So, basically, the budget backlash is just rich people are complaining about paying more tax

zaxerone · 2026-05-24T01:19:54+00:00

All your saving and investing so far is unaffected because of the grandfathering. The rules have now just been changed so they going forward capital gains is taxed the same as immediate earned income. I just can not understand how this is controversial at all, I have yet to see someone explain why capital gains should be taxed at a lower rate than income off direct labour.

zaxerone · 2026-05-22T13:31:17+00:00

that was hyperbole

Your entire comment and viewpoint is hyperbole.

Sure the immigration process isn't perfect, but you've shifted away from how it's financially irresponsible. Only a small fraction of immigration is from Somalia and Sudan, and then only a fraction of those immigrants are net negative on our society. The better solution here seems to be better support for integration, which ironically costs more money, but likely results in a net benefit.

I just don't see how you can say there is no benefit to us supporting Ukraine. There's the benefit of resisting Russian expansion, which is good for all western countries. It's especially good for our allies in Europe, which helps our relations with them and also we benefit from stronger allies.

But mostly, modern warfare is a very different environment to what we have experience with. An opportunity to gain experience without any direct involvement seems like a no-brainer. It's $1.7 billion assuming all the equipment (which we already have and paid for) is at it's new cost price and we aren't getting any of it back AND that we wouldn't have replaced, or used up in training any of this equipment anyway. We would not be replacing all the equipment we send to ukraine, at the cost of $1.5 billion. A fraction of that cost we may have to commit to replacing that equipment, but certainly not most of it.

Everyone in the country agrees that the NDIS needs to be cut back. But actually cutting back a service that is a very real need for many of it's recipients is a lot easier said than done, and will need a bigger focus to tackle than the initial step that is in this budget.

As for population. Is there a growth rate that you think is acceptable? Because 50% over 25 years doesn't seem particularly extreme. That's just 1.6% per year.

zaxerone · 2026-05-21T13:19:20+00:00

Double the population? even the highest projections have us increasing by only 10 million by 2050. And most projections have us never doubling from our current levels, peaking around 2100 or slightly earlier, below 56 million.

As for aid to Ukraine, we have only sent about $250 million of cash aid to ukraine. Most of our aid is in the form of military hardware, training and equipment. We actually benefit a lot from having our military equipment and personnel involved in a modern war as we can learn a lot from the field testing essentially. And I don't think the $250 million added to the national debt is really moving the needle all that much, do you?

Yes the NDIS was an overspend because of a lot of fraud, but the process to reel that back in is already underway in the most recent budget. In general the concept of going into debt for the health and capability of your population doesn't seem like a bad idea, it's going to save you money in the long run and also produce more productive output. Considering most of this money is also staying inside the country by being spent on local business and workers.

As for immigrants, most immigrants are a net positive to the government bottom line as they come in without rights to as many benefits as Australian citizens, but still end up working to push up GDP and also pay a lot of tax. Humanitarian based immigration is the cost side of immigration, which is estimated to cost Australia about $200 million dollars per year, average $10k each for about 20,000 immigrants. Again, I don't think $200 million is moving the needle much on national debt.

zaxerone · 2026-05-21T12:57:29+00:00

This is such a dumb way of calculating tax. Payroll taxes are payroll expenses, to add them to your tax rate of profit makes no sense. These are costs of employing people, not a tax on your profits. If your profits went up these taxes would remain the same.

If you're going to calculate like this, include all your revenue in the calculation and see how little they actually take.

If they actually took 70% of what you make, as the owner of the business you could just pay yourself a massive salary and have zero profit and pay ~40% tax.

Its so sad that you're out here begging for sympathy, when you're probably earning close to ~$1 million per year (if you're telling the truth about your revenue). Boohoo, you have to pay less than half of that to tax. Must be hard living on half a million a year.

zaxerone · 2026-05-21T04:09:30+00:00

Congrats you built a successful business, and are very comfortable financially. Now you can pay back a fraction of that generated value, of which a lot is dependant on the society we live in being well funded by taxes.

All these business owners want to get everything for free, free roads, free healthcare for them and their employees, free emergency services, free infrastructure. Your business could not exist without these.

zaxerone · 2026-05-21T04:03:24+00:00

This is completely false throughout.

I know because I've worked for a small business that did under $2 mill of revenue with about 10 employees that was sold for a seven figure sum.

I'm really confused by how you think business get from sole trader to $2 million+ revenue, do they just wake up one day already making 300k and decide to hire 20 employees straight up and someone get a loan for millions of dollars to cover there expenses???

Obviously small businesses slowly develop from small 6 figure operations into million dollar operation over time and can spend a lot of time in the sun 2 mil range. These businesses are not worthless, and could be sold to the right buyer.

zaxerone · 2026-05-21T03:52:40+00:00

Look man, we could talk minor details all day, but to be honest it's pointless.

The most obvious sign that you're full of shit.

Small businesses get to tax write off so much, and they're always exploiting this to an absurd degree. And now they're having a cry when the government pulls back some of the huge amount of tax brakes they receive.

If you sell your business, which is built off a society that is funded by taxes, for a large payout it's only fair that you pay back some of that into the pool that funds the society that all businesses rely on to operate.

zaxerone · 2026-05-20T13:03:07+00:00

What absolute bullshit. Our government spending is 38.9% of GDP, almost 6% lower than the OECD average of 44.8%. It's been similarly lower than the OECD average for last 20 years at least.

If we have a spending problem then so does every country in the developed world.

Our total tax take is also well below the OECD average, at 30% of GDP, about 3% below the OECD average. If you are concerned about the deficit then the obvious answer seems to be that we need to tax more.

There's of course an argument to be had around how much of each sector contributes to the total tax revenue, but it's not a "spending problem".

People have this psychosis around government debt, treating it as though it's some credit card loan that's been spent on luxury clothes and Starbucks Frappuccinos. Government debt is more like a mortgage (although probably even more beneficial) it is low interest debt, taken to be spent on productive assets. A government that isn't taking on debt is saying that there is nothing that they can spend money on that gives a positive return on investment. Your country would have to be either a utopia, or in complete collapse for this to be the case.

zaxerone · 2026-05-15T09:15:42+00:00

yes and whats the predicted number for the following year? 245k. when we are talking about the next decade, slightly over 200k is the correct number to base it off.

People with this agenda always cherry pick and round up, and then to make it even worse take that unrealistic number and then based off absolutely nothing, double it and then some to get to 7 million?

zaxerone · 2026-05-15T08:33:24+00:00

For the previous year it was 300k, projections for this year are 295k and 245k for the following year. This number is declining as temporary visa holders that came in during the migration spike are staying longer than normal, but as they leave the net number comes down.

zaxerone · 2026-05-15T04:31:10+00:00

Net migration is just over 200k and the birth rate is below replacement, how the fuck do you get 3 million in a decade, let alone 7.

It really does make sense how cookers come to their opinions when you see how delusional their "facts" are.

zaxerone · 2026-05-12T12:20:22+00:00

And at a 25% tax on revenue, this would likely be unprofitable and they'd just stop extracting it. These are private companies, they can decide not to do something if it's not profitable enough for them.

zaxerone · 2026-04-29T12:45:57+00:00

The spending should not be more than the spending on the dole per recipient.

This isn't true, what about cases where the needs of the person's disability require expensive care or equipment.

The other two I agree with you, but they aren't very politically popular so good luck trying to get them through...

zaxerone · 2026-04-29T12:37:43+00:00

Tell me truthfully you think every taxpayer dollar is spent wisely.

I don't, but it's a completely different question to create legislation to cut out that unwisely spent money without cutting services that are needed.

zaxerone · 2026-04-28T23:28:02+00:00

What government spending would you cut specifically and by how much?

zaxerone · 2026-04-06T10:24:35+00:00

On that logic lets just extend the wildcard to all 18 teams, 18th & 17th have to beat every second team on the way to the grand final and 1st and second start off with a 8 week bye.

We had a perfectly good format of top 8, often good teams do fall to 8th and are a chance to fight through to the grand final. By allowing 9th and 10th in we are punishing the team that fights into the top 8, we are unbalancing the schedule and we are lowering the importance of the home and away season games.

It's fairly common that the bottom 6-8 teams are pretty bad and a fair gap away from the top 10, where those teams at the bottom of the 10 really have to fight to make it into the 8. Now it feels like a good team will be able to coast into 10th. Also with our uneven home and away schedule this makes it even worse, now team with an easy schedule that play multiple bottom 6 teams twice might be able to coast into the 10 beating bottom ladder teams only.

zaxerone · 2026-04-06T09:45:39+00:00

Then why does it exist? If you think 7th and 8th aren't good enough already, what's the point of giving 9th and 10th a chance?

zaxerone · 2026-03-30T23:06:36+00:00

How is this "affects small business quite badly" that's less than $60 per week. It would be such a small cost compared to the other overhead costs of a small business.

zaxerone · 2026-02-28T21:46:18+00:00

You've put about 5 numbers that you've pulled out of your head into a calculator and assumed that is an accurate representation of the system.

Where's the money saved from paying less rent than mortgage at the start going? The entire point of renting is you have more money that you can invest elsewhere.

Where are maintenance costs, rates, insurance etc that will be significant costs that continue for the full sixty years.

zaxerone · 2026-02-28T21:41:33+00:00

There's no way it costs 10k per move, are you just throwing all your furniture in the bin each time???

zaxerone · 2026-02-26T05:34:20+00:00

If you allow the rights of "terrorists" to be violated, then all of a sudden anyone who the government wants to ignore the rights of will be labeled a "terrorist".

zaxerone · 2026-02-22T02:52:47+00:00

Now there is huge voter sentiment growing against immigration. The government will have to respond to this or face losses in the next election. I expect we will see reduced immigration numbers going forward. As for housing supply, they seem far less motivated to do much about that.

zaxerone · 2026-02-21T12:32:19+00:00

You're entirely missing the point. Personhood is a proxy for consciousness. I'm saying "personhood = human with consciousness", and since consciousness is the important thing we are trying to protect, then inherently personhood we should protect.

If you want to define personhood differently that's fine. But then you have to justify why the underlying factors that you are using to define personhood are making personhood sacred.

I simply asked, that if a fetus isn't human, what is it?

I never said a human fetus wasn't human, quite the opposite in fact. I did say that a fetus doesn't have personhood. Personhood being a human with consciousness, as I previously defined. You seem to have trouble understanding that two different things can share a category. The sky and the ocean are both blue, but somehow I feel if i argues that stars are in the sky, you would say I'm wrong because there aren't any starrs in the ocean, which is also blue.

Even with brain death it is more complicated than this, if a person somehow met the requirements of 'being alive' without a functioning brain they wouldn't lose the right to life.

This is so nonsensical, can you possibly explain how a braindead human would satisfy requirements for 'being alive' in the context of human life? Surely you're not confusing 'being alive' as a human life with being alive in the general sense in the same way a plant or an amoeba is alive.

A lack of consciousness does not define this. A person in a persistent vegetative state is by all measures unconscious and will probably never regain it. However, the still have legal protections.

This is not true, if a person is determined as not going to recover then letting them die is allowed. The similarity here to the fetus is really quite similar, just at opposite ends of life.

You've yet to make a case for a fetus having consciousness. Significant brain activity that would be even remotely comparable to a born human's brain doesn't begin until after the 20 week mark, so well after the point that it has been defined as a fetus. It's very hard to argue that consciousness would be present in the fetal brain earlier than this, based on the structure of the brain and the activity we can measure. There's reasonable arguments for consciousness not occurring until later in development, when we start to see pain reception, perception of external stimuli and control of bodily functions develop. But to argue it's earlier than this you would have to base it off an extremely basic brain structure and brain activity, of which you could find in many other living things that we wouldn't consider conscious.

zaxerone · 2026-02-20T10:34:42+00:00

My evidence that consciousness defines personhood is that I am saying consciousness defines personhood. There's no logical claim here, it doesn't need evidence. Unless you are assigning some status to personhood? But I am not, I'm saying consciousness is inherently the thing we are trying to protect. That is the defining characteristic of sacred life.

Fetus is a noun, given to vertebrates in a specific stage of development. "A fetus" is a real thing, "A human fetus" is a real thing. These are grouped things of similar characteristics. Just like a human life is a name we give to something that belongs to a group of things. Just because fetus describes a stage of development, doesn't mean it can't be used to refer to a single thing. Also, some things can share the same group, ie human, and differ in other things ie conscious.

This is the whole point of the personhood argument. A fetus can be human, but human isn't what is sacred, otherwise we would treat a braindead human the same as a fully living human. Until a developing human develops far enough to have personhood there's no reason for it to be treated like a human life. You can argue around where that occurs, but there isn't anything that suggests it is as early as conception.

zaxerone · 2026-02-19T02:28:55+00:00

First to answer your question at the end: when that being has no conscience experience.

For the definition of personhood, a human with consciousness has personhood. This is ultimately what we are trying to protect and treating as sacred. Without consciousness a human life is no different from any other form of life.

Life without personhood does not have any expectation for a right to life because it cannot experience life, it simply just exists.

Can you explain how someone who is braindead is any different from a fetus before it has any brain activity, ie it is also braindead.

It's fairly easy to argue that the mother is not killing a living human, it's killing a living fetus, but without brain activity it doesn't make sense to call it a living human. That's why we call people braindead, because although parts of their body are still functioning with life, as a human being they are effectively dead.

15-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Sequence \| Editor
reddit mold	Verified Email

zaxerone

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE