Tax in Australia

Wouldn't it be nice if accountants were emp;oyed to help people run their business affairs instead of tax avoidance, that way many small business would prosper instead of going to the wall.

I hate politicians, accountants, priests and lawyers.......without them, we would all be better off, and the world MAY have some chance of achieving PEACE.

 

Troy you are a legend, you answered your own question. Ronald Regan is evil yet you are virtuous, ( before when you were poor anyway).
Sorry, I am not mocking you, honest, it just happen to be an area in which I have some experience running seminars for personal development and have seen this a million times over.

You are perfectly correct when you say that you paid more proportionally in taxes than the governor, since that is exactly what I am pointing at. There are two forces at play here. One is the universal (anti) value that rich people must be punished for robbing the poor of their money and so taxes must be scaled higher and higher according to income. This is the Robin Hood tax in principle. Government are not stupid and know that this system only taxes heavily the medium income earner and leave out the low income and the high income. The low income is happy because thinks that the high income is taxed higher, the high income has found a way to avoid paying tax altogether and the middle ground slaves away and pays all the taxes.

Yet the irony is that the very principle that I point at, rich is evil poor is virtuous, that is so engrained in the human mind is the originator of this fallacy that a progressive tax is fair and a flat tax is not. In essence a flat tax would increase the amount of tax paid by the poor and reduce the tax paid by the rich. In practice it would increase tax for the poor in a very small way yet create an incentive to earn more without falling in a higher tax bracket, and also make sure that the rich pay some tax in stead of avoiding it because of the absurdity of having to pay 50%
Yet any party that would try this will be invariably accused of apologising for the rich and chastising the poor, and so a flat rate tax is seen as a monstrous regressive tax and compared to a feudal system of tribute and will never exist unless there is a radical campaign to educate the people. This is true in Australia where we have a pseudo socialist state. Perhaps the US is a tad different, I don't really know.

 

Accountants have in general very poor business sense and are in general useless in advising a business beyond their expertise in book keeping and tax law. That is their area, they are not entrepreneurs, and have only a "third party hindsight vision" of affairs. In fact that makes them dangerous and the principle of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" applies to accountants in business very well.

 

That`s largely contradictory.

Who designs , and then builds , and maintains the robots ?

Robots?

Automation has replaced 75% of the workforce ? I don`t think so !

Read : That would be a major , unprecedented WORLDWIDE DEPRESSION , TOTAL ANARCHY IN FACT !

 

politicians, accountants, priests and lawyers......

Very good candidates for automation.

 

Where did I say Reagan was evil for paying less taxes than I did? Or that he needed to be "punished?" Or that being poor somehow made me virtuous? You're putting words into my mouth. I said that since Reagan made more money than I did that year, a fair system would have had him paying more taxes than I did, rather than none. I didn't say he was motivated by Satan....or that I was on the side of the Angels.

I think I'm outa here.

 

If you spread this nonsense around at your " seminars ",
all I can say is , heaven help us !



Spare us your patronizing , pretentious , pseudo erudite lectures.

Any resentment among underpaid , exploited workers is totally justified , and certainly is not " One universal (anti) value " as you call it.

Has it ever occurred to you that the poor (or low income earners ) are only interested in attaining a reasonable , and dignified way of life ?

They have better things to do , than pondering over , let alone postulating " robin hood "schemes , as you would have people believe.
You are every poor or low income earner`s nightmare.

I no longer employ any laborers in construction ,but I have in the past.
When ever possible I have paid more than the current wage ,in the form of bonuses for good effort .
These guys just wanted to get paid for a days work.And they always were.
The "payoff" was a productive , efficient , on site team.

Get a reality check.

 

Troy, what goes around comes around... The kind of position, where you are denying what you said, are the kind of accusations you made of me... Are idiots, in this case, caught at their own game? - - re-interpreting what has been said and regurgitated as a quote?...

Is this a case of reversal? - - Where troy can give it but "I think I'm outa here." cant take it?

 

If we look at the actual numbers, 'robots' now do the work of a few times the total work work force of medieval England. Do you work on a farm? Do you spend most of your time labouring to pull the things you and your family need to live from the earth? I'm betting you don't. Instead you likely have some other job and pay people to use machines to do that work for you.

90% or so of the population worked directly to feed everyone. Less than 1% of Canada works to directly produce food here.

The world population has increased by about 10 times since the middle ages. If we assumed the rest of the world was mechanized as Canada is and had similar farm labour requirements (most nations have more people working in agriculture due to man labour being cheaper than fuel and equipment), then we now have about 10% of medieval population levels feeding 1000% of its population.


We are pushing the world to fewer and fewer skilled jobs, and building robots that are getting better and better at skilled labour. Capitalism cannot continue to function as it has in the last 200 years if the trend of automation continues at the rapid advance it has in that time.

 

We don`t live in medieval England.

Capitalism as we know it , is doomed.
Unless we make serious changes , Capitalism as we know it will collapse , owing to the fact that the model is unsustainable.

No. We are " pushing " the world to fewer and fewer unskilled jobs.
Information age ring a bell ?
Unskilled jobs ? Where are they ?Who employs unskilled labour these days ?

That is really irrelevant.The " workforce " consists of far more sectors than farming.More so every day.People work at almost any OTHER sector.

I work in construction btw.

 

Yes, we don't live in Medieval England, but automation has still replaced most of the jobs, freeing labourers to do other jobs. The problem is as automation continues and takes up more and more jobs, we are not likely to replace those jobs with different specializations as we have in the past.

Actually we ARE pushing for lower skilled labour sectors. Have you toured a factory? Ask the average worker in a factory to preform all jobs there to complete one item that they 'produce'. Many workers would need to be 'retrained' to work on other stations. Even after you were to 'train' someone to work at all stations, if you drop them in a proper workshop they wouldn't have a clue how to do most basic craftsman skills.

Fewer and fewer skills are being expected in a workforce. You work in construction, can you (and everyone you work with) explain how to make the cuts for a 30 degree dove tail joint? Without using a spirit level, what methods are there to insure a structure is square and plumb?

Even within white collar jobs we are seeing a reduction in general skills and replacing them with dedicated tools that do the job faster (Computer programs), but often leave the employee completely clueless how to do the job without it.

We generally Know more than the average person 500 years ago, but in general we're not as skilled as most people were in the past.

 

There , you said it yourself..... other jobs.


We specialize more now.Those computers need to have competent input.
It`s more a matter of shifting skill sets. Computers are just that , a specialized tool.
It requires new skills to get the best out of them.

I would point out that we are now more skilled , in our specialized field.

Many , if not all workers ARE now being retrained during their working years.
Often not within their chosen field , or by their original employer.
Job security no longer exists.

Studies have found that an average worker is likely to be working in more than three or four often totally unrelated and different disciplines or fields of industry ,
during their lifetime.This was almost unheard of years ago.

The day of working for one company , and the golden handshake after 40 or more years of service are long gone.

 

What do you mean by robot? do you consider a tractor to be a robot (a work saving device), or do you mean the multi million dollar robotic arms in car manufacturing that can do repetitive work only, like spot welding.

Personally i'm all for increasing production with robotics. A mas produced car is far better than a hand built one.

But the increase in production and quality should reflect in the price of the product and not be absorbed in cooperate bonuses for white collar workers and dividends for share holders.
If it does not then it just further fuels the flaw in capitalism of rich getting richer rand poor getting poorer.

 

Multimillion dollar robotic arm? What decade are you living in? Try $10-50k for most mid weight industrial arms, and those prices are just dropping even more every year.

Now consider the advancing field of robotics. The concept that robots can only do "simple, repetitive work" is true in industry today, but not in the lab. We are rapidly advancing the technology, and already have the tech to potentially replace a wide range of major employers with the cutting edge techs, but they are simply not mature or trusted enough to be accepted for wide spread adoption.

What jobs are safe? Labour jobs aren't. Robots don't need breaks, don't draw benefits, and when they get old they're replaced and you can actually sell them for scrap! Try doing that with a human worker.

Service sector jobs aren't safe. Do you really think it takes a massive amount of skill, talent, or critical thinking to ask "Do you want fries with that?"

Advances in RFID tags and their rapidly dropping prices means shopping may have a chance at being what was promised 50 years ago of being able to walk into a store, put all your wanted items in a basket, and pick up your bill at the door. Facial recognition and other bio-metrics coupled with smart chips means you may even be able to PAY by just walking through the doors without stopping.

What jobs are really safe from the ever advancing robotic work force? Name a job that you think cannot be replaced by a robotic mind, and I'll simply show you new challenges that have yet to be solved by Computer Sciences and Engineering.

 

Luckless,

I am a Shipwright, I would like to see a robot that can grind down an old engine bed in a fibreglass boat and replace it with a new one (that was my job last week).......the robot can have it anytime if he can do it. NO WAY