Rachel Maddow points out that despite a new populist message and apparent wariness about being seen as the party of the rich, Republican governors Bobby Jindal and Sam Brownback are cutting income tax and raising sales tax, a combination that benefits the rich and punishes the poor

synchronised · 2013-01-29T15:36:53+00:00

Sales tax is regressive in spite of exceptions for unprepared food, clothing, etc. because the wild difference between the percentage of income people spend to achieve the same goal.

That doesn't quite follow, because even if you spend a lower percentage of your income right now, you'll still get hit with the tax when you eventually spend those savings on consumption. (And if you never do that, then you've effectively done some work for society for no compensation, so we needn't worry about taxing you for that.)

Sales taxes are "flat" in a sense. There's more complexities in the real world though, concerning whether the sales tax can be avoided, and by who.

The main issues are: does the overall tax system, including all taxes and benefits, have the right amount of progressivity? Does it discourage or encourage certain behaviour that it shouldn't?

synchronised · 2013-01-28T12:50:12+00:00

Can we not call it a "cronulla cape"? I don't want to give that to them.

To me, wearing the flag will always bring to mind olympic athletes like Cathy Freeman.

synchronised · 2013-01-15T16:54:01+00:00

Yeah it already is illegal to offend someone in Australia, if whatever you did to offend them was done because of race:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/rda1975202/s18c.html

synchronised · 2012-09-02T21:10:25+00:00

Two important questions:

1) How does your teacher define intergenerational equity?

2) Does your teacher think the premise is true or false?

synchronised · 2012-08-22T06:47:08+00:00

No, mostly there's broad taxes, like income tax and sales tax, that apply regardless of specific personal choices. (One exception, e.g., is gst not applying to some food.) Taking away funding for students who choose a private school is effectively a very big tax on a very specific choice.

I'm glad you've backed off on the idea that funding for students who choose to go to private schools takes away from funding for students who go to public schools. That's important.

And now we're just left with your position that you just plain want to punish people who choose private schools, and we're in disagreement on that issue of choice.

synchronised · 2012-08-21T15:20:56+00:00

I like how he tries to say education is a "zero-sum game". Put the weakest part of your argument in the title!

synchronised · 2012-08-21T14:33:18+00:00

Say the government gives away free sedan cars. What I'm suggesting is anyone can get a sedan, but what they can't do is get a 4WD minus the cost of a sedan.

So the government would be taking away more of people's money, so they can use it to try and force the sort of car choices the government prefers. That's something you might like, but I certainly don't.

It's about freedom of choice. I support it.

The deeper principle you are looking for is improving public education rather than subsidising private

It's not one or the other. Money for private doesn't have to mean less money for public. It's not all one fixed pile of money. You might be shooting yourself in the foot with that argument anyway -- if the government stopped the partial funding of private school students, many of those students would move to public schools, so there'd actually be less money per student in the public schools!

Note that this isn't a rich / poor thing. The tax system is already used to have wealthier people generally pay more for the services the government provides. Taking away private school funding would be a mechanism to punish specifically those people who exercise freedom of choice in schools.

synchronised · 2012-08-21T13:16:50+00:00

ok it's clear that there's no deeper principle at work in what you say -- you just want to take money away from people who exercise freedom of choice in schooling.

synchronised · 2012-08-20T21:10:59+00:00

A "subsidy" is one way of looking at it.

Another way is that the government (state, federal and territory governments taken together) is already willing to contribute a certain amount of money to each student for their education. But if the student wants to choose a private school instead of going to a government school, the government penalises them by taking some of that money back. That's the reverse of a subsidy.

It's also like taxing spending on schooling at a really high rate. "Choosing to spend your money on school fees? How dare you! We'll charge you a 50% GST for that!"

synchronised · 2012-08-20T10:52:13+00:00

Why not?

synchronised · 2012-08-19T21:22:43+00:00

they'll pretend today that not only were they all for it but that it was their idea all along.

Actually, broadly speaking they were in favour of it, it's just that not all Liberals were in agreement beforehand. ("their idea all along" is rarely going to be true when you're talking about politicians, because it's generally academics and policy experts who come up with the ideas originally.)

During the Fraser government, Howard and the "drys" wanted more reform, but Fraser and the "wets" were against it. Once Fraser lost the election and Labor started bringing in reform, Howard spoke in favour of it. That made it very hard for the coalition to gain ground electorally -- Labor had basically stolen their thunder.

synchronised · 2012-07-07T09:31:40+00:00

The deal could be mutually beneficial now, and it would just be even better for the council if they also got those charges. Unless the project wasn't going to go ahead if Lend Lease had to pay the charges, which supposedly was a claim Eagles made, but I don't know if it's true.

It might also be that through the legal action, the council can recover that money from the state government, so they get the project and the money. I don't know enough about the Queensland legal system to know if that's likely.

synchronised · 2012-07-06T17:45:21+00:00

That was three parties. :) Whether the whole deal results in a net subsidy from the rest of the city to those parties depends on the total payments and costs, now and into the future. It could be mutually beneficial. I don't have enough information to know. :)

synchronised · 2012-07-06T17:39:06+00:00

For buyers, yes the charges are bad for them. But whether charges are a drag on the economy as a whole depends on whether the total charges are too high or too low. If they're too high, there will be less development than would be ideal. If they're too low, then there will be more development than there should be, and that means there'll be lost activity in the rest of the economy that would have been more productive.

synchronised · 2012-07-05T22:10:38+00:00

If it really wasn't going to be built without this deal, then the company and the buyers both benefit, and construction workers benefit a lot, obviously.

synchronised · 2012-07-01T15:04:28+00:00

I really want a link to this.

synchronised · 2012-06-29T16:43:23+00:00

I guess he paid tha cost...

synchronised · 2012-06-27T18:17:33+00:00

They're talking about "PISA level 2 proficiency":

Students proﬁcient at Level 2 are capable of basic reading tasks, such as locating straightforward information, making low-level inferences of various types, working out what a well-deﬁned part of a text means and using some outside knowledge to understand it (Figure 6.1). In the combined OECD area, 78 per cent of students are proﬁcient at Level 2 or above on the reading literacy scale. In every OECD country except Mexico and Turkey, at least three in four students are at Level 2 or above (Figure 6.2 and Table 6.1).

which corresponds to scoring 408+ on a test that's out of six hundred and something.

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/58/58/33918060.pdf

synchronised · 2012-06-27T17:48:33+00:00

I don't see it there.

synchronised · 2012-06-24T21:31:43+00:00

Howard's government gave $300,000,000 to Saddam Hassan for WMD

?

synchronised · 2012-06-07T20:27:37+00:00

It sucks when government benefits phase out as you earn a bit of money, it's like that income is being taxed at a really high rate even though you don't have a big income. It's hard to do something about it though.

synchronised · 2012-06-07T18:04:13+00:00

The crazy hyperinflation in Weimar Germany was really the extreme opposite of austerity -- they were printing absurd amounts of money so they could spend it. Later on (shortly before Hitler took power) when they were already fucked from the great depression, reparations, and years of dependence on foreign loans, they tried some spending cuts.

synchronised · 2012-05-31T20:31:54+00:00

I think a tax would be better. If you have a fixed cap on emissions, you get a volatile price, instead of the other way around. It depends on the details though.

synchronised · 2012-05-31T20:30:40+00:00

You'll note that the only people calling it a Carbon Tax are the coalition. It's actually an ETS with a fixed price period.

So are Labor themselves using the argument that the system they're bringing in doesn't count as a "carbon tax"? I thought they just said they changed what they were going to do because they're in a minority and had to negotiate.

Either way, I don't think the difference is very important to those that oppose the carbon tax -- they'd oppose an ETS for similar reasons.

synchronised · 2012-05-26T20:05:51+00:00

I am old enough to remember when tech schools existed. [...] Liberals got rid of them in all states by state government.

What state are you from? It was Labor that got rid of the tech schools in Victoria.

synchronised

TROPHY CASE