kirby483,I'm baffled as to how you arrived at the figure of 60 cents in the dollar. WTF do you think happens to the other 40%? You seem to be implying that that's how much it costs to run the ATO, yet if you look in the ATO's annual report you'll see the real cost is about 1%.

The government doesn't need to raise a cent to stimulate the economy by $100 million. Stimulus spending is done by increasing the deficit. But having spent the money, the government will immediately get a lot of it back in tax, as every time the money is spent it boosts either profits or wages. And with fewer people unemployed, the government will save on social security payments.

You're right when you say that lowering tax will boost demand. But whether it's the best way of doing so is debatable – it does very little to improve productivity and it can't be targeted at depressed areas like government spending can. There is a strong case for cutting some of those indirect taxes, but it doesn't make sense for a business to employ more people unless the demand is there.

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Hasbeen of course I'm not Greek. But if you look at Greece you'll see proof that government spending cuts when the private sector is weak result in economic decline.

Greece is stuffed! It has limited credit (unlike Australia) because it's in the Eurozone. Their government should've respected the referendum result and rejected the counterproductive deal that was being offered (and reintroduced the Drachma instead). As it is they've not solved any of their problems; merely postponed them for a few months.

Business does not have confidence or trust in Abbott. The fundamental cause. We need an election to clear the air. The man is subject to saying anything one day and reneging the next.
It's useless upping the GST and lowering tax at the same time. People are very weary of cost shifting, and politicians that tell lies.
Hockey would not be keen to go through another budget, with an extra 100 billion on the books in 2 years so far, you can bet the budget will come in 50 billion extra.
Unemployment is guaranteed to rise sharply next year, no matter what happens this year.

After self-funded retirees had the guts sucked out of them paying high income tax rates over their working lives, let's take effectively 5% of their saved nest-eggs by raising the GST from 10 to 15% and lowering income tax rates.

That's taking 50K from someone who's saved a million to get through 30-40 years of retirement without a pension (after recently decided changes).

Meanwhile pensioners and welfare recipients will receive something to compensate for the impost of an extra 5%.

Too much them and us and personal greed/greed is good, in most of the posts to identify what should happen.

We are not a them and us but a single nation.

Destroy discretionary spending by any means and you destroy many businesses operating just in the black!

All of whom are impacted by the treatment accorded to the least among us! The cost of living or just doing business could be halved if we could just eliminate the add nothing but his or her demands, profit demanding paper shuffling middleman.

And rather than getting rid of them we seem to be getting more and more of them and their inevitable brokerage fees?

Housing carries far too many passengers to once again ever be truly affordable. Tax and entirely unnecessary compliance costs are far too high to encourage entrepreneurial endeavor! We really do need to study the celtic economic miracle if only to understand what actually created it and what destroyed it!

So as to copy once and avoid repeating the other! we are clearly a large enough country to emulate the best practice success of nations like Singapore, Taiwan, korea, Norway, Sweden, Ireland and Finland.

Forget the politics, just focus on the best practise success and what created it; be it untrammeled free market examples or socialist co-ops/employee shareholders?

We need to embrace long overdue real tax reform and vast simplification! And with that long overdue pragmatism, we also need to embrace cooperative capitalism not rat eat rat extremism/exploitism, that just turns a nation against itself! We need to focus exclusively on what works best rather than vested self interest of set in concrete idealogues; or greed is good self ruining examples.

Nor should we accept the debt is good rationale of folks like Adian who have never seen a deficit they don't like?

There' a way to avoid the predictable economic gloom; it's just not what we are doing now! Or them and us, rationales.

If it's an economic lifeboat, we all need to take a turn rowing or baling!
We just don't need tax avoiding leaners.
Rhrosty.

Rhosty, your accusation that I've never seen a deficit I don't like is baseless. You don't know what I have and haven't seen! Nor do you know my likes and dislikes, and how they've changed over time as my understanding of economics improved. A decade ago I, like most people, was under the illusion that any deficit the government runs now will result in them having to run a surplus later.

What you mistake for a debt is good rationale is actually an understanding that money comes into existence as debt. In order to have more money, someone else has to have more debt.

It would be possible to totally redesign the economic system so that the government creates money without debt. But as that would fail to acknowledge there's an opportunity cost, it would IMO be inferior to the status quo. The problem at the moment is not the debt itself, but rather the assumption that debt and deficits are bad.

Luciferase, it's the biggest scam I've encountered in my life time, 'work hard and invest or save for your future and you will reap the reqrds', yea, pull the other one I say. is it little wonder there is so much fiddling of the books going on.

I have no issues with people having fallen on tough times getting a pension but, when the tough times have arisen from carelessness or wastefullness then I get snakey. But when a government that I didn't vote for wastes so much of our taxes that we have to miss out, I get pissed!

A simple small flat tax on every dollar spent is what's needed, but to simply make the tax payer pay more while businesses get a free ride is simply unfair, and I'm in business myself so I'm not being bias.

No amount of tax increases can combat financial mismanagement and they're all crooked just look at this speaker wasting so much of our money simply because she feels she is entitled to.

That woman has ensured we are still in the race for the bottom when it comes to politics.