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38% Oz Families Pay No Tax - And Yet Are Unhappy!

"IMAGINE that you were able to (legally) pay no income tax. You'd feel pretty happy, right? Apparently not. This year an astonishing 38 per cent of Australian families will pay nothing to the Government in net terms, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest they're anything but happy".

So starts an incisive article by Peter Martin [former economics commentator on the ABC and now with SBS] in the SMH. Martin highlights, not for the first time, the absurd tax system which Messrs Howard and Costello have allowed to continue, and proliferate, now over 10 years. Read the entire article here.

To suggest that Costello has been a great Treasurer must surely be a joke!

To read that 38% of Australian families pay no tax - yet have cause for complaint with the Government - should be yet another wake-up call that something, drastic, needs to be done to get the tax system to work properly and equitably. Costello's recent boast that he had "reformed" the system was really no more than a con! All that Costello really announced was excising now long-dead provisions of the Tax Act - which should have been "taken out" years ago.

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