Inequality and growth? An oxymoron if ever there was one?

This morning on radio, I heard a regional Mayor belating the worsening economic circumstances of his drought ravaged community! With tendered solution that relied almost exclusively on passing trade and tourists?

Like folks from other equally depressed local economies are going to go out more often and spend more money! And Trickle Down/Economic Rationalism economics at its very finest, in operation.

Bill Shorten is onto something, and highlights the fact that some folk have misused family trusts to make them operate as tax havens and little else?

What's to be done? Well the best response is to remove any and all incentive to use "tax havens" here or abroad. By lowering the tax rate to a flat tax rate of 15%, which without any inherent reductions for business costs whatever, effectively meaning increased government revenue!

All while removing any incentive for some very creative accounting!?

With that gone, so also is any necessity whatsoever of tax compliance and tax compliance costs!

Meaning, an average saving of an averaged 7% to Australian businesses! Which can then be returned to the bottom line and or be reinvested in growing the business!?

And when applied, produce an adjusted effective tax rate of just 8%!

And with that in place end the need for fiddled returns, and family trust tax haven, negative gearing tax havens and capital gains subsidy, tax havens!

And indeed all off shore tax havens which would become entirely counterproductive and cost the tax dodger more tax, than would result/incur if just left or reinvested here.

We talk about smaller government, yet govern this country as if if were seven different countries all competing for the lowest common denominator at the greatest possible cost and wasted resources!? TBC.
Alan B.

Equality and growth is very possible with preferenced cooperative capitalism, some of which will of necessity be the brainchild and creation of facilitating and financing government!

With first cab off the rank being the most affordable carbon free or carbon neutral energy!

The first being cheaper than coal, thorium. And able to be factory mass produced, as walk away safe, molten salt, thorium reactors. For around one third of conventional coal fired power or coal comparative, large scale solar thermal!

The second, very local domestic power production utilising, wasted waste. Which instead should be digested on site and the resultant methane scrubbed and used in ceramic fuel cells, where given a chemical reaction and not combustion per se. Plus the high atomic hydrogen ratio in the methane molecule, the exhaust product is mostly pristine water vapor!

Where this to be grown as competing co-ops competing for business, with credit union finance etc, we could completely resuscitation the steel industry then massively turbocharge it as the locally invented single step method of steelmaking, and if powered by thorium, and assisted with maximised automation? The cheapest in the world with the lowest carbon footprint!

Look far and wide, and nowhere can one find a successful and growing economy, minus a robust, metals smelting (steel aluminium) industry!

Nor more successful industries than the cooperative model! And the only prospect for a future with both guaranteed robust growth that leaves nobody behind, but increases equality with every passing decade!

Yes it will take time, the brains we were born with and the complete jettisoning of some favorite ideological imperatives!

And given our parlous state and the world! Not a minute to lose and not a minute too soon TBC.
Alan B.

Gillard didn't do so well out of trying to beat up the Class War. She had Gender War as well, but that failed miserably as well. The last was more about a pre-made speech and men's wristwatches apparently.

As long as Shorten isn't worrying himself about anything real, like those Struggle streets, that Labor ex-Leader Latham so 'unfairly'(sic) drew attention to,

Former Labor leader Mark Latham slams Labor over gay marriage
MAY 27, 201510:23PM

FORMER Labor leader Mark Latham has slammed his party’s “obsession” with gay marriage saying it should focus on the nation’s “Struggle Streets” instead.
He told 3AW radio Bill Shorten’s private members bill to push for changes to the marriage act to allow same-sex couples to tie the knot, to be introduced into parliament on Monday, was nothing more than a symbolic gesture.
He said the biggest social issue facing Australia was unemployment, drug use and homelessness in suburbs such as Mt Druitt which was the focus of the SBS documentary, Struggle Street.
“If you are interested in equality and social justice in Australia then what was the really big event in the month of May,” he said. “We had the Struggle Street documentary which revealed that in the nation’s public housing estate, most notably in Mt Druitt people live in conditions that you wouldn’t wish upon your dogs. Absolute chaos, despair and hopelessness in their lives.
“And surely, you would have expected a serious national response from the party of social justice?
“We didn’t hear anything.
“They’re obsessed, instead, by gay marriage.”

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/gay-marriage/former-labor-leader-mark-latham-slams-labor-over-gay-marriage/news-story/6c89f7077536bf321ee40c25946e6f0f

Which reminds that it is Labor and Greens who have been riding gays bareback for years for tres 'Progressive' headlines, but now that free ride is all but over. They are having to cast about for new things to protest that might have some longevity and can be dumbed-down for the ABC's Q&A Ultimo Hipster audiences.

Really, really affordable energy is just the major half of the growth equation, the other half, is also affordable, water.

None more affordable than desalinated water utilising the world's cheapest energy and deionization dialysis.

This brand new, space age, Dutch invented, desalination method, even when reliant on far more costly coal fired power, still managed in some Texas trials, to produce 90% potable water, still cheap enough for cost effective irrigation!

If drought ravaged communities could have some of this, introduced as cost effective irrigation and drought proofing! It'd be money in the bank and an ability to pick crops, with the highest international return/demand/profit! Cotton, cane, come what may or cannabis

The trick is to keep this new, inexhaustible water, out of the hands of profit demanding middlemen and the usual water barons. One and the same thing really?

And only doable actually, if rolled out as government facilitated and financed or by an underwriting government!

Government guarantees, would leverage our two trillion super fund and around another lazy two trillion residing in international corporate coffers, looking for a better return than on offer offshore!?

Our doable dreams need to be outside the box and the biggest we can imagine! Thinking small and safe has produced today's result and an economy in terminal decline!

Can't died in a cornfield over a century ago! Won't has endured and looks just as sprightly, load, abusive and active as ever.

Don't hold your breath waiting for (coal share owning) self identifying, pollies to get enthusiastic or even mildly lukewarm? They'd sooner die in a ditch?
Alan B.

The entire wages and salary structure in Australia needs a good shake up and review if any semblance of equality is to be attained.
JC himself isn`t worth half a million dollars a year. Let alone others.

The politics of envy. The left always return to it, when they have nothing else to say.

I don't give a damn how much the other bloke gets, provided there is enough for me to have a decent life. So far I have little to complain about, even now on the pension.

If I were to complain it would be about waste, particularly in the public sector, with tens of thousands of unnecessary bureaucrats on inflated salaries doing nothing useful.

That of course goes double in education, particularly the university sector. Expanded incredibly over the last couple of decades with thousands being paid a lot for not very much. Education for the educator, not the student.

Anyone who is prepared to do a decent day's work can still do very well in today's Australia