Reply to post: Re: Counter intuitive

Re: Counter intuitive

"The government collects from her first. Unless Ali & wish start charging GST & do the remitting , she will receive a card in the mail (instead of her package) , she then has to go to the post office to pay the GST, at which point the parcel will be released."

I pay it by credit card on the customs (or whatever they are called this week) website. It usually adds about two weeks to shipping time.

"This will cost many times the 50c in GST she will have to pay for her average parcel value, and the nett revenue will be negative."

This.

This seems to be the fundamental misunderstanding of all the Level Playing Field (tm) posters. They don't seem to realise that it costs to collect. They seem to think GST is collected by the Magic Fairies and left under the pillow of the Treasurer if he's been good.

Can you tell I'm sick of pointing this out recently [/SARCASM]

"Shades of idiot Keating deciding to tax the ARES expecting to raise 10 million in tax"

Sadly, he was followed by a much bigger idiot in Howard who added a high school level economic ideology. Consumption taxes are a wonderful idea in theory. Sadly, in practice they are a nightmare to administer. You can tell the people who have never had to actually do it, they are ones replying that its simple.

We used to have a pragmatic solution: just don't try to collect where the cost of collection is more than the sum collected. A reasonable solution in an unwieldy regulatory regime. We now have a bunch of muppets imposing an even more massive, costly and unwieldy system in order to compensate for the inequalities of their original scheme. I can only regard it as a form of madness.

The ATO never wanted the GST because it is highly inefficient from a collection point of view. They have to process a vast amount of paper work in order to collect a huge number of small amounts. In reality, the cost of collection doesn't vary much whether you collect 10c or $10,000 Its far more efficient to extract large amounts from a few choke points and they know it. As does everyone except a few economic idealogues.