italian senate, saying that the free market had been replaced by a greed market, and also blamed such a mentality for the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
One thing only that I agree with Tim Wilson is his statement from his maiden speech; “I have never understood why we tax people more than companies … It fosters perverse incentives for the wealthy to redirect energy to minimising tax rather than growing profits.”
‘We’ll all be rooned’ unless the corporations are reigned in.
