Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Sean Hayden » Sun Oct 02, 2022 5:13 pm

Sure. In another situation who’s to say these same people won’t immediately recognize the intended use and meaning of “fool”? Increase the stakes, change what’s being sold etc and maybe they recognize and switch to using moral language.

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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by pErvinalia » Thu Nov 10, 2022 6:12 am

Alan Kohler: How to fix the budget – turn back time
The personal income tax scales have been fiddled with 18 times since 1983, seven of them big changes and 11 fairly small ones.
If income tax rates had not been changed in the past 40 years, and the wages at which they cut in had simply been increased with inflation, personal income tax revenue would be $170 billion more than it is now, there would be no budget deficit, structural or otherwise, and tons of money for government services.
Almost all of those changes were designed to gain political points by giving back bracket creep with a flag-draped flourish at a press conference, but they did much more than that.
Bracket creep happens when you get a pay rise that takes you into a higher tax bracket, so your tax increases more than your income.
There was a brief attempt by Malcolm Fraser in the 1970s to index the income tax scales so that CPI wage rises would not result in an increase in anyone’s marginal tax rate.
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FINANCE

6:00am, Nov 10, 2022 Updated: 8:48pm, Nov 9

Alan Kohler: How to fix the budget – turn back time

[https://thenewdaily][https://thenewdaily]

Alan Kohler does the tax indexation maths and comes up with a surprising figure. Photo: TND, Getty

OPINION

[https://thenewdaily]Alan Kohler

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[https://thenewdaily][https://thenewdaily][https://thenewdaily][https://thenewdaily][https://thenewdaily]

The personal income tax scales have been fiddled with 18 times since 1983, seven of them big changes and 11 fairly small ones.
If income tax rates had not been changed in the past 40 years, and the wages at which they cut in had simply been increased with inflation, personal income tax revenue would be $170 billion more than it is now, there would be no budget deficit, structural or otherwise, and tons of money for government services.
Almost all of those changes were designed to gain political points by giving back bracket creep with a flag-draped flourish at a press conference, but they did much more than that.
Bracket creep happens when you get a pay rise that takes you into a higher tax bracket, so your tax increases more than your income.
There was a brief attempt by Malcolm Fraser in the 1970s to index the income tax scales so that CPI wage rises would not result in an increase in anyone’s marginal tax rate.
[https://thenewdaily]Malcolm Fraser tried to index the income tax scales in the ’70s, and failed. Photo: Getty
But that idea was quietly strangled behind the garage after just one year because it removed the option for politicians to win votes by giving tax cuts that simply give back CPI bracket creep.
Both sides of politics have been happily doing that ever since, so I decided to see what would have happened if they hadn’t, and tax indexation had continued.
Sure enough, I found they have been handing back much more than the impact of inflation. In the process, 40 years of fiddling has disastrously undermined the tax system for short-term political gain (what a surprise!).
How it works

First, a brief excursion into the economics and ethics of bracket creep.
The basic idea of a progressive income tax system is that those who earn more should pay a higher percentage of their income in tax.
The way it works is that every dollar of income above a certain threshold attracts a higher rate of tax than the dollar below it. There are usually two or three jumps before you get to the top rate.
In 1951, the top rate was 75 per cent. In 1955, it was cut to 67 per cent, where it stayed until 1983 when it was cut to 60 per cent, then 57, 49 and finally 45.
There are four ways to get a pay rise:

Get a CPI increase

Go on strike or otherwise negotiate a larger increase than CPI

Get promoted

Change jobs.

All of them result in bracket creep, but the only one that should be given back is the creep resulting from CPI increases.
The whole point of progressive taxation is that those who are better off should pay tax at a higher marginal rate, and that includes those who become better off over time. And by definition you become better off if your income increases faster than inflation.
So when wage rises greater than the CPI take people into higher tax brackets, that money should be kept by the Tax Office, and not handed back through tax cuts.
In other words, I agree with indexation of the tax scales, and wish that Malcolm Fraser and his treasurer Phillip Lynch had stuck with it. But they didn’t, and here we are.
If I apply the 1983 marginal tax rates to those amounts, I get total personal income tax revenue of $409.3 billion.

Quelle horreur!

According to the recent final budget outcome papers, income tax from individuals in 2021-22 totalled $239.7 billion – $169.6 billion less than it would have been had nothing but indexation applied from 1983.
The deficit in the year just finished was $32 billion; it could have been a surplus of $137.6 billion.
I tried this out on a dozen well-paid academics, lawyers and executives over lunch this week, and the idea of a 60 per cent top marginal tax rate was greeted with horror and cries that they would immediately emigrate.
And 60 per cent tax is right up there, it’s true. Only two countries do that – Finland and Switzerland (two of the happiest nations on Earth, as it happens).
Mind you, 40 years ago most countries had top marginal income tax rates of 60 per cent or more, but they were driven down by the wave of anti-government neoliberalism in the 1980s and ’90s.
But it would be a big call to join them and return Australia to an income tax rate of 60 per cent, although most of the countries with lower income tax rates have much higher GST rates. It won’t happen.
An alternative to keeping the same income tax scales and not having a structural deficit might have been to tax Australia’s resources profits properly, but that didn’t happen either – it was tried by Kevin Rudd, and torpedoed by the tax-cutting Coalition.
But it’s worth knowing, I submit, that the reason the Australian government has a long-term structural budget deficit is that successive governments – Labor and Liberal – have buggered up the tax system with short-term political decisions to hand back all bracket creep, not just the result of inflation.
At the very least, they should stop doing that – most bracket creep is just progressive taxation working as it should.
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Tero » Tue Nov 22, 2022 12:01 pm

Food aid ended when the pandemic ended. Lazy bums back to part time jobs!
However, under program rules, emergency allotments are only available in states that have a Covid-19 emergency declaration in place. So when Kentucky lawmakers voted to remove the state’s declaration last March, the extra grocery money that residents had come to rely on disappeared alongside it.

Today, at least 16 other states have done the same, arguing that extended welfare programs are to blame for high unemployment and are a waste of taxpayer money.

The total amount of food assistance lost as a result is staggering: according to a new analysis by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the Guardian, states opting out of emergency allotments have collectively relinquished nearly $4bn worth of food stamps that would have gone toward helping their poorest residents avoid going hungry.
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Brian Peacock » Tue Nov 22, 2022 2:10 pm

These people enjoy making others suffer. There's a word for that.
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Svartalf » Tue Nov 22, 2022 2:32 pm

I thought it was more like three words, like SoB
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Sean Hayden » Tue Nov 22, 2022 6:10 pm

—probably cutting into the local christian charity racket.

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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Tero » Sun Nov 27, 2022 11:22 am

Tesla-Twitter-rocketman no longer richest.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/ ... est-person

luxury goods peddler (thanks, Instagram for selling stuff for him) is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Arnault
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Our case for survival before it's too late

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Turn stone to bread right away...

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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Svartalf » Sun Nov 27, 2022 11:29 am

thsoe 40+ billions made a world of difference...
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Brian Peacock » Sun Nov 27, 2022 2:27 pm

I could make do with half that much.
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Svartalf » Sun Nov 27, 2022 2:56 pm

if I had even a tenth of that, I'd be set for life, and my relatives would be really prosperous when they got my inheritance..
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Thu Feb 02, 2023 1:54 pm

Oh yeah.

'Shell 2022 profit more than doubles to record $40 bln'
Shell (SHEL.L) delivered a record $40 billion profit in 2022, the energy giant said on Thursday, capping a tumultuous year in which a surge in energy prices after Russia's invasion of Ukraine allowed it to hand shareholders unprecedented returns.

The British company's record earnings, which more than doubled from a year earlier, mirror those reported by U.S. rivals earlier this week and are certain to intensify pressure on governments to further raise taxes on the sector.

"We intend to remain disciplined while delivering compelling shareholder returns," Chief Executive Wael Sawan said in a statement on the first set of earnings since he took the helm on Jan. 1.

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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Brian Peacock » Thu Feb 02, 2023 5:49 pm

And over here the Tory government is saying that inflation and the cost of living crisis is the result of wage pressure, even though since the 2007/8 financial implosion we've seen the longest period of wage stagnation and real-term falls in wages against prices since the Napoleonic war.
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"This is how humanity ends; bickering over the irrelevant."
Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by laklak » Thu Feb 02, 2023 6:37 pm

All this shit has to happen. System needs to implode in order to change. Seriously, I've been smoking a lot more dope recently and listening to Mrs. Lak, whose theories about these things are starting to make sense. The Great Reset, unfortunate and messy but inevitable as climate change. The future will be much better, eventually (I mean, she's an occupational therapist so she's an optimist by nature), but we're in the transitional phase and shit's gonna get hinky, as it has many times before. And given the size and complexity of our current situation, there's a fuck of a lot of hink out there. I accused her of dialectal thinking, as I detest the stench of Hegelianism, but she assures me that reality cares not a fig for philosophy.

So cheer up, lads. We might not make it but the species will. Maybe we should start a Last Man bottle club, no telling how much hink we're in for.
Yeah well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by pErvinalia » Sun Feb 05, 2023 9:49 am

Just started reading Macdoc's, sorry, the Australian treasurer's essay on capitalism.

Capitalism after the crises
In a time of serial disruption – to our economy, our society and our environment – the treasurer argues for the place of values and optimism in how we rethink capitalism
Macdoc and Brian at 10 paces!
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by rainbow » Sun Feb 05, 2023 9:56 am

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/buga ... ble-yacht/
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