From Wayne Swan: HOCKEY BLOWS $6.8 BILLION HOLE IN HIS BUDGET TO FUND TAX BREAKS FOR THE WEALTHY Joe Hockey today failed the first obligation any Treasurer has when it comes to tax, to protect the tax base from those seeking to minimise their tax contribution. The one consistent theme in his approach to tax policy is to reduce the taxes for the top end but increase taxes for those on modest incomes. Even adding up just a handful of the measures he announced today [MMRT $5.5b, OBU $300m and Profit Shifting $960m] will blow a hole of at least $6.8 billion in the Budget over the next four years. Worse still, Hockey will continue to erode the tax base, weakening the Budget for years to come just so he can reduce the tax paid by big corporations and wealthy individuals. This, despite Australia having lead the way through the G20 and OECD to clamp down on profit shifting and base erosion. Knowing his behaviour is economically reckless, he then cynically tried to partially offset his big-end of town largesse by slugging low-income earners and small businesses. A very simple example of this is that he will scrap measures designed to give 3.6 million low income earners a tax break on their superannuation of around $500 a year each. It is disgraceful that two-thirds of those low income earners he’s targeting are women. Instead he will give 16,000 very wealthy individuals a tax break, even though they already have tax-free income of around $100,000 or more a year.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 06:00:10 +0000
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