Poor Albo. First he had to piss away his weekend on the grotesque imperial revelries of an ageing dementer in the questionable company of deplorable leg humpers. Then he had to go to Charlie’s coronation.
I’m still not sure why.
Nobody is.
I guess it was a choice — if you wanted to bookend the week with two gold-crusted dog turds, a week in which it leaked out you were planning on giving boomers, and only boomers, a little tickle in the coin purse in next week’s budget. Everyone else struggling to buy groceries would get a delicious nuclear-powered submarine - sometime in the future.
To be honest, the Sandilands wedding was more explicable than Big Ear’s official embiggening. The Prime Minister is now, among other things, A Prominent Sydney Identity. And with that comes certain heavy responsibilities and direful obligations, like hanging out with other prominent Sydney identities. It’s unavoidable. The Coronation, however, was totes avoidable. The whole reason we have a Governor General is to send him off to these fuckdiculous pantomime goat rodeos so we can all have a good laugh at the telly. As a Prominent Sydney Identity, the PM has more important goats to rope.
Nuturing your disappointment now will save time next week.
Think of it as anticippointment.
Also: category error.
But we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. Right now, we’re all very busy being told by the Greatest Labor Cabinet since the last Great Labor Cabinet that the budget has to be responsible, whereby responsible means saying YES to hundreds of billions of dollars of tax cuts for the idle rich and not just no but FUCK NO WITH SPARKLERS to helping poor people pay for food and shelter.
You could get upset at this, but your day would be better spent nursing your long-running grudge against cosmic background radiation.
The problem with this budget is the same problem with every budget, which is you.
You’re not rich enough. And if you were rich, the budget wouldn’t be a problem for you because no budget ever is.
The problem isn’t a shortage of money to spend on nice things like food stamps, unemployment benefits or even nuclear submarines. It’s that you don’t have enough money to spend on food stamps, unemployment benefits and nuclear submarines. Because you’re not rich.
And if you were rich?
Still no problemo. Because you wouldn’t be paying for any of that shit.
Here’s the deal, and it’s epically shitty, at least for you.
The rich aren’t like you. The super-rich, I mean. The ones with all the real money. For one thing, they don’t earn salaries. If they do, it’s some token bullshit amount like a dollar a year.
They don’t have incomes. As the old joke goes, all their money is tied up in wealth. And that wealth is protean. It moves, it changes, it flows in vast amounts through carefully crafted loopholes in the same tax laws that extract, on average, thirty per cent of your hard-earned folding stuff with machine-tooled efficiency.
Governments everywhere live in terror of the wealthy disappearing their wealth. So instead of carving even a wafer-thin slice from the giant juicy leg of billionaire ham, they settle for begging the rich to leave the ham out on display, where we can all appreciate it.
Why? Because if the wealthy did simply disappear their wealth, the comparatively small amount of that money they use to pay their middle- and working-class wage slaves would go with them.
In this way, the super-rich, as both individuals and corporations, become partners with governments in collecting taxes from the poor dumb bastards who weren’t smart enough to be born Lachlan Murdoch.
It feels like you’re getting mugged by the government, but they’re just the hired help.
I don’t think Albo went to Kyle’s or Charlie’s piss-ups as a distraction from this.
But getting angry about either of those clown shows is definitely a distraction from this.
The problem isn’t monarchy or celebrity or Piers fucking Morgan.
And it has taken not quite a year for all the anticcipointments to become clear. I love the photo heading the essay, JB - a pack of Joe Hockey look-alikes! Puffing on cigars - not a care in the world because they represent exactly the very rich who pay no taxes. What a lovely piece of scorn you have served up to these clowns - if only someone can forward this essay on to them...but possibly they don't really read the opinions/thinking of others - because they can't.
I mean I was relieved when we booted out that bunch of incompetent grifting cockwombles in the Morrison government, and I wasn’t foolish enough to have actual hopes for the Albanese government, but I did think it would take more than a year for them to somehow manage to slither underneath my very low expectations and disappoint me anyway 🤷🏼♀️
Having been elevated to my city's 'good and great' I suspect both Albo and the creep have scoped out the emergence of a barely surviving gig economy underclass and thought 'I'm not going back to that shit.'
Albo will get a front row seat to a real class system at the coronation, where he will find being the Australian Prime Minister is, to some English folk, one step above chimney sweep. There they long ago reconciled the dodgy relationship between the super-rich and outright criminals by making them all lords.
I remember once having a tedious online non-debate with someone after suggesting we send the SAS to demolish all the large buildings in the Cayman Islands, arrest the bank managers, and bring them back to Australia for a trial. (Our next submarines can travel that far).
Of course, these bank accounts are managed from the City of London which is itself beyond the British or any other government, suggesting a whole additional group who could could be given the Ben Roberts-Smith 'tractor job' treatment.
'What about the poor innocent people of the Caymans?', my opponent offered.
The rich don't pay tax because they keep our governments divided, but indeed it is the core problem. It is behind Brexit (EU tax laws were not facied by the City), Murdoch, and how our staggeringly wealthy country (9th highest per capita GDP even after the wealthy have made off with all the cream) can't afford hospitals or schools or to help the poor.
... and the ultra rich are now so rich they have nothing left to buy, so even international housing stock could well be in the hands of semi-monopoly, tax-avoiding corporations within a decade or two.
100% agree JB; happens to be the percentage of their wealth they're likely to keep as their wealth. When I was a kid (lolz) the rich family at school drove a Benz, had a big house. Think other kids in the burbs families' owned smaller houses and cars. All felt pretty same same. Labor don't want livable benefits for those young and tender enough to feed into the meat grinder. Those subs aren't going to sail themselves.
Ah yes, the rich paying a reasonable amount of tax, that would be a fine thing. My guess is that Labor desperately wants to dump (or radically re-model) the stage 3 tax cuts and plans to take such a proposal to the next election - but only if Labor still has enough political capital to do so.
The Liberals are right about at least one thing - Labor wants to raise taxes, it's in Labor's DNA. The problem is that the ALP is constrained by those pesky elections that come round at least once every 3 years. Labor tried to tax carbon and mining superprofits, then tried to nibble away at the edges of some of the most egregious tax rorts for the rich. And didn't that turn out well at the 2013 and 2019 elections?
Never hath truer words been spoken than that last two lines.
Wonder why the governments of the world haven't gotten together and decided to co-operate to force the rich to pay, given that it is in the public interest? Should be pretty straight-forward when something like half the world's wealth is controlled by only a couple of hundred families. Couldn't be that those self-same politicians get paid off by the aforementioned kleptowealthiacs the moment they leave the public employ, could it?
The nice thing about Kyle’s wedding is that Albo can now help others that were homeless. Andrew Tate grew up in terrible circumstances and it’s only natural that Albo help sort his problems. Helping Assange get back home or vulnerable Australians just won’t grab those headlines in the way he would like! Leg humpers - such a way with words!
In my opinion, Vile Sandilands has become, to borrow and bastardise the title of Eugene Burdick and William Lederer's book, The Ugly Australian. Politicians are a strange breed of bird, they sing about their noble intensions and charitable hearts, and they roost with the most contemptible and corrupt of creatures, my thanks to Anthony Moauro for that zinger. The Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family are doggedly sticking to their pomp and ceremony, whereas the other survivors of the mass culling of the European monarchy have learned to dumb down their coronations, lest the Hoi Poli besiege the palace with pikes and flaming torches. Their battle cry, "we are going to do you like Louis XVI, but slowly this time".
The well endowed are a clear case for study by the best and brightest of the psychiatric profession, a Nobel prize is in the offing, to determine why they become psychopaths in their pursuit of manna, and trophy wives.
Hayek's School of economics is the one that most of the rich attended, which is living proof that tax cuts for the party donors are in the best interest of the proles, and the Mercedes dealerships and the members of the Qantas First Class Lounge Club too.
The honour of being a ruler of a land that has become a second world, and soon to become a third, must weigh as heavy as the Stone of Scone on his shoulders, another example of the proceeds of crime as Edward I would attest is he were still alive.
In these times of penury, where is our Robin Hood?
As Michael P Arenti once opined, the dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.
"anticippointment" Chef's Kiss.
And it has taken not quite a year for all the anticcipointments to become clear. I love the photo heading the essay, JB - a pack of Joe Hockey look-alikes! Puffing on cigars - not a care in the world because they represent exactly the very rich who pay no taxes. What a lovely piece of scorn you have served up to these clowns - if only someone can forward this essay on to them...but possibly they don't really read the opinions/thinking of others - because they can't.
“Anticippointment” has to be Word of the Year.
I mean I was relieved when we booted out that bunch of incompetent grifting cockwombles in the Morrison government, and I wasn’t foolish enough to have actual hopes for the Albanese government, but I did think it would take more than a year for them to somehow manage to slither underneath my very low expectations and disappoint me anyway 🤷🏼♀️
"The problem is the rich won’t pay tax. All the sorrows of the world come back to this."
...and that... right there, says it all.
Who are the blue suited goons in this photograph? And what the fuck is it with goons and blue suits anyway? Its like a uniform -
Blue suit teamed with brown shoes and some sort of "tapered fade" haircut = real estate arsehole or violent arsehole at a pub after a mate's wedding.
Fucken blue suits.
I expected to be disappointed by the Albo government, but they really are taking the piss.
Excuse me, I need to get back to sharpening the guillotine, it's been a couple of weeks.
Having been elevated to my city's 'good and great' I suspect both Albo and the creep have scoped out the emergence of a barely surviving gig economy underclass and thought 'I'm not going back to that shit.'
Albo will get a front row seat to a real class system at the coronation, where he will find being the Australian Prime Minister is, to some English folk, one step above chimney sweep. There they long ago reconciled the dodgy relationship between the super-rich and outright criminals by making them all lords.
I remember once having a tedious online non-debate with someone after suggesting we send the SAS to demolish all the large buildings in the Cayman Islands, arrest the bank managers, and bring them back to Australia for a trial. (Our next submarines can travel that far).
Of course, these bank accounts are managed from the City of London which is itself beyond the British or any other government, suggesting a whole additional group who could could be given the Ben Roberts-Smith 'tractor job' treatment.
'What about the poor innocent people of the Caymans?', my opponent offered.
The rich don't pay tax because they keep our governments divided, but indeed it is the core problem. It is behind Brexit (EU tax laws were not facied by the City), Murdoch, and how our staggeringly wealthy country (9th highest per capita GDP even after the wealthy have made off with all the cream) can't afford hospitals or schools or to help the poor.
... and the ultra rich are now so rich they have nothing left to buy, so even international housing stock could well be in the hands of semi-monopoly, tax-avoiding corporations within a decade or two.
Sorry for length.
100% agree JB; happens to be the percentage of their wealth they're likely to keep as their wealth. When I was a kid (lolz) the rich family at school drove a Benz, had a big house. Think other kids in the burbs families' owned smaller houses and cars. All felt pretty same same. Labor don't want livable benefits for those young and tender enough to feed into the meat grinder. Those subs aren't going to sail themselves.
All the sorrows of the world come back to this - This almost had me in tears
Ah yes, the rich paying a reasonable amount of tax, that would be a fine thing. My guess is that Labor desperately wants to dump (or radically re-model) the stage 3 tax cuts and plans to take such a proposal to the next election - but only if Labor still has enough political capital to do so.
The Liberals are right about at least one thing - Labor wants to raise taxes, it's in Labor's DNA. The problem is that the ALP is constrained by those pesky elections that come round at least once every 3 years. Labor tried to tax carbon and mining superprofits, then tried to nibble away at the edges of some of the most egregious tax rorts for the rich. And didn't that turn out well at the 2013 and 2019 elections?
"boomers and only boomers"
Au contraire. Sadly we have to admit that "age 55 +" now includes the upper end of Gen X.
Never hath truer words been spoken than that last two lines.
Wonder why the governments of the world haven't gotten together and decided to co-operate to force the rich to pay, given that it is in the public interest? Should be pretty straight-forward when something like half the world's wealth is controlled by only a couple of hundred families. Couldn't be that those self-same politicians get paid off by the aforementioned kleptowealthiacs the moment they leave the public employ, could it?
The nice thing about Kyle’s wedding is that Albo can now help others that were homeless. Andrew Tate grew up in terrible circumstances and it’s only natural that Albo help sort his problems. Helping Assange get back home or vulnerable Australians just won’t grab those headlines in the way he would like! Leg humpers - such a way with words!
yep. & point colourfully argued :-)
Brilliant as always - anticippointment - mwah ❤️❤️
In my opinion, Vile Sandilands has become, to borrow and bastardise the title of Eugene Burdick and William Lederer's book, The Ugly Australian. Politicians are a strange breed of bird, they sing about their noble intensions and charitable hearts, and they roost with the most contemptible and corrupt of creatures, my thanks to Anthony Moauro for that zinger. The Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family are doggedly sticking to their pomp and ceremony, whereas the other survivors of the mass culling of the European monarchy have learned to dumb down their coronations, lest the Hoi Poli besiege the palace with pikes and flaming torches. Their battle cry, "we are going to do you like Louis XVI, but slowly this time".
The well endowed are a clear case for study by the best and brightest of the psychiatric profession, a Nobel prize is in the offing, to determine why they become psychopaths in their pursuit of manna, and trophy wives.
Hayek's School of economics is the one that most of the rich attended, which is living proof that tax cuts for the party donors are in the best interest of the proles, and the Mercedes dealerships and the members of the Qantas First Class Lounge Club too.
The honour of being a ruler of a land that has become a second world, and soon to become a third, must weigh as heavy as the Stone of Scone on his shoulders, another example of the proceeds of crime as Edward I would attest is he were still alive.
In these times of penury, where is our Robin Hood?
As Michael P Arenti once opined, the dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.
This brings to mind that Jarvis Cocker song about who is still running the world. Not for quoting in polite company, but accurate.