photo credit: Nicholas Erwin At the moment, Victoria’s Metropolitan Fire Brigade and Country Fire Authority are funded by the Fire Services Levy, a charge added to fire insurance. But the FSL gives a free ride to uninsured property owners – they don’t pay for the level of fire cover provided. Free riders increase the cost [...]
photo credit: Grégory Tonon This week’s backdown by the federal labor government on the Mineral Resource Rent Tax will cost Australian taxpayers $35 billion over the next ten years. The shortfall in government revenues will be made up from taxes on work and taxes on business. That means it is coming out of your [...]
photo credit: Urban~Spaceman Miners finally agree to tax reform. What are the changes? The attempt to harness economic rents for the public good has been renamed from the Resource Super Profits tax to the Mineral Resource Rent Tax. The MRRT kicks in at the corporate bond rate plus 7%. That is 12%, rather than the [...]
“Gillard must come out strongly and call the lobbyists for who they are. She must assert control over the RSPT rather than negotiate with each and every individual company.
photo credit: Schaffner Sometimes the ignorance of experts makes my blood boil. Why can’t they do the arithmetic, the sums plainly before them? The Victorian Transport Plan will cost $38 billion and produce benefits of $180 billion, according to a state-commissioned report by Ernst and Young. If these numbers are right, the Plan [...]
photo credit: loungerie The Henry Tax Review recommended a resource rent tax to the Australian government, carefully designed to maintain incentives and reward risk. The miners responded with apoplexy and a campaign of deliberate misinformation that has left the economically literate gobsmacked. Let’s get a few things straight. Searching for ore-bodies is not done by [...]
photo credit: 10b travelling Clear-eyed media commentary in the national interest is rare and sweet. Alan Mitchell’s analysis of the Henry Tax Review in the Australian Financial Review - A tax on all your economic rents – is such a creature. He opens with a broadside at entrenched interests pretending the changes will affect the economy: [...]
photo credit: raminders We follow the glitter of celebrities and our football teams and let others do the dull work of government. Our dreams are about homes, cars and holidays. But sometimes an issue is so important it deserves our undivided attention, if only for a short while. The big issue is tax – [...]
photo credit: anarchosyn The Henry Tax Review’s highlighting of Land Tax as a policy direction is a welcome and encouraging development, says Prosper Australia. “This is THE tool to liberate the people of Australia from their current financial difficulties,” Prosper Australia’s Karl Fitzgerald said today. “Consider the enormous economic benefits this reform offers. “Taxing land [...]
photo credit: robertivanc The great property speculation game is over in America and Europe. The music has stopped. Forty years of steadily increasing pressure has been released. Houses are worth a fraction of what people paid in better times, while the giant mortgages they took on remain. Meanwhile, Australia parties on. We play the [...]