Menzies House

Why we need a flat rate of Tax

Great article in today’s Australian

 

…The moral case for a single rate of tax is even stronger. Yes, progressive income tax rates may well discourage effort and enterprise but they might encourage it too if people work harder still to make up for the rising rate of tax. Individuals should be treated the same regardless of what they earn. How can it be right to tax 38.5 per cent of a dollar of income above $80,000 but only 24 per cent of dollars below that level? It is an offence to procedural fairness and equity. In any case, a flat rate is not regressive -- higher earners still pay more.

Any reduction in revenue from a lower flat rate would be partly offset by the economic boon it would foster. Smart people employed servicing the tax would shift to jobs that produce goods and services people actually want. People would devote far less of their lives thinking about tax.

Makes sense to me, but the left will poo hoo it.

 

 

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Sex Party could help Pauline slip into senate

While Labor seems to be sailing to a fate similar to the original Titanic come September 7, a swirling maelstrom of murky Senate preference deals could provide life jackets to a very mixed bag of Senate hopefuls including Pauline Hanson, writes John Mikkelsen 

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Dracula is BACK!

Dracula has come back to the blood bank for MORE! - AEd TWH

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-14/greens-propose-billions-in-new-taxes-to-pay-for-promises/4819016

900+ Peer reviewed climate sceptical papers

Something to share with our AGW friends when they arc up about there being no peer reviewed literature on the climate sceptics position.

Read More: http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html

MUST READ: A Health Warning For Liberals

Medicine is pressured by a radical socialist transformation. Some of this is top down. Much of it is bottom up, writes Dr Grant N Ross

For 2 years I was the Melbourne University Liberal Club’s token doctor. Turning up late, or never, I would always be out of kilter with JSM, political theories and fights of the day and somewhat under the impression that Kroger was a kind of cheese. Luckily, being a stereotype got me over the line.

I would like to redeem my standing by attempting to write about the direction of health under Labor and the alternative policy direction the Liberal Party should choose when in Government.

The Injustice of the ATO

Gary Kurzer write about the injustices committed by the Australian Taxation Office:

Revelations outlining recent activities of the Australian Taxation Office show that this organisation is not playing fair. Seemingly, this may not be newsworthy, however, if the allegations move into “illegal behaviour” then the concerns are justly amplified.

Journalist Chris Seage has published sensational articles in Crikey which have been reprinted on the ‘SmartCompany’  website.

In one article, Seage has shown how the tax office treats its own employees, by turning the tables on internal dissension and whistleblowers within the organisation to stifle legitimate claims and the rights of its employees. Ironically, the senior ATO staff, being Australian Public Servants themselves, are transgressing the ‘Australian Public Service Values and Code of Conduct’  and threaten the beleaguered ATO employees via the same conduct breaches that they allege against their own staff.

 More sinister are the revelations that the ATO issued a “tick and flick” method to deal with objections. In essence, the ATO instructed staff to “approve 20%” of tax Objections and “reject 80%” of Objections, regardless of tax laws or merit. This must be of concern to all SMEs, and pretty much everyone else. 

Payroll tax

Henry Innis explains the inequities of the NSW State Payroll Tax system.

Without a doubt, payroll tax is one of the dumbest taxes I have ever seen. Here in New South Wales it is set at a rate of 5.45% of wages that are over a certain monthly threshold (depending on the number of days). The threshold varies from $52,855 (28 days) to $58,518 (31 days), with variations on wages paid interstate, wages paid for part of a year, and so on and so forth.

The question is, however, why do we even have payroll tax in the first place?

If you think about it, payroll tax in the form described above is little more than a tax on employment. To tax employers a percentage of what they pay out sounds more like a disincentive for companies to employ, if anything.

Take a company with over 20 employees that exceed the threshold. Given that they will have to pay 5.45% of their wage value as tax, they functionally are paying out for 21 employees. That isn’t to mention high levels of corporate tax rates, income tax, the Goods and Services tax, the Carbon Tax and the myriad more hidden ones that don’t immediately come to mind.

Of course, one of the main arguments for supporting the tax is too raise revenue, particularly for often-vulnerable State Governments (when it comes to revenue, Australia is anything but a nation of federalists). But the solution should never be to create more taxes and to draw more money out of the economy where possible.

Publishing drivel on taxpayer dime

Major Karnage exposes a public media body you may not have heard of

Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland, which describes itself as "the most radical of Australia’s long-standing literary and cultural magazines".

Sparrow has some very particular views and a slightly perturbing pseudo-intellectual way of putting them across. Take this blog post today, for instance, where he seems to spend some time flirting with comparisons between the Obama Administration and the Nazis/Stalinists:

living in The Avengers’ universe | Overland literary journal.

Yet you cannot ignore the origins of [Superman] in an era awash with supermen, from the Nietzschean blond beasts so popular with national socialists to the Stakhanovites inspired by Joe Stalin, the original man of steel. That doesn’t mean that the genre’s innately and inevitably fascistic, as is sometimes argued. Nonetheless, the concept of the superhero necessarily rests upon a distinction central to both the far Right and the Stalinist Left – the gulf between the (ordinary) masses and the (extra-ordinary) hero. ...

The cult of the superman developed by the fascists, like its equivalent in Stalinism, was implicitly directed against mobilisations of ordinary people. The Aryan ubermensch was necessary precisely because the untermenschen against whom the fascists raged were so numerous and so well organized ...