Hi Yuyutsu,

You may appreciate this;

Last Saturday I went into K-Mart, at the door was a young girl, checking bags, and greeting customers I assume. There next to her was a large stack of grotesque looking plastic pumpkins, and a large sign $39, a Halloween special! I looked, I turned to the young lady, and with my dry wit I said; "Nah...I have half a dozen of those plastic pumpkins at home already, do I need more?" The shop was full of people, with arm fulls of useless rubbish scuttling to and fro, lining up eager to pay for even more useless rubbish.

"Halloween, contraction of All Hallows' Eve, a holiday observed on October 31, the evening before All Saints' (or All Hallows') Day. The celebration marks the day before the Western Christian feast of All Saints and initiates the season of Allhallowtide, which lasts three days and concludes with All Souls' Day."

Consumerism has taken over Paganism, with plastic pumpkins @ just $39 each. Long live America!

We entered the post war period loaded to the gunnels with war debt and still hadn't fully recovered from the economically deleterious effects of the Great Depression.

But we had two socialist visionaries at the helm and a balance between socialism and capitalism. With the people owning power generation some insurance companies a bank and a couple of profitable airlines. Plus, most railways.

Visionary leaders put us on the map with the massive and visionary snowy mountains project. The engineering wonder of the world. And we produced cheap energy because we kept price gouging, tax avoiding, profit repatriating debt laden foreigners out of cash cow public amenity/essential service.

And became as a consequence of the hard-nosed pragmatism, the third wealthiest nation on planet earth and a debt free creditor one to boot!

Times change, leaders and parties come and go but economic fundamentals never ever do! What our Grandparents were capable of, means, we can do better given our far superior resources.

What they had and missing here is visionary leaders able to set aside petty partisan politics. But were bipartisan and understood the way to recover from crippling war debt was through economic growth on steroids and cheap energy.

And that's all we need now today, given economic fundamentals never ever change. See my previous comment for the recipe we need for today and our times. Pragmatism is another ism!
Alan B.

Broadcaster, Alan Jones, said on air, that people like him on executive salaries and such, could so arrange their affairs to not pay more than 15% of their income in tax. In 2017 the top tax paid as actual dollars to the ATO was just 13%. with a reported 40% of companies paying no company tax to anyone and others paying as little as 4%!

This being so it makes little or no sense to reduce tax to 30% when those who arguably pay all our tax aren't paying any more now today than 15%. And that probably includes most polly waffling Pollies.
Moreover, the double tax act of 1953 was almost the dumbest thing we've done given it was used as another tax avoidance loophole by companies with US branches.

In the sixties and seventies companies paid most of their fair share of tax, and arguably one of the reasons we were as well off as we were.

It wasn't broke and didn't need fixing by muddle-headed ideologues.

Today, no real economic recovery is possible without tax reform as branch and root reform and a jettisoning of our current tax act in its entirety, to be replaced by an unavoidable flat tax of 15% that is imposed on all income/earnings above a generous tax-free threshold. And the world's lowest costing energy! [And that isn't coal or battery/pumped hydro supported renewables!]

Do the above, but only if we would once again, wish to become a debt free wealthy nation with a robust manufacturing sector making everything from nails to airplanes, trains and warp drive starships.

Get the energy and tax paradigms right and all else follows as all comers are all but crushed in the rush to relocate here. And that being the case, we can pick and choose who we want here and who we share with.

It's like, fart tax my arse, with our current polly waffling Pollies at the helm.
Alan B.

Hi AB,

The Capitalist government managed to run the nation into a trillion dollars of public debt. With new debt both public and private increasing, which with generous tax cuts and massive tax avoidance is impossible to reduce, the estimate on repayment of existing public debt alone is 40 plus years, the question is, how are we going to return to a prosperous economy where rising standards of living are possible. Is it now a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted? Are we likely to have a government with the intestinal fortitude to undertake the necessary radical changes needed within the economy. Me thinks not.

The current debt level in Australia, and indeed, throughout the world, is primarily due to the policies adopted to 'fight' the WuFlu. From the outset, it was clear to many that the lockdowns were going to result in massive and unsustainable debt.

Yet an overwhelming majority of the population supported the lockdowns, oblivious to or unconcerned about the generational costs of those lockdowns. For those people to now turn around and lambast governments for incurring debt that they, the pro-lockdown crowd, cheered on, is the height of hypocrisy.

I seem to recall that Paul was one of the leading supporter of lockdowns on OLO. Draw your own conclusions.

Agree Paul, this lot and the other lot don't have new ideas or the testicular fortitude to borrow from the success stories of our forebears! Are limited by what comes on the table by their political masters, i.e., the union bosses/heavies!

The other lot too busy with blame shifting and political point scoring and looking after corrupt cronies, middlemen parasites with deep pockets to look at things like cooperative capitalism and genuine national interest, root and branch, essential, market, tax and energy reform. And are constricted/constrained by a self-imposed financial straitjacket.

And wouldn't look at the snowy mountains project today, but for lack of vision put it or today's version, in the too hard basket!

We do not need to borrow money but use our own social credit with cheques that say, the reserve bank promises to pay x dollars. When the project is built and added/shifted to the credit side of the ledger by the value and income earned of/by the finished project, which more than completely offsets the debit!

And the exact same way commercial banks leverage their very modest pool of money which buys more than face value much more than seven times over! With the real estate market and with real estate backed, business loans! Cooperative capitalism comrade!
Alan B.