Another thing that’s great about aussie tax… you can fill it out yourself, it’s very easy, all online, and it takes a very short time. They also explain every question in the form and have lots of materials that you can read. For me, I finish it each year in about 10 minutes, and never think about it again.
In the UK tax is deducted ‘at source’ by your employer for anybody employed. You have a personal tax code, which tells your employer how much tax to deduct and pay on you behalf.
You then have a number of allowances you can claim against if you are eligible, to reduce your tax, which issues you an updated tax code.
In Norway, we just get it prefilled based on automatically reported data, and it’s delivered by default after a certain date - you can of course make changes up until then (and retroactively up to 3 years later).
Is this hard to do in practice? I would love to see a breakdown like this in the United States, and especially on a local level. What’s involved in getting this information? Where does someone even start to request something like this?
It would not be a good use for Blockchain technology. Besides the problem that your dollars are a fungible asset that don’t have a physical object associated with it, as soon as you dollars get converted to another state, account, entity, whatever along with another thousands people’s dollars you would lose the tracking. And ultimately even if you could achieve this it would then either all fall to one or two accounts so you would have the disheartening effect of seeing your entire annual contribution spent on something tedious like fuelling an aircraft carrier, or they would attempt to distribute it evenly in which case why not save all the effort and just track the average spend budgets? It’s a solution looking for a problem here.
Ah, thank you for the explanation. I thought that money could be tracked even through conversion, but now I see how that wouldn’t be possible. It’s better suited for tracking bitcoin and the like, right?
Part of me wants to see that tedious spending of my money but I suppose it wouldn’t do me any good. An average breakdown would be nice, starting with my property taxes.
One thing to note about this breakdown is that it wasn’t legislated with good intention but it was implemented in a very malicious compliance way that completely counteracted the original intention.
This receipt was legislated by the conservative party in Australia under Tony Abbott, the surface level intention was to “show where people’s tax dollars are spent”. However the underlying intention was to show welfare spending as a huge category that totally eclipsed all other spending in order to demonize welfare, particularly unemployment welfare. In order to build public support for rolling back that spending.
However when the letter was implemented, the welfare category was further broken down as you see here, completely working against the narrative that the government at the time was trying to spin (that unemployment welfare particularly was a huge drain on society).
Fun fact: in the United States you can request this same sort of receipt. It’s slightly different, but all you have to do is request it, and they can show you exactly how many brown people they shot, or godless communists they’ve brought democracy to with your taxes!
You can request this in most countries, especially here in Canada. It’s cool that the Aussie government makes it more transparent and accessible though. The “other purposes” seems a bit sussy-baka, though.
i’m assuming that “other purposes” are other categories that each are smaller than the ones listed. they are probably available on a website or something that gives the full list.
it would be nice if they had merged them together in wider but more informative categories though
There is no excuse for any country not to do this TBH. The math is really easy and uses already available information: take the year’s total federal spending for different things, specifically in the form of percentages of the year’s total tax revenue (hopefully the government has been keeping track of what they’ve been using the money for) and multiply by the total taxes paid by a specific person and you get exactly how much of their money went to what. This assumes every person’s tax revenue is treated the same which I’m pretty sure is at least mostly the case in every country.
If they release the national spending percentages (which they should) then it’d be pretty easy for individuals to calculate these themselves.
Yes, from a salary of about 90k. However this is federal tax. We dont pay individual state taxes as well. Our sales tax is built into the price of goods. Our healthcare is also completely free.
Comparatively, in the US a $90k USD salary is about $10,415 in federal taxes.
However, my family healthcare is about $22k in premiums alone, for a high-deductible plan. This includes the employer-paid portion, as that is part of my total compensation package. Then there is the deductible ($5k) before the insurance starts paying out. And this is not including Medicare/SS taxes as well.
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