It sounds awful doesn’t it. Everything you have earned from your daily graft so far this year is to pay your tax….and you ain’t done yet.
The Australian Taxpayers Alliance has done the numbers on just how much we working stiffs get to give the government every year.
As the report points out calculating income tax is as easy as visiting the ATO website. But Aussie workers are not only taxed on their income, they are taxed on their spending, their savings and sometimes even taxed on their taxes.
Trigger warning: these figures will shock…and hopefully appal you too.
A Victorian worker earning the 2019 average income of $63,440 costs their employer an additional 10 grand or so in superannuation, payroll tax and other benefits.
If you build that into the bundle, the total government grab of the 73K is more than $40,000. That’s a whopping 55% tax rate.
To put it in another perspective, you only need to work until the end of July before you stop paying the government.
Yippee, I can hear your cheer, only three more months to go.
It’s gets worse if you choose to smoke. The average smoker coughs up another $5200. If you insure your home you’ll pay tax in the form of stamp duties and then pay GST on the stamp duty tax….a tax on a tax. Don’t get me started on alcohol taxes, defacto wealth taxes built into water and council rates, land tax and ‘levies’.
The list of opportunities that governments have seized to keep you broke goes on and on and on.
In total, the Taxpayers Alliance has identified 125 separate taxes at the local, state and federal levels…most of them so sneaky you don’t even realise that government has their grabby hands in your pocket for most of the year.
If you’re a working Joe or Josephine and wonder why you are struggling to keep your own budget in the black, it’s probably not you.
Cory Bernardi is the author of seven books and has been a member of the Australian rowing team, a publican, an investment portfolio manager and spent nearly 14 years as an Australian Senator.
