The total tax take in Australia is around the OECD average, but tax on people’s incomes is well above average. The top rate is out of line with most other western countries, which have been moving to lower and ?atter rates. Because the threshold at which people start to pay tax is well below subsistence, people are taxed before they have earned enough to keep body and soul together. People on welfare are deterred from looking for work and low-wage families are penalized whenever they try to increase their take-home pay.
Secondly, the system is riddled with distortions and disincentive effects. There are so many special allowances, exemptions, credits, offsets, and write-offs that tax law has become almost indecipherable, and gross amounts of money and time get spent trying to reduce liability to tax. Most really-high earners are paying a lower rate of tax than workers earning little more than average income.
Outside of the federal government there is a mounting demand that something radical needs to be done to tackle these problems. This book looks at the options and demonstrates that the case for radical reform is now unanswerable.
Taxploitation is published by The Centre for Independent Studies.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1: Introduction
CHAPTER 2: How Highly Taxed Are We? - Peter Burn
CHAPTER 3: How High Taxation Makes Us Poorer - Alex Robson
CHAPTER 4: Cut Taxes To Raise More Revenue - Sinclair Davidson
CHAPTER 5: Who’s Not Paying Their Fair Share Of Income Tax? - Sinclair Davidson
CHAPTER 6: The Moral Case For A Flat Tax - Lauchlan Chipman
CHAPTER 7: Tax Complexity And The Rule Of Law - Geoffrey de Q Walker
CHAPTER 8: Tax Reform To Make Work Pay - Peter Saunders & Barry Maley
CHAPTER 9: The Taxation Of Shared Family Incomes - Terry Dwyer
CHAPTER 10: Rebuilding Australia’s Tax And Welfare Systems - John Humphreys
CHAPTER 11: Why Politicians Aren’t Rushing To Increase Taxes - Andrew Norton
Endnotes
Index