Lol!, SM,

Sorry to pop your bubble, but I don't envy people like yourself or butcher. Why would I envy people who are cringing, grasping and avaricious, forever watchful and fearful of someone taking their spoils?

People like that deserve our pity, not our envy - for they have a limited measure of their own humanity usually parenthesized inside $ signs.

.....and the jumped-up middle-class attempting to promote itself to glorious Aristocracy always leaves one with a snort of embarrassed laughter.

SM,

Those figures of your can be considered quite rubbery. take for example, military spending, if Tax'em Tony blows $24 billion on purchasing new planes who benefits most from that purchase? The down and out who's got nothing to defend, or the rich who have everything to defend. Government expenditure is not always of equal benefit to all.

"Government expenditure is not always of equal benefit to all."

Is obviously true, Paul1405... as it is also, that government income (like personal income) is never equally obtained.

https://www.ato.gov.au/About-ATO/Research-and-statistics/In-detail/Tax-statistics/Taxation-statistics-2011-12/?anchor=Individualstables#Table15

[if you copy and paste the link it takes you straight to the table]

People with the top 2.3 taxable incomes paid 26.2% of all net tax.
The next 14.4 paid 37.4% of all net tax.
The next 37.3 paid 32.8% of all net tax.
The next 38.2 paid 3.7% of all net tax.
The last 7.7 didn't pay any tax.

I find it amusing to think that wealth has its costs. Still, it isn't as though anyone is forced to be a gazillionaire.

Nor is any politician forced to make election promises which they break... they seem to do that on their own volition.

John Howard's middle class welfare has been a mechanism to aid in the redistribution of wealth. A family has a churn of money going out in tax then coming in as benefits.

It does look like the levy and churn-reduction proposals leaked so far are going to leave many out of pocket. I think this it is a veiled approach to clawing back the income tax cuts and pension rises that compensated the introduction of carbon pricing.

Parrot,

Unless you have never taken a tax rebate, family benefit, car allowance or any form of legal tax minimisation, you are a hypocrite. And yes you are envious of what we have and that what we do matters. You and your ilk consider it sinful that we earn more than you, and that the only way we can redeem ourselves is to hand over our earnings to dullards and bludgers.

Paul,

If you used your brain, the 50% or so of the population that get hand outs and services far in excess of the taxes they pay have a lot to lose. If they lose the 25% that pay for just about everything, they will soon find out what real poverty is.

Well, I adopted the theory that it was far better to donate my money to what I considered 'worth while causes, mostly within the communities that supported me, hence my generous donations over the decades of butchery. Besides, at least this way I was able to draw comfort in the fact that my taxes didn't support the dole bludgers, nor the single mums with multiple fathered kids, nor the stay home dads who found it more appealing to suck off the public tit than contribute. In fact, at least my path gave me what I considered value for money.

As for pocketing the GST, gee I hate to educate some, but meat is.a basic food and as such does not attract GST.

I also, for my customers sake, never sold another bag of 'dog bones' since the year 2000. I sold leg bones, neck bones, brisket bones, even mixed bones, but never dog bones.

So yep, I did contribute, but in what I considered to be a much fairer way, because after all, rather than provide smokes for some single mum, I provided a free lunch fior her kids. It was about the only way I could do my bit to control welfare waste.

Also, unlike many small business operators, I drew a fair wage as well as a wage fir my wife, both if which were taxed via the PAYG system and it's predecessor. We also paid super to ourselves at the applicable rate.

Cheers.