More Taxes? How About Less Spending!

 

Raising or implementing new taxes is the solution we often hear for solving a nation’s economic woes. The people saying it ignore that taxes are constantly being created and/or raised.  They also ignore that the extra money raised does not solve the problems, it just gets recklessly spent.

And while there is a short term gain to the treasury in the long run it can be a failure as people re-adjust their budgeting to accommodate the extra costs and spend less money.

The pro tax brigade/economist wannabes try and justify their position by presenting the costs as something like ‘only an extra $5 per week’ or ‘only an extra $200 a quarter’ or ‘only an extra $500 per year’. These figures are of course presented in a whimsical way ignoring that people only have a limited amount of money and have already been hit with plenty of these ‘only an’ additional costs, especially during the last five years of ALP state and federal governments.

There is a limit to how much you can raise peoples costs whether it’s taxing people more or governments profiting (and wasting that money as well!) from water and electricity. A large number of business and people have gone under due to the extra costs that have been put on them.

Ignoring all these things the pro tax brigade then talk about extending the GST to cover the currently excluded items such as fresh food because somehow the rich are ‘benefitting from it’ or are ‘getting away with something’. In essence they are saying make life harder for lower income earners and increase their costs because the rich shouldn’t benefit from a lack of a tax everyone benefits from.

A consequence of extending the GST to fresh foods is that some people may be more inclined to get takeaway meals more often as there’d be little cost benefit to eating at home. Also it can easily become more convenient to get takeaways more often which could lead to less healthy people.

Of course the pro tax brigade would say raise the taxes on takeaways but if you make them too expensive it can cause businesses to lose customers and the lower revenue will have a flow on affect.

Best to just leave fresh foods and takeaways alone.

And after going all through this the pro tax brigade and economist wannabes prove their economic ignorance by saying not having certain taxes or not extending the GST is costing something like $30 billion, or some other made up figure, per year.

Not having the GST extended or not having something like family home sales taxed is not costing the treasury. Money is not coming out of the treasury to maintain a lack of taxes in those areas. Using their ‘cost logic’ we could say it’s costing is $30 billion per year not having a tax on beards or not having a tax on continental drift tax which, if you use climate scam logic, must be man-made and will somehow be solved by a tax. (Wonder why that scammer Al Gore isn’t on that one?)

Not having certain taxes isn’t a cost, these so called costs are actually potential revenue projections of how much money these extra taxes could potentially bring in. And the figures are usually grabbed out of thin air like the revenue projections for Brisbane’s Clem 7 tunnel and bike scheme or anything Wayne Swan and the ALP put forward.

A cost is when money comes out of treasury to pay for something such as useful things like Medicare and our armed forces or the not so useful things such as our freeloading politicians.

The real solution is for governments to spend less. Governments at all levels have to be made more accountable for how they spend public money.  Unfortunately many in and out of government see public money, also known as other people’s money,  as a revenue source for personal projects and agendas. They do what they want, blow the money and hand the bill to the electorate.

The spending less and taxing less approach can be done, the Liberals ran a welfare state that was actually more generous that the ALP version and the Liberals would still be in if it wasn’t for WorkChoices. (Take note WorkChoices IS NOT good for business and the economy. It gets the Liberals voted out, the ALP voted in and their looting of the nation begins in earnest!)

We do not need more taxes, just an end to the ALP spending and wasting money philosophy along with their fantasyland approach to governing. This is the problem Australia is has, not a lack of taxes.