I saw ‘Speersy’ on ABC News Breakfast this morning, talking about how the government won’t win the public debate about the tax changes. He said that criticisms were growing stronger and that businesses were demanding carve-outs.

I felt that whole line of reasoning needed a bit dose of “they would say that, wouldn’t they”. The criticism that David Speers was referring to was coming directly from the people who are going to be paying the tax… like, boo hoo, the profits from just owning stuff (capital gains) won’t be as large any more - maybe they’ll need to do some work or something.

But obviously when people are making a lot of money from doing not very much work, then they also have a lot of time and money to spend on lobbying the government to keep tax laws in their own favour. Meanwhile us mere peons don’t necessarily have the resources to have our opinions heard so strongly (and since the effects are indirect, many people might not have much to say about it anyway). So Speersy et al. don’t hear that at all. Journalism is hard, I guess.