“No country ever taxed its way to prosperity!”
“What about Norway?”
“They don’t count.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know enough about them. And besides, they don’t fit my basic point and as any economist will tell you, if some piece of data doesn’t fit the theory you just call it an outlier and move on, and concentrate on the bits that prove you correct.”
Now it’s going to work like this.
I want all of you to send me $100. Ok, if you can’t afford $100, just make it whatever, but if I get $100 from everyone in Australia, then my plan to make Australia great again will be a lot easier to implement because I’ll be a billionaire and not just a millionaire.
When I’ve received the money, I’ll actually have enough to start doing things with it. But before I do that, I’ll have to lobby the government to make me tax except because, let’s face it, if I’m being charged tax there’s no incentive for me to do anything.
Once I have the right not to pay tax, it’ll save me the trouble of employing Malcolm Turnbull’s accountant so I too can work out ways to send my money on a holiday to the Cayman Islands and I can get started on my aim to boost the economy.
Of course, when starting up a business, it takes a while before it’s profitable, so while we’re waiting for that tax exemption to actually mean something, I’d like to offer you all the chance to work for me. Because I’m intending to employ people with limited experience, I’m not going to pay you anything, but I’m sure I can have a word to Scott and he can count it as part of a work-for-the-dole scheme.
While I realise that there won’t be enough people with actual skills ready to work for no money at all, I’ll be bringing in a thousand workers on 457 visas. Before you go off all half-cocked, remember that these people will stimulate the economy with their needs for things like food and shelter because I can only sleep about fifty percent of them at my place of business so I intend to put the other five hundred in a motel. And I have just the motel because it has twenty rooms, so they won’t be more than twenty five to a room.
Now we’ve reached the point where my business has to actually do something. Ok, this is a bit of a stumbling block because I realise that if it was manufacturing anything then I could do it more cheaply in China. But after careful thought, I’ve decided that I could run a consultancy business. When the Federal Government wants advice on something they could give me a call and for a reasonable fee, I’ll issue a report telling them that they can go ahead and do what they were planning because I’ve handed it over to my 457 workers and none of them could find any problems with the plan. Not even the ones who could speak English and actually read the proposal.
However, I realise that there’d be a limit to how many times the government would need advice from me, so within a year or so, I’d be bankrupt and I’d only be allowed to keep my new house anc car, and I’d be forced to live off my family’s savings which thanks to their income as directors of my company, would be enough to enable me to eat, even if it’s not at the absolute top restaurants and I have to remember not to order the Grange.
All right, I know it may not make Australia great. But at the end, my family will be quite well off and we won’t have to depend on welfare and be a burden, so isn’t that a good thing. And all it takes is a hundred dollars from everyone…
If you read yesterday’s Herald-Sun you would have learned two very interesting things: Scott Morrison thinks that it would be a good idea to raise the GST to 15% and apply it to everything, enabling tax cuts which would “grow the economy” (Page 12 small column) and Peter Costello is an idiot.
Now, I know that some of you are thinking. How does applying a “great big tax on everything” actually equate to a tax cut? Well, it’ll enable them to cut company tax to twenty two cents in the dollar and all those companies paying exorbitant taxes will suddenly have greater profits. But I’ll bet some of you are confused about how a cut to company tax will boost profits when so many of the companies are paying more in Liberal Party donations than they’re paying in tax. And I’ll bet all of you are confused that the so-called carbon tax was supposed to be a dampener on economic activity but adding five percent to everything will boost growth. Actually, not five percent on everything. When it comes to fresh food, health and education, it’ll be a fifteen percent increase. But the Financial Services Council gave Scott a report and there’s one thing you don’t question, it’s a report telling you what you want to do. (See there is a good business case for my proposal!)
As for Peter Costello being an idiot, I am overlooking the possibility that he could just be pretending. I mean, he used to do a lot of that when he was Treasurer. He used to pretend that all the good things that happened were a result of his work, whereas everything bad was because of Labor. Even when he sold gold for about $300 an ounce and its value skyrocketted over the next ten years, this may not have been because he was an idiot – he was probably just trying to fit in with the Liberal Party and show that he too could make mistakes. And surely when he suggested that he thought that John Howard would stand down, because that’s what he promised and surely you could trust a promise from John Howard, he was showing the sort of comic genius that made Barry Humphries a household name.
However, his article on how we were being forced to lose all our money because of the super guarantee made me suspect that maybe the man hasn’t been pretending all these years.
He starts off by telling us how much the stock market has gone down this year. Yep, it’s a lot: about eight percent. But anyone who invests in the stock market will know that it has fluctuations and if you try and judge performance over a two week period, it’s like deciding to become a professional gambler because you picked the winner in the Melbourne Cup. Costello then goes on to tell you that you’re being forced to put your money into the share market because of the super guarantee. This overlooks, of course, that most super funds give you options and you could opt to put your superannuation into fixed interest. However, as Costello points out in the article, interest rates are low and it’s hard to get a good return which is why superannuation funds go for shares, which are more volatile – or as Costello says, riskier. Of course, he doesn’t acknowledge that interest rates are low because inflation is low and that you are getting a return above inflation and that a three percent return on your money when inflation is two percent is actually better than a ten percent return when inflation is fifteen percent.
He concludes by telling us that the Australian Share Market is 30% lower than it was eight years ago, but doesn’t point out that it’s actually about twenty percent higher than it was ten years ago. Significantly, however, he doesn’t actually talk about super funds when making the point about the Australian Share Market, and given that most super funds are a mix of cash, overseas equities, as well as the Australian Share Market, I’d be very surprised if any of them have actually lost money over the past eight years. While I know that a lot of people received a sizeable downgrade in their wealth when the GFC hit, if you look at the performance of money in a superfund from 2003 to 2013, the average rate of return for the big funds was around 6% per annum, so even with the big losses during the 07/08 year, you still did ok over a ten year period.
Of course, careful analysis doesn’t suit the idea that somehow the government is robbing you by forcing you to put aside 9.5% of your income into funds which have lost billions in the past week. Never mind that the same Aussie share market may bounce back billions in the next few days and actually be worth much more than they were at the start of the previous year.
Nah, convince people that they don’t need super. And convince ’em that they don’t need the pension either. Convince ’em all that they just need to be independently wealthy.
Actually, don’t send me the $100. If we have the Liberals in charge much longer, you may need every cent.
