The Budget Night Thread.

[weemadando]

So, It's going to be an interesting one. I can't wait to see if the slipped tongues from my executive level in my dept bear out.

That said, given what Swan has leaked so far, it looks like we're heading deeper and deeper into welfare dependency and from there, ready to blow the arse out of our economy in about 2 years when the big blocks of the baby boomers start to retire.

[JointStrikeFighter]

That and now that we've lost howard's +5 economic bonus we are DOOMED!

[weemadando]

I think that the gov't at the moment is lacking the necessary balls to make the cuts that need to be made in order to save us from rapidly going down the shitter.

In fact, given that they've backed down on most of the welfare reforms that were rumoured (given Australia's welfare budget is nearly HALF of our fucking economy that's kind of important) we're looking at smashing our economy into the ground as there won't be enough tax payers to support the amount of welfare dependants that we will have.

Certainly, Howard hurt us a LOT with this, with his bullshit extensions to Pension eligibility and bonuses out the fucking wazoo, but unless Rudd and co. are willing to follow up on their "razor gang" promise, we're still just as fucked.

[tim31]

And then we can do what we've been doing best for the past twenty years: Consolidate our position over Canada as America Junior

Not long to wait.

[weemadando]

Oh dear lord. THIS IS MADNESS! THIS IS BUDGET NIGHT!

The keyphrase of the night:
Working families. I heard it 18 times at my count.


Ok, so lets start with the biggest bit of craziness:

Did I hear right when he said that the tax free threshold was going up to 26k? TWENTY SIX THOUSAND DOLLARS AND NO FUCKING TAX?


Not to mention big tax cuts for those on <$48K? Fuck staying in my current tax bracket then. I'm better off cutting back to part time work and dropping into that tax bracket. You know that your system is stupid when I can choose to work 1 day less a week and TAKE HOME MORE MONEY.


Add to that, the huge bullshit with the social security.
*At a time where we have more pensioners than ever before (both numerically and as a percentage of population) we choose to increase the indexation rates for their already ample payments? And not roll-back the bullshit asset limit increases which they were given by Howard as a vote-grabber.
*More and more work keeps on landing on Centrelink's plate, so now I want to see if our funding is restructured (it's currently based solely on the unemployment rate, so despite the fact that there are more Centrelink customers than ever before getting more complex payments, because unemployment is down our funding is WAAAY down). No word on that in the budget though.
*Oh yeah, and now there's even more work - income testing of the Baby Bonus, FTB part B and probably some more stuff hidden in the actual paper. Sure, it sounds easy to do, but income testing TAKES TIME and I hope to hell that Jeff Whalan went to bat for us in the meetings over this kind of shit.
*Making it easier to claim Carer Payment for children. Sure, they say it will be only 19,000 people that will become eligible, but that's the section I fucking work in. And by the time some of the less scrupulous people in the land meet up with their less scrupulous doctors, you can guarantee that you'll be looking at at least 3 times that number, probably even more than 100k. After all, Carer Payment has a lot more perks than Parenting Payments.


The broadband shit continues to roll onwards. Ever onwards. Because we all know that it's more important to spend the money on getting some shitty little town on the NSW/SA border hooked up to ADSL1 than it is to upgrade our pitiful international bandwidth and upgrade the MASSIVELY overloaded infrastructure in our major business centres.


Holy shit, the level of stupid in there was remarkable. Sure, there's a lot of "fat trimming" but they're more than making up for it with their stupid choices.

The thing I'm taking away from this budget is that they want to encourage more fucking bogans to keep on breeding, while providing every disincentive imaginable for those like myself, my wife and my friends who bear the fucking burden of this economy to a) give a shit about this country and b) maybe ever have children who might grow up to be anything other than 5th generation welfare dependants.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

[weemadando]

OK, the speech is up. Budget Speech and a whole lot of other stuff on the Budget site.

Going through it now to clarify some of the stuff. Especially my possible mis-heard 26K tax threshold thing.

[weemadando]

Yeah, I was wrong. It's only up to $14K. I was fairly sure that I'd misheard, so there's some of my vitriol gone.

But I'm still not looking forward to all the briefings at work tomorrow.

[Xon]

The other tax thresholds look to be moved up as well. Given I'm part-time on ~$33k I'm quite glad about the tax cuts

[weemadando]

The other tax thresholds look to be moved up as well. Given I'm part-time on ~$33k I'm quite glad about the tax cuts :P

Meanwhile I'm on about $51k and looking at cutting my taxable to $45K (taking one day a week off with a drop to part time). That would drop me into a tax threshold which would possibly put me into a much better position in terms of "per day" income. Possibly even leaving me with an unchanged fortnightly post-tax income.