Judging by the polls, more Australians have negative take on the latest Swane budget. The bottomline is that in Australia, we are caught in the bind. We detest strong leaders, and hate weak idealistic ones who try to be responsible. The enduring fact is that most people are generally selfish, regardless of their wealth and education level.
Has everyone bothered to work out the sums and taxes just for your own interests?
Carbon tax is a landmark for the future. Only countries which are not suffering from negative growth can afford to do so without political backlash. But one can't really say what is the best time. It's like Waiting for Godot to arrest degeneration of Mother Earth.
It sounds all too familiar hearing Tony Abbott's superficial and hypocritical ranting. The Liberals did not have a good track record of promoting foreign languages learning to a proficient level to be able to connect with the world. Howard/Costello policies were visionary and reformist on the domestic front but drifted internationally to conservatism.
Most of us are in the middle class or on the borderline between the middle class and poor, and not entitled to any much benefits in the first place, let alone one-off from the budget.
The key to deciding whether you should be dead against the budget is weighing the alternatives. Would this translate that into voting the Gillard government remains to be seen as popularity polls while reflective, is not the final determinant till the last minute.
What we do know is that majority of Australians don't care about equity, because we have not experienced how the bottom half of Australians struggle for survival. That selfish streak has been thoroughly exploited by the wealthy to perpetuate their hold on to power and riches without sharing with needy and more deserving folks.
The Liberals mirror American Republican propaganda to exploit the workers to oppose policies that will benefit them. More educated Americans are beginning to see through the Republican ruse. What about us?
Extracts from economist Ross Gittins' article :
But loyalty to parties on the basis of class is long gone. These days people's vote is as likely to be guided by the party divide on social issues as economic ones. Then there's the rise of the ''aspirational'' voter - people who don't mind seeing the better-off favoured by the government because they hope to be better off themselves one day.
If the public's reaction to this budget is any guide, we've either all become aspirationals or, more likely, a lot of people don't know which side their bread's buttered on. Wayne Swan brings down a Robin Hood budget and, according to last week's Herald poll, 43 per cent of respondents think it will leave them personally worse off and only 27 per cent expect to be better off. Talk about living in a fog.
But Australian shareholders - including Australian super funds - get tax credits for the company tax paid on their behalf. And tax economists argue that, in the end, the burden of company tax is borne mainly by wage-earners.
So it's not at all clear to me that company tax is a tax on business or on the rich. Business was never terribly enthusiastic about the 1 per cent cut; I'm unimpressed by the bitter tears it's shedding now.
When you combine this Robin Hood budget with the way the tax cuts linked to the carbon tax are limited to individuals earning less than $80,000, with the way the temporary flood levy was aimed at the better off, with the various previous measures to reduce upper-middle class welfare and with the 2009 discretionary increase in the age pension (the largest real increase in the pension ever), you do have to conclude this Labor government, particularly under Julia Gillard, is very redistributive - though its record isn't unblemished.
And unless you're happy to see the gap between rich and poor widening - as it has been - that redistribution is not unwarranted.
According to figures from the Bureau of Statistics, between 2003-04 and 2009-10, average household disposable income rose by 26 per cent in real terms.
But the income of the bottom fifth of households rose by 17 per cent, whereas the income of the top fifth rose by 32 per cent.
Remember that next time you hear highly paid business people banging on about the budget being ''more about how we carve the pie, rather than how we grow the pie''. It was about time.
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