34 Years, If I'd Lived

[captlychee]

In the midst of all the kerfuffle over the mutated flu strain that’s come out of China like a boatload of fee paying students, and swept across the world with Indian speed, the travails of me and the ATO might seem trivial (and as I have to correct the spelling of both ‘travails’ and ‘trivial’ it seems the ‘v’ key on this laptop is a smidge sub par), but it’s important to think as you start reading this that coronavirus is temporary, whereas what I’m going to be crapping on about over the next few hundred words may end up being permanent. ‘May’ in the sense that whoever organises this shit has given it permission to.
(We now pause while I get fucking ropable at the fact that I wrote a further five hundred deathless words of prose here but for some reason it didn’t get saved. The upshot of this is that I’m now typing a 27 November entry on 2 December. With all the other bullshit going on in my life I haven’t been able to sit down long enough until now to actually type anything.)
If you’re reading this for something other than trying to tell me how fabulous your search engine optimisation is, and how you can drive traffic straight at me with the speed of whatever car actually hit me in 1982, then the above parenthesised bit of reflexive prose kind of ruins the illusion that I’m writing this on 27 November, but I have finished a semester of Experimental Writing and bits of it are still clinging to me like those kind of fleshy things you get on your back that I really wish I hadn’t even referred to now.
So as you may have realised, a viral scourge has been transmitted across the plant by the constant iteration that ‘freedom of movement’ is enshrined in Article 13 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Many other things are determined to be human rights, and people are always quoting the US Constitution in the TV-fostered belief that we’re part of a TV America. One thing that’s true about our rights of freedom of movement or freedom of speech is that both go out of the window when there’s a plague on, or where there’s money involved. Oh, yes. The ATO deals with money, which is why it can detain you without charge and enter your house without a search warrant. I never had exercise this power in my time at the ATO, but I do know people who had to, and sometimes required the assistance of Victoria Police to gain entry to the property and protect them from the assaults of the invaded public.
The Victorian Government’s response to this gallop by the third horseman of the Apocalypse was to clamp down on our freedom of movement, and remind everyone that the ‘right’ to free speech disappears instantly when you use it to advocate criminal activity. Actually spreading the disease is not as bad as inciting people to protest about house arrest to prevent its spread, as we found out when a Ballarat girl was arrested for inciting a protest march, while five Afghanis were exonerated after they deliberately spread the disease but caused the ‘unfair’ targeting of the rest of the Afghani jihad community.
Meanwhile, the Victorian lockdown brought a halt to manufacturing, most of construction, office-based office work and trade with the other States, which One Nation was going to challenge on the basis that a closed border violates free trade between the States under S92 of the Constitution. The problem was that even the constitution can be politely ignored if there’s a plague on, which may be the other aspect of the third horseman as we stroll towards the Apocalypse, apart from the actual deaths he causes.
In any case, Victoria is hardly the manufacturing centre it once was in the days before multiculturalism held back our technology to give wogs a job, and since we are a modern Western country we have eschewed manufacturing in lieu of technology and service, on the basis that everyone else on the planet is more productive in manufacturing because their wages are lower, or that making things is beneath our dignity somehow, even if we’ve moved here from a country with even less manufacturing than we have managed to retain in spite of ourselves. So, the lockdown didn’t affect our manufacturing that much.
But you can’t gear an economy to hospitality and lawyers without a lockdown totally fucking it, and wages, employment, leisure time and enjoyment have all gone downhill while we all sat in a kind of house arrest watching it all happen locally, interstate and overseas. One of the interesting stats they came out with while that was happening was that Victoria produces 25% of the country’s GDP. But we have 33% of the population! So, we are actually less productive per capita than the other States. Well, no, because the other States produce GDP per capita based on how much dirt they are digging up and flogging off to the Chinese at a competitively low rate. Another explanation might be that, even though we have a third of the country nestled between our borders, a lot of the people here just aren’t that productive. How can they be? They’re all doing low value added work or high-end service industries that consume a lot of money but don’t actually produce that much of value. Almost any kind of agent fits this latter category.
The upshot of this combination of low value and no prodcution has put the Federal government (a phrase I capitalise for no reason I can fathom right now, unless it’s due to editorial style, which I make myself, anyway, so you’d think I’d know it was that, wouldn’t you?) isn’t making any money off of our broad-based consumption tax (or GST) because nobody’s consuming anything. Savings rates are actually up, even though banks aren’t paying enough interest to even keep pace with inflation let alone generate any additional value. One solution to this problem, which has been threatened on and off since 2000, is to raise the GST to 15%. Then why not 20%? 25? 28? Going once, twice, duly enacted by a government who actually believed that a broad-based consumption tax was going to achieve anything. It’s too vulnerable to the winds of change to be a dependable source of revenue. Further, income tax is in trouble if wages don’t keep pace with inflation, but that ain’t gonna happen while there’s a government that has committed itself to treating he electorate as an infinite source of corporate small business welfare.
Well, apparently, the economy is back out of recession, so that was quick. But money has been lost…well, it has gone somewhere where the government can’t find it our touch it. After all, and let’s take the stock market as an example, if someone buys stock at a given price from someone who owns it, and then the price goes down, then that buyer sells the stock for a lower price, the buyer has lost money on the sale, but the first lot of money that has changed hands is with the original owner of the stock. Money can be created but rarely destroyed.
So, what does 2021 hold for us and, more germanely to this post, for my former employer? One thing that seems to be getting a lot of traction is that multinational companies, particularly the tech companies everyone is throwing money at nowadays because it seems like they’re stable for some reason,I don’t know what reason, because if I could think like a stockbroker I wouldn’t be any better at thinking than I am now, but I’d be making a ton of commission, is that these companies should be paying ‘their fare share of tax’. This seems to mean that these companies, who are making a lot of income from whatever, ought to be paying tax on the income and not on their profit.
But why doesn’t every company do that? Sure, companies have expenses like wages, rent, utilities that are costs necessary and peculiar to their business, but individuals pay tax on their income and then pay wages, rent and utilities. What’s ‘fair’ about that? This idiotic system has been around for about two hundred years, originating at different times in the Western world. It’s been held as semi-sacred that individuals are taxed on income and business is taxed on profit, but now they want to change that for these large tech companies. I don’t recall them ever wanting to do it for large car companies or large food chains, but here we are. Why shouldn’t one branch of a company be allowed to move income from one branch to bail out another branch? Banks do this all the time, even from suburb to suburb. Business can deduct pretty much any money they spend in order to reduce their taxable profit, whereas individuals are curtailed by various income tax rulings in what they can deduct.
Ultimately, the tech companies can’t withdraw their services from every country that wants to prosecute them in this way, but they can certainly withdraw their commerce from countries one at a time, forcing people who want to deal with them to deal with other countries, with consequences to the nations’ balance of payments (which is a disaster, apparently, which I don’t want to go into right now) or to miss out.
The solution to a fair tax system is to have one definition of income which is set in the constitution so it’s hard to change and which is universally applicable in every piece of legislation, and to tax either income or profit for both individuals and business.
I doubt we’ll see it happen. The important thing is, I won’t be there to enforce it.