Domain: budget.gov.au
Stories and comments across the archive that link to budget.gov.au.
Comments · 5
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Re:MathI'd take this with a grain of salt (or bucket maybe), but $3 billion is a fraction of our welfare spending - here it is estimated at $190 billion annually in a few years time.
The current welfare cost of $140-150B is ~35% of the federal budget.
For last financial year it is estimated between $140 to 150 billion at the federal budget website.DSP recipients can claim up to $782.20 a fortnight, while the Newstart allowance rate is up to $561.80 a fortnight for singles with children.
From this I would gather a UBI would be around $400/week per adult = $20,800 per year.
~82% of the ~23M population is >14 years old, and could therefore be construed as recipients of a UBI.
The annual requirement therefore is some ~$392B, so we're looking at a little more than doubling the welfare bill..Our current government focuses on "shifting from entitlement to enterprise; from hand-out to hand-up" so a UBI is ideologically opposed to them.
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Re:All defense and health careThis is a much better situation than Australia.
http://www.budget.gov.au/2010-11/content/overview/html/overview_37.htm
~84% of all Individual Income Tax is spent on welfare.
I was surprised to see how little, compared to the individual taxpayer, Business (including resources sector ) are contributing in way of taxes.
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Re:Costs too much, huh?
All this cost me a grand total of: $0
+17% of your taxes source
Guestimating your yearly tax to be $6000, that's about $1000 per year.
How often do you go to hospital?
I'm actually British and we have socialised health care too, but I don't appreciate it, and it bothers me when people claim it's free. -
Re:Well
In short, there's no capital because it's all been bloody spent, and then some! Not because someone's sitting on it.
Your analysis is interesting, largely because it is true
:-), but the issue of debt is not so simple. In continental Europe, business is funded to a large degree by debt. That is when a company wants money to expand, they issue bonds. In the UK, the US and other "British decendent" economies however, business expansion is largely driven by the raising of capital via shares and other non-debt related vehicles. The origins of this distinction are uncertain but very interesting, might it relate to the nature of the industrial revolution in the UK? Maybe the role of bankers in the non democratic states of europe? Who can say.But the reality is that capital is handled very differently in these economies and so the debt feature of the European ecnomies is not a perfect example of their problems when comparing to the US and the UK. More importantly, debt is a critical feature of captialism and a very important factor in growth levels. The issues are very important and certainly beyond the scope of
/. however, as examples, look at the countries with virtually no foreign debt (say Norway I would guess) and then a country like Australia where they have just examined the issue of "closing" the government debt market because they have the opportunity to eliminate (for all intents and purposes) their government debt or at least lower to a level where a market in that debt becomes impossible (report). They decided against it because, amongst other things, having a government debt market serves a useful economic purpose to help control the economy. Much like the control rods of the reactors on which this article is based :-).So debt isn't quite the evil that the original poster made out.
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Re:i'd rather...
Obviously that is already provided here:
http://www.budget.gov.au/
and here:
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/estimates/index.htm
I mean, honestly, who doesn't know that governments produce "Budgets" ?!?!?