That's the Rudd Vision for Australia. Why give people their money back in a tax-break when you can give them some red tape instead? He has made all education supplies 50% tax deductable. If you want you're money back you,ll have to keep all those receipts for pencilcases and uniforms and send them all off to Kev once a year to look over. He'll check you've been looking after your kids and decide whether you deserve your money back.
Make them earn it, says Rudd. He wants to reduce all of us to subservient bean counters like him. Why not just give people their money back and trust them to spend it as they see fit the Howard/Costello way?
Increasing detail makes things easier: the double-think of the bureaucrat. Out in the real world we see perverse results of this kind of Keynesian tampering. At one fell swoop he has made all computing products 50% tax deductable. All you have to say is you are buying it for your kid. Will anyone be suprised if the cost of computers go up by the difference? He's messing with the market in a boom economy with excess wealth. The money will follow the incentives. As a result the taxpayer will be subsidising Telstra's broadband fees and second computers for homes that are already well-off.
This is the kind of middle-class welfare he attacks Howard for, just a more convoluted and misplaced version of it. This is another bit of pointless policy fluff from Rudd which reveals his lack of stomach for real reforms .
The genuinely badly-off kids dont have parents who are on-the-ball enough to take advantage of tax deductions. What those kids need is for their parents to have jobs. Howard's strong economic management and a modern IR system will make sure of that. Along with the Government's welfare crackdowns and anti-drug policies.
What really pisses me off about this tax policy is that it follows the Rudd formula to the letter : ALP Policy = Liberal Policy - substance + guilt-trip. Without Howard he would not have a policy platform, but he puts enough crappy trimming on his almost identical policy to make it look morally superior to Howard. If you scratch the surface you see it's all bullshit.
If you really want to help poor kids get laptops vote Howard. Give their parents jobs, don't give them a pissy little tax-deduction. Heck, if they are on a low-tax bracket then a 50% tax deduction is fuck all anyway. If they are on the 15% marginal rate they get back a measly 7% of what they spend. If they are not earning enough to pay tax they get SFA. This measure is all gesture and no benefit. This just boosts my point that this will benefit the well-off only. Just like we all know tax-deductablitly for child-care does.
It's cunning i'll give him that. He had to make a move fast as he was slipping behind in the polls and he's put his best guilt-inducing foot forward, but fact that he had to copy it goes to show as Costello says that they can't have had a tax policy to start with. They had a year in opposition to work one out. Like my Dad says union officials are lazy. They talk while others do the work.
The good thing, from my perspective, about this policy is that the differences, however small, have shown up the ALP's priorities. This tax policy makes a mockery of Rudd's claim to be an economic conservative. He and the ALP want to tax and spend. They are redistributionists like all socialists. They dont believe in wealth and incentives. They believe in indulging their guilty consciences with your money.
I can't believe he said that people earning more than 180K 'don't need the money now'. Who the fuck is he to say that? This all works on the assumption that a bureacrat knows better than you what your money should be spent on. This is old-world European thinking. It's 1970's stuff. It's pre-Thatcher, pre-Raegan, pre-Howard, hell it's pre-Keating and it's sure as heck pre-late 20th C western properity. We can't afford to go back to the Nanny State model. If we are going to compete in a global market and keep jobs here in Aus we can't afford to apply the breaks.
Rudd will sap the economy and throw money at his perceived social-justice priorities, but just like any other socialist approach it won't work. How many times does this have to try and fail before people see that? The reduced steam in the economy and the bureaucratic wastage will give us the wost of both worlds. What little tax revenue there is to spend will be wasted.
The tax cuts Howard and Costello promise will stimulate growth, increase workforce participation though incentives, promote enterprise and create wealth. This will fill Govt. coffers for years to come (tax is still too high even after their pretty-big cuts) and that money can be spent wisely by tough decision-makers in politics on infrastructure for transport, water, education and health.
It's a virtuous circle: more tax revenue money, better spent and without taking the economy back 30 years. That's what we'll get with Howard and Costello. It's been happening for the last 12 years. The Government is now taking it further, bedding it down, forcing this country to accept it needs to have a low-tax economy to have a future. We need consolidation right now, not a change of course.
One last word. Rudd's tax-cuts are delayed and not guaranteed. He has doubled the timeline for their introduction from 3 to 6 years (into his second term if he has one) and made them contingent on continued economic growth. That's right. He will damage growth by not cutting tax in the beginning, and once growth slows he will use that as a pretext for not cutting tax at all. This is a typical Rudd promise-that's-not-really-a-promise just like the 'vote for me and IF the States stay crap at health management and IF you vote for a referendum THEN i'll take over the hospitals. It's a con. He's trying to appear concerned but promising nothing.
The botton line is, don't trust Rudd with your money. He's a petty bureaucrat with a love for red-tape, commitees, review-boards and centralised control by pencil-pushers. He'll do more harm than good. If you really want to help poor kids get laptops vote Howard.
Vote for prosperity, not pomposity.
