When The Levy Breaks

Over the weekend the government failed to rule out introducing a debt levy. Of course this means they’ve all but ruled it in. What is a debt levy anyway? Simply, it’s stupid.
We know tax revenue is pooled together to pay for services (health, education etc etc) and a levy is basically a tax for a specific service or purpose - to pay for Medicare or to help with reconstruction after the recent Queensland floods. Even if we don’t access the services ourselves we know someone, somewhere is. A debt Levy does neither. No service is being rendered and you don’t get something for nothing as Joe Hockey said last week. Paying down government debt should not be responsibility of the taxpayer.
We’re told the proposed levy would only affect high-income earners and I’m all for making the top end of town pay a fairer level of tax. But should they have to bail out - which is what this boils down to - the government’s budget crisis (particularly when said crisis is, at least in part, manufactured)? I don’t see people copping that on the chin.
If they really insist on ‘fixing’ the budget the Coalition should do what it was elected to do: cut spending. We’ve seen much of that. At least not in the media. We’ve had penny-pinching from war orphans which was later abandoned, a bid to reassess DSP recipients which will humiliate people whilst bringing in a whopping nothing to government coffers, a proposed sale of the one government asset that makes money and a retooled NBN that isn’t national, uses decrepit tech and isn’t really any cheaper. We don’t know what's happening with Gonski or health but expect savage cuts.
There are cuts that can be made before insisting people foot the bill. An overly generous and expensive PPL for one. Giving Rio Tinto $100m to build a mine in South America is another. And ALL the other subsidies the mining industry receives. Then there’s the planes, my god, the planes. $12 billion for Joint Strike Fighters and knowing our luck with military procurement the canopy won’t close or one of the cross-beams will go out-of-skew on the treddle or something rendering them shiny paperweights.
‘You gotta spend money to make money’ doesn’t fly (heh) when you have your hands in the pockets of the people.