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hawil
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Democracy;what Democracy?
Take retiree: 1)
Worked for 45 years and paid taxes, but did not accumulate enough assets to be completely independent of the age-pension. For every dollar of extra income for him and his wife above $6,500, the couple loses $0.50 of age pension, and if their income exceeds $45,000 per annum, the couple will pay tax of $0.315 in the dollar including medicare levy, leaving them with an income of $0.185 from every dollar extra income. For the defined benefit income a 10% tax-offset applies if paid from an Australian super fund, but not if the income comes from an overseas fund.
Retiree 2)
Has accumulated assets of $1.5million and the assets are in a so-called taxed Self Managed Super Fund. To be very conservative, the assets are in a term deposit earning 7.0% income of $122,500 per annum and even if the retiree is single, he/she will not pay a cent of tax.
Now if the assets are in fully franked shares, like banks and return $100,000 worth of franked dividends, he/she will again pay no tax on the dividend, and the government will send him/her a cheque of $30,000 for the franking credits.
Retiree 3)
Is an ex-politician or highly paid public servant, in receipt of a defined benefit pension of $100,000, on which he/she will have to pay tax, but he/she gets a 10% tax offset, which equals %10,000 after reaching retirement age, but before retiring, the public servant can establish a SMSF and contribute into it extra with tax concessions if the $25,000 total for under fifty and $50,000, if over fifty is not exceeded and in addition he/she can contribute $150,000 from after tax income, and the earnings from the SMSF will only attract 15% tax, and when the person reaches the age of 60 even the income will be completely tax-free from the SMSF.
What Ken Henry should have recommended is, abolish all tax concessions for super,abolish the means test for the age pension so that even millionaires get the full pension, but then the retirees should pay the same tax as do the workers.
I have made submissions to the Ken Henry Tax review and the Jeremy Cooper Superannuation review.
I would also like to refer you to my website Hawilspoint “The Great Australian Super Fraud”
In the book “Unemployment forever or a Support Income System and Work For All”, by Allan McDonald, on page 142 (h) it is stated: Any means tested welfare system requires extensive and complex state control and regulation. Australia is slowly but surely moving towards the ultimate outcome of a means tested social welfare system-state control over finances, the savings, and the labours of the poorest in the community.
Have the politicians of Australia the know-how and will to change the tax and social system to be more egalitarian, or was the late Professor A.J.Marshall right when he wrote, as quoted in the book “Equality and Authority” by S Encel on page212: “Most Australian politicians, he wrote, aspire to parliamentary seats ‘to better their salary, to inflate their egos and feather their nests’.
John Pilger in his book “The new rulers of the world” wrote on page 175: Like Britain and the US, Australia is a single ideology state with two competing factions, discernible largely by the personalities of their politicians. The difference between Howard’s conservative coalition and the opposition Labor Party is that Howards policies are not veiled. The Labor governments of the 1980s and early 1990s oversaw the greatest distribution of wealth in the country’s history: from bottom to top. They were Thatcherite and Reganite in all but name. Indeed, Tony Blair described then Prime Minister Paul Keating as his
‘inspiration’.
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Buying Democracy (Read 952 times)
