does this remind anyone of something said by sloppy joe hockey and repeated by the murdoch press and some others....copied from romney? wouldn't surprise me at all. This is from the Fin Review, september 2012, it ends with the usual clap trap from the IPA but that's to be expected. Like everything that has come from the telesmear and bolts bog or whatever, big on slogans and hate but light on the details which tell the true story.
http://www.afr.com/p/national/infographic_australians_who_don_IiBi6f6xdQiVcDGLGsQJWM
The debate over the “47 per cent” of American adults who Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says don’t pay income tax caused a firestorm across the US this week.
But like the figure cited by Mr Romney, that number is full of caveats and exceptions rather than evidence that half the population are bludgers.
In the US, once you deduct those who pay payroll tax, including social security and Medicare, about 18 per cent of households don’t pay federal income tax – most of whom are elderly people living on social security or low-income workers who don’t earn enough to have to pay tax.
The figure was even more meaningless given the tax benefits that the rich received in the US, University of Melbourne economics professor John Freebairn said.
“The only traps in the game which Romney didn’t talk about is that most of the tax breaks are really available to the high-income earners,” he said.
And Australians pay the GST and many other forms of levies and taxes in their daily lives outside of the income tax system.
Australian Taxation Office statistics and Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data can help explain a lot about who pays what in this country.
Overall, the average income of those who lodge a tax return but do not have to pay tax is less than $10,000. So many people don’t pay tax because they don’t earn enough.
Almost half of the 7.4 million adult Australians who don’t pay tax are either retirees – who have worked – or students, who are soon to start work.
One third of non-payers are retirees aged 65 and over. Most are likely to be on some form of pension or living off their superannuation and other investments below the income tax threshold.
Another 13 per cent of non-payers are aged between 18 and 24, many full-time students who don’t work enough to pay tax and/or receive some form of government assistance.
Stay-at-home mothers account for another large portion of non-payers. Between the ages of 30 and 44, women who don’t pay income tax outnumber non-paying men by up to three to one.
The results of the Financial Review’s analysis were what you would expect from a progressive tax system, said Patricia Apps, a professor of Public Economics at Sydney University.
“When you look at the group who are not paying tax, it’s exactly the sort of profile you’d expect,” she said.
“A lot of people who aren’t paying tax are pensioners, they are retired.
“They are people who have paid tax, so you have to look at it from a lifetime.
“The other groups are students and families across the distribution of ages when women are working less because they are raising families.”
but forgot the chorus....
