Taxation Review

Julia said:

The Treasurer has another review of the tax system under way at present.

How do you think the surplus should be used?

Should we all receive another piddling little tax cut which is fairly meaningless on our individual bases?

Or should that total amount be used to much greater effect to improve some of the problems in health, aged care, education?

Not too many brownie points for guessing where my vote would go!

I'm also not keen to see more tax payer funds going into child care (though I expect that will in fact happen), or IVF. Imo these areas should be the responsibility of the people concerned.

Would be really interested to know what you would do if Mr Costello handed you the job.

Julia

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I am with you all the way Julia (finally a Julia with a clue)

It also helps stop feeding the inflation troll with tax cuts and prepares us for the future.

Heck, it may also help save us from the crazy save the world tax we will soon be paying.

In fact, the older I get, the more I feel that it is an absolute disgrace that we have sold a lot of government owned assets, and we allow too high foreign ownership of STRATEGIC assets (farming, mining, realestate), and quite frankly,

I would actually pay MORE tax to rectify this problem, the problem is that our current govt is so clueless, I have a Kerry Packer attitude atm.

laurie said:

pay full price for medication and those that abuse the system gets looked after by the Goverment! yep see it every day on tv ACA/TTD....
cheers laurie

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You pay full price on SOME medications. A lot are subsidised for all medicare card holders...... but in principle, I agree, somewhat.

What a nice reminder that we actually had a surplus under Costello's watchful eye. He might not have done everything perfectly, but what a huge contrast he is to Swan.

Wysiwyg said:

Could tax collection and spending be more localised? So each shire would be responsible for the distribution of funds to the respective areas of need. The benefits :

a) funds would remain in the area that generated them
b) local government would be held directly responsible and thus limited in their absolute power to waste funds
c) increase in self worth and community pride
d) needs such as education, medical, infrastructure, essential services would be first priority

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That would indeed be a magnificent solution. It might actually ensure funds are distributed as needed. Provided of course there wasn't an entire new layer of bureaucracy duplicated at the low end shire level. Just imagine all those meetings and policy justifications were duplicated thousandfold across Australia.
As an example, read the "Consultative Forums calendar of meetings" released by the Tax Office:
http://www.ato.gov.au/download.asp?file=/content/downloads/cor00221898.pdf

Wasn't it time we demanded our public servants to be hired on the basis of what they know about the subject matter, rather than paying lipopygian chairwarmers huge salaries and Super entitlements for asking lobby groups how THEY would WISH things to operate and money to be spent?