I sometimes wonder if the Green-Left really are as stupid as they sound. Not just in their endless insistence that socialism will work next time, but for their apparent utter ignorance of even the most fundamental concepts of economics.
Now, I don’t pretend to be an economic expert by any means, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has an actual degree in economics — and she can’t even define capitalism properly.
Then there’s the Australian Greens.
Greens leader Adam Bandt says Labor is politically “gutless” for backing the government’s stage three tax cuts, releasing modelling showing the cuts will worsen the gender pay gap and give high income earners up to 400 times the benefit of the lowest paid.
Analysis prepared by the parliamentary budget office for the Greens shows that men will receive about $2 for every $1 women receive between 2024 and 2031 under the tax plan, receiving a total of an extra $121.7bn compared with $62.4bn for women over the period.
Well, anyone who blithers about the “gender pay gap” can be sent away from the grown-up’s table straight away. It’s been illegal to pay a woman less than a man for the same work for decades. What they should really talk about is the gender earnings gap: the fact that men on average work much longer hours and take much less time off than women.
Longer hours, less time off = more earnings.
And more earnings means more tax paid.
So of course men who pay more tax in the first place are going to get more back from a percentage tax cut than women who pay less tax.
Unless the Greens are actually trying to argue that men are being given, say, a 10% tax cut and women only 5%.
Because that’s obviously not the case:
All people earning between $45,000 and $200,000 – which accounts for 70% of the workforce – will be taxed at 30%, down from 32.5%.
(Emphasis added.)
For the same reason, higher income earners, who pay far more tax in the first place, will get more back from a tax cut.
The top 1% of earners – those with incomes more than $309,000 this year and more than $462,000 in 2031-32 – will be $11.8bn better off over the course of the decade.
This is more than the 40% of taxpayers earning less than $60,000, who will get just $3.1bn – or 1.7% – of the total $184bn paid out by 2031.
The average tax cut for the top 20% of earners will be worth $4,230, compared with just $10 extra for the lowest paid – 400 times the benefit.
Compare the earnings and tax paid of the top 20% and the lowest-paid: the top quintile earns 12 times what the lowest earns. At the same time, the top quintile pays 60 times as much of their income in tax as the lowest. Even more, when government rebates and benefits are included: the bottom 20% pay no net tax.
Now, Adam Bandt is clearly not a complete idiot, especially when it comes to money. He’s a multimillionaire, after all.
So, why is he spouting such obvious nonsense?
Bandt said Labor’s decision to capitulate and support the final stage of the tax cuts – a position signed off by caucus last week after more than two years of internal debate – would be a political opportunity for the Greens at the next election.
In other words, it’s nothing more than rank political opposition, pitched at the low-information vote.
In any case, the Greens’ “tax the rich” politicking rings pretty hollow, considering that the Greens are the real “party of the rich”. The Greens’ vote is the wealthiest voting bloc in the nation, concentrated in Sydney’s harbourside mansions and Melbourne’s inner-city terraces.
The Greens are proposing an annual extra 6% wealth tax on billionaires for Australia’s 122 wealthiest citizens that would raise about $40bn over the decade.
The Guardian
Just like their idol, the shifty Bernie Sanders, now that they’re millionaires, the Greens have shifted their class rhetoric from “millionaires” to “billionaires”.
And the educated idiots who vote for them will lap it up.
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