WHAT were they thinking? How could our leaders have made changes designed to ”better target and strengthen the application of capital gains tax” without seeing they would later allow companies associated with the misleadingly named Texas Pacific Group to make a billion or so dollars in capital-gains-tax-free profit from the sale of Myer because they were registered not in somewhere like Texas but in the tax havens of Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands?
…
Mark Latham said:
It would ”add to the great Australian disease of asset and property speculation, particularly in our big cities”, Latham told an uninterested chamber.
He was right. Before the change, Australian landlords actually made money. In 1999-2000 they pulled in a net $219 million from rent. By 2006-07 they were losing a net $5.37 billion.
Ralph – prodded by Howard – turned Australia into a nation of losers. He encouraged us to deliberately lose money in order to replace highly taxed income with lightly taxed capital gains.
BUT WAIT – READ THIS!
As Macquarie Bank’s Rory Robertson told his clients at the time, ”Since September 1999 it is almost as though the Australian tax system has been screaming at taxpayers to gear up to earn increased capital gains rather than to work harder to earn increased wages or salaries.”
Other worthwhile reading of recent:
The Housing Bubble that no one dares bust
Fannie Mae trick to hide ghost houses
