Cheesed off working families

~ Andrew Norton

Yet more handouts to families, this time to fund school uniforms, are another sure sign that an election is about to be called.

But as we have seen before, such is the sense of entitlement built up by the welfare state that people with no real need complain when they miss out:

Ms Pilgrim, whose two daughters, aged 13 and 16, attend Our Lady of Mercy College in Parramatta, will not qualify for the tax break because she and her husband earn a combined income of more than $100,000.

”It cheeses me off a bit,” she said. ”It’s a great help for families on Family Tax Benefit A, but for middle-income earners like me, we miss out.”

Of course my heart bleeds for the problems of ‘middle’ (actually, fairly high) income earners.

Published by Andrew Norton

12 thoughts on “Cheesed off working families”

  1. This is just another silly handout. The money comes months after the expense and just makes the tax system more complicate. Resulting in more people haveing to pay to get there tax done to actually get the extra money and the people who need the money the most would not normally get there tax done by a professional.

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  2. That reminds me of one of the lines in the Vic governments health ad. “I’m from the country, what about us?”

    I know someone who was quite put out that they didn’t qualify for the baby bonus because their combined income was over $150K. I asked if they realized that put them in the top 10% of households.

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  4. The amazing thing is that Ms Pilgrim doesn’t realise that not only would she be paying for her own daughters’ uniforms with her taxes, but that she is funding other people’s purchases!

    The Great Australian Tax Churn really seems to be proving Abe Lincoln wrong: on some issues, it is possible to fool all of the people all of the time.

    Until Ms Pilgrim and others start bucking up against this rubbish, her complaints are no more than the bleatings of a sheep as the wool is shorn from its back.

    I won’t hold my breath.

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  7. caf: I can assure you, being an unmarried childless male, that I know all about being fleeced by the taxman.

    I was being charitable.

    Alexander: the idea behind shearing is to leave the animal alive so that it can regrow its wool: the RSPT was the equivalent of shearing the sheep’s skin off and letting it bleed to death. I can assure you that, like the rest of us, Ms Pilgrim would have felt that down to the marrow.

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  8. While I concur with the handout sentiment created by middle class welfare, calling them fairly high income earners is a bit rough.

    The average yearly wage is around $65k per year; if there were two earners making average wages, the combined income would be $130k.

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  10. Jeremy that reminds me of my favorite quote from the movie Rounders “You can shear a sheep many times, but only skin it once”.

    Duncan, whenever I look at the figures on average household incomes and wages I realize that I live in an upper-middle class bubble of university educated elites where practically everyone earns above the national average wage by their late 20s.

    I have to remember that only 25-40% of people even go to uni.

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  11. What about schools-such as Ballarat Secondary College-and schools like it-which has a no-uniform policy at its VCE campus? How would government avoid discriminating against students simply for what they are not wearing in common?

    While I would agree that uniforms do foster a sense of comaraderie, which may be especially useful in maintaining order for younger less mature students, in a more mature environment such as a sentior school, surely those who want to be there are mature enough to have discarded prebubescent angst and oscracism of the kid smart enough to not spend his limited resources on the latest overpriced sweatshop manufactured fad?

    It’s no surpirse Julia likes uniforms. So did Mao.

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