fatvegan

It troubles me that the discussion of the appropriate income tax rate for Australia has become so dominated by what is internationally competitive. Apparently we no longer decide how much tax we'll pay by working out the sort of society we want to live in. In the past some have decided to have friendlier governments at the expense of higher taxes, and others have chosen less friendly governments. I've always been quite sure I wanted to live in a country with a friendly government that didn't let people die of cold and starvation. It's never seemed like the sort of thing anyone would want, even if letting those people die did reduce the tax bill. Particularly since I don't even think there's much evidence to suggest that high income taxes reduce growth. The very mildly higher growth of the United States, hasn't benefited many of its citizens and has arguably mostly come from American military intervention in virtually every poor country on the planet. I don't think the United States is compelling evidence for lower taxes.

How is it that the Scandinavian countries have had very similar growth rates and unemployment rates for decades and yet they have tax rates often double those of Britain, Australia and the United States. Tax levels don't influence how much stuff society has nearly as much as what sort of stuff society has. Plasma screens or schools.

I don't care if Australia is "internationally competitive" in taxation. But maybe I'm just confused. After all, we are no longer a society, merely an economy. The annoying thing is, I must have been concentrating on something else when we our society turned into an economy, because I really have no idea when it actually happened. Otherwise I certainly would have done something to stop it.