1879
in Australia, when we pay taxes, we get a receipt. The receipt shows what our taxes were spent on
(lemmy.world)
I assume "Other purposes" is govt kickbacks to mining and gas companies ๐ฌ
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).
Instead it shows that boomers are the real drain on society
Nice
Makes sense. I was already worried as soon as I saw "welfare" being bigger than "health".
Well, are they lying? It's just true that welfare costs a lot of money (the "aged" category takes like half of my country's taxes)
Yes, they were lying. We are not talking about the aged pension here.
Still, in the long term it just improved the government's transparency