Death Duties !

After the end of the second world war the two most hated taxes in Australia were the license fee for listening to radio or watching television - and death duties !   When television arrived in 1956 detector vans roamed the streets seeking unlicensed receivers and a death in the family brought a visit from government inspectors to value the personal effects of the deceased.

The astronomical cost of housing in Sydney and Melbourne has socialists salivating at the prospect of a return of death duties to level the playing field for young people.  At a recent meeting of the Fabian society a representative of the left wing Australian Manufacturing union proposed that death duties be applied to wealthy estates to provide a capital grant to every young Australian on attaining their twenty-fifth birthday.  The value of this grant was not stated, but it was proposed to be sufficient to either act as a deposit for a home or to totally repay HECS education expenses.

It seems that starry eyed socialists expect that every young man and woman in this country will have attained wisdom at age twenty-five to spend this dividend well. Obviously there are some who will dissipate it wildly in an orgy of drugs, drink and high living, but what will strike fear into the hearts of most economists is the prospect of this largesse becoming another "entitlement " !

It is suggested that this "gift " would be of no concern to the average Australian wage earner.  The collection of a new form of death duties would only apply to the twenty-five thousand families with assets of ten million dollars - or more.   A thirty-five percent death duty would raise $ 3.5 billion and still leave these "donor families " well able to live a comfortable life style.

The wise would do well to remember that the first form of income tax was deemed a "temporary tax "to pay for a war, and it too was not levied on the lowly paid.   Once it was successfully in place it was just too valuable to the political mind to ever be relinquished and when whatever war it was implemented to pay for vanished from awareness, income tax was here to stay - and it encroached across all income brackets.

We should have learned by now how the public build their lives around "entitlements ".  The Socialist mind seems to think that taxation is a way of levelling society and that with the right policies we will eliminate what we call " the Poor ".

That has never happened in the long history of the human race.  It seems that we are hard wired at birth in how we will evolve.  A few are destined to become very rich.  The great mass of people gain average wealth - and in every society here on planet earth we have that bottom tier of humanity who simply fail to achieve a decent living and struggle to keep their heads above financial water.  It is a certainty of life that the poor will always be part of every society.

Another certainty is that every strata above " the poor " will protect their way of life with skill and ingenuity.   They will turn to lawyers and accountants who will devise a multitude of legal schemes to protect their money by utilising whatever laws are in place..  Their wealth will be beyond the reach of the tax man.

Time an again we have seen the poor gain sudden and unexpected wealth - by way of a lottery win or the death of a relative - only to slowly withdraw to their former state because of poor decision making ability.

This utopian socialist plan to reward every citizen with wealth on their twenty-fifth birthday will quickly be quashed by realists, but should it ever become reality you can be certain that society will  evolve protocols for spending that do not included becoming a home owner of paying off HEC bills.

You can also be assured that the reach of death duties will creep ever closer to the average family wealth.   The politicians never lose their enthusiasm for spending other people's money !