(December 5, 2011 at 9:17 pm)padraic Wrote: Keynes said; for an affluent society to develop ,you need three things: full employment,(which he defined as 97%) high wages and high taxes at all levels.Those things are true of Australia,as well as strict controls over the financial sector.None of those things are true of the US. (OK our national unemployment level is currently 5.2% **)
**source;Australian Bureau Of Census and Statistics figures for October 2011.
Well Australia's level of taxation was estimated by the The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal to be 30.8% of GDP in 2011. That figure is among the lowest among developed nations (Only Ireland and the United States were lower than Australia). Government spending was estimated to be 34.3% of GDP, which is actually lower than the USA which government spending was estimated to be 38.9% of GDP.
Taxes appear to be high in Australia, because unlike other western countries we don't have social security taxes. If you factor in social security contributions, taxes paid by a household on an average income are more at the level of the US and Canada than the European nations are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in...ome_tax.29
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