Super Duper Tax Haven

The tax concessions bought in by Howard and Costello for the Superannuation system are so generous and so huge in money terms that they can only be described as a local tax haven.

The sheer quantity of money involved - $40 billion overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthy - being above and beyond any proper purpose of retirement policy, is an act of theft by the Liberals on behalf of their wealthy constituency. It is an example of Kleptocracy.

This is not the stuff of an academic policy debate.  To bring into close, grotesque view, this week tens of thousands of people with retirement income from superannuation of $5,000 for the week, were exempted from paying tax of $1,700. Can they not live on $3,300 this week? The one million people living below the poverty line could certainly do with an extra $10 in their pocket.

What we have here is structural greed.

Morrison takes the batton

Well Scott steps into the position and the first things he says are crap. All the economists and senior economics journalists in the country have been arguing conviningly for two years that Australia has a revenue problem. Scott says we don't have a revenue problem. He thinks we have a spending problem. We have a revenue problem.

When challenged his justification for this is that he has control over spending and you have to concentrate on what you can control. This is a very strange statement because governments have control of both spending and revenue. Hmmm.

When pressed further he says, "You've always got to keep a healthy balance" (between spending and revenue). Well yes Scott, so why are you only focused on the spending side of the equation?

The new mantra: "We want people to work more, save more, and invest more".  Great, but that is no argument against moderate equitable redistribution.  But he seems to think it is.

If there are 800,000 unemployed and 400,000 jobs, then Scott's argument that the miserly Newstart allowance of $300 per week is a disincentive to work, is absolute crap.

New PM, Malcolm Turnbull, has said that his main philosophy is free markets and individualism. No mention of the actual society that provides those conditions, the infrastructure and the support that allows a lot of fortunate bods like him to actually be "individuals".

Looks like there is not going to be much financial joy from this government for anyone who isn't in the top 10%.