INEQUALITY may not cripple us, but it certainly hurts, and it is fundamentally unfair.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Abbott’s intention to force young people off the dole, when the work just is not available, will force many young people into crime.
For thousands of years humans have been developing labour-saving devices and we have reached that stage where there is just not enough work available to keep every- one fully employed.
One years ago most of us worked on the land but now only about 5 per cent to grow enough to feed the world.
John Maynard Keynes suggested that England could escape the Great Depression by employing thousands of people to dig holes, and thousands more to fill them in, but it finally took another war to end the depression.
This problem can only get worse, as ever smarter machinery takes over more and more work, but it’s only a problem if the gains are shared unequally among us.
The problem is falsely seen as a lack of work, when the real problem is a lack of money.
If everyone were to receive a generous “dole”, of say $300 per week and all income was taxed at a flat rate of 40 per cent, say, we could do away with Centrelink, 90 per cent of the tax office, thousands of tax consultants, and a lot of the police force as fewer young people would feel the need to turn to crime.
And I believe the security gained would greatly diminish depression, family breakups, and suicide.
In his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Picketty explains how the capitalist economies in the western world favour the rich, and lead to the growing inequality we are all, unfortunately, becoming accustomed to.
Without something drastic happening, we are heading back to the slums of Dickens’ time, with the elite living in gated communities to avoid contact with the poor.
Peter Costello once remarked that the tax system is necessarily complex because we live in a complex society.
He had it backwards — we have a complex society precisely because the tax system is so complicated.
If all income was taxed at the same rate, and all loopholes closed, so that the only way to reduce one’s tax was to reduce one’s income, we would all understand the system.
Many people turn to crime believing that the system is unfair, because it is unfair.
It is stupid of us to build more prisons, where we keep people at $120,000 per year, when for much less we could have kept them out of prison in the first place.
— ROBERT REID,
Albury