31 May

Here’s a story which I promise gets more interesting as it goes along. The ratio of tax paid to GDP in a country. (Stay with me!) GDP is a measure of how much wealth a country produces, usually in a year. Australia’s ratio of tax we all pay, to our total annual GDP, is 22.4%. That’s one of the lowest ratios in the world. Here’s where it gets interesting. If we increased that ratio to 24.4%, we would wipe out our current $1 trillion deficit in just 3 years. At 24.4% that ratio would STILL be one of the lowest in the developed world. But they won’t do it, because conservative politics has spent decades brainwashing us into thinking all tax is theft. Tax is really society choosing how much wealth to hold collectively (in government), and how much privately (in our personal hands). So right now, less than one-quarter of our wealth generated every year is held by us collectively. More than three-quarters of that wealth is held privately. And a huge percentage of that is held in only a very small number of hands. It’s a choice of how society, as a whole, invests its wealth. Not theft by the government of ‘our’ money. Government is us too, we invented it, the people who run it are ordinary people doing a job for the rest of us, that we asked them to do. Nobody is stealing anything. But I reckon having less than a quarter of our annual wealth invested in us as a society is pretty stupid.