CURRENT POLITICS - Tax reform six proposals |
TAX REFORM SIX MODEST PROPOSALS To reduce this criminality, here are six modest proposals for reforming the tax system. These changes are what we used to call reforms. The last thirty years has seen the term ‘reform’ applied to what are in truth ‘de-forms’. Because flat-rate levies, whether on Medicare or for flood relief, are calculated on taxable incomes they compound the injustices that flow from deductions. The proposal is to replace the unfair GST with a Financial Services Tax of 0.1 percent on each dollar traded. The annual turnover on Australian foreign-exchange markets alone is $50 trillion. One cent out of every thousand of those five thousand trillion cents would collect $ 50 billion. That is the same amount as is gathered by the current GST. On top of the foreign exchange trades, there are those on the stock exchange and the futures markets. If they also paid a 0.1 percent Financial Services Tax on each dollar traded, who knows how many welfare services could be funded for citizens instead of for the corporates. No doubt you have already worked out what the traders will say. A Financial Services Tax (FST) will not generate anything like the revenues I’m predicting because it will drive those transactions off shore. There is no doubt that a FST will be a blow to Merchant Bankers like billionaire Malcolm Turnbull. The FST would also keep down an exchange rate that has been driven up by parasites whose ‘value adding’ to fictitious capital has helped to destroy manufacturing jobs and to stymie the export of other services. Before Hawke and Keating floated the dollar in December 1983, foreign exchange traders dealt with physical goods and services such as transport and insurance. Since the biggest deform of all, FOREX has become a diamond mine for speculators. The huge trades on foreign exchange add to the volatility of an inherently chaotic system. In 1980, the annual turnover on the local futures market was $100 million, a fraction of the trillions this year. We can’t afford to wait for the next crash. We have to take the fight up to the Masters of the Universe by re-regulating the financial sector. Re-opening a peoples’ bank to replace the Commonwealth Bank that the ALP sold out would be a start. The sixth reform takes up income management. Introduced by the Coalition. it was extended by the ALP under Gillard. South Australian ALP premier ????? wanted to go even further than the Abbott crew until his de-forms were knocked off at the ALP State Conference in November 2014. The Northern Territory Intervention has proved to be the thin edge of yet another wedge. Income management has spread beyond the Territory and beyond indigenous communities. We are now confronted by the de-form proposed by paper billionaire Andrew Forrest. The Coalition had commissioned him to investigate indigenous affairs. He went way outside that brief to say that the regime should apply to two million Australians. He exempted pensioners and war service benefits because that would be politically disastrous – for the moment. The Coalition has not accepted Forrest’s ambit claim – for the moment. But the universal management of incomes is now on the agenda. The boundaries of what it is acceptable to argue about have been thrust further to the Right. One assumption behind the Forrest report is crucial because it confronts the unequal version of ‘equality’ that he uses to extend income management to non-indigenous Australians. He justifies expanding the regime so as not to be seen to discriminate against indigenous Australians. Once more, we encounter the doctrine of fake equality before the law, the Hansonite mantra: ‘treat everyone the same’ and ignore generations of social inequalities. Nonetheless, managed incomes are a great idea - if applied to the likes of Andrew Forrest. He did not go far enough to achieve real social equality. We demand income management for billionaires by stripping them of their booty. Let’s manage his income by relieving him of most of it. A marginal tax rate of 90 per cent would be a start. At the same time, we should manage corporate welfare by putting an end to all of it. |