Inspired by Ukraine, and Worried by China: Taiwan Teaches Its Citizens How to Fly Drones. “I may not be a soldier, but if [a China invasion] ever happened here, as a citizen, I’d like to have the ability to help in some way.”
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has given away half a billion dollars against a backdrop “where a growing number of billionaires are lashing out against philanthropy”.
Bloomberg Law, IRS Can Fire More Positions at Will With Trump Executive Order:
Trump’s order strips job security from almost 8,000 federal positions. Under Office of Personnel Management regulations, employees moved into a new job classification—known as Schedule Policy/Career—lose many of the procedural protections most federal workers have, including the right to appeal their removal to an independent body.
A slew of job types could be reclassified at the IRS and its legal arm, according to an appendix released by the White House. More are on the list for the Treasury Department. IRS workers who are senior advisors, human resource specialists, and program managers are among those who could be impacted. For the IRS’s chief counsel office, attorney advisors, senior level counselors to the commissioner, counselor to the general counselor, and senior legal advisor for regulatory affairs will be reclassified.
Edward Fox (Michigan) and Zachary Liscow (Yale), “The Rich’s Real Tax Trick Isn’t ‘Buy, Borrow, Die’” (Tax Policy Center, June 15, 2026):
A fashionable theory of how the rich avoid taxes captures something real—but it misses what’s mostly going on. Consider two of the wealthiest billionaires in the US: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. The theory says they never sell their stock and never draw a real salary. Instead, they borrow against their appreciated shares to finance yachts, jets, and everything in between. When they die they’ll pass their unsold stock to heirs on a “stepped-up” tax basis, resetting the stock’s value to its price at their death and wiping out any capital gains during their ownership.
Buy, borrow, die? A catchy, scandalous story.
View from The Hill: Lowy poll shows Australians more pessimistic about almost everything
Anger kills wisdom.
Fear kills freedom.
Ego kills love.
Jealousy kills peace.
Doubt kills faith.
Now read it right to left…
Wisdom kills anger.
Freedom kills fear.
Love kills ego.
Peace kills jealousy.
Faith kills doubt.
PCMag: “Apple changes iOS all the time, and you can expect some major Siri upgrades later this year. However, new additions don’t change the aspects of iOS that have always been annoying, such as clutter, frustrating notification behaviors, and more.
The good news is that you don’t have to suffer and can fix many of these issues with a quick visit to the settings app. Give these seven tweaks a shot to see if they improve your experience with your iPhone…”
Man who hates paying taxes loves government handouts
The SpaceX IPO Is A Giant Unworkable Con Orchestrated By An Overt White Supremacist Huckster. “He’s endlessly mythologized by a shitty corporate press, eager to ignore his virulent racism & financial fraud bc he’s accumulated obscene amounts of money.”
How The Heck Do Solar Panels Work? “Every hour, the Earth receives enough sunlight to power all of human civilization for a year. It arrives silently, from all directions, at no cost
Billionaires’ Billions Are Increasing Faster Than Ever. 15 years ago, billionaires had $4.5 trillion. “Now, their combined wealth totals $20.1 trillion — an amount that is equivalent to nearly a fifth of the entire world’s total yearly output.”
‘I would not do it again’: KPMG whistleblower reveals toll of going public
The former KPMG executive who revealed allegations that senior staff at the firm had used confidential material from major companies to win work says speaking out has had devastating consequences.
In documents published by a parliamentary committee investigating the anonymous whistleblower’s allegations – several of which have been confirmed to be true – the ex-KPMG employee detailed the strategies allegedly used against them.
“If I were asked, genuinely, whether I would do this again, my answer would be no,” he wrote. “Not because the matters were not worth raising, and not because I regret raising them, but because of what I now know, and could not have known then, about what disclosing them at a firm like KPMG, in the legal and regulatory environment that exists in Australia today, actually involves.”
The whistleblower informed KPMG of the allegations, which included that senior staff had accessed board papers from Lendlease and used them to help win work from Westpac, in 2024 but has said he faced years of obfuscation and retaliation from the consultancy firm.
The whistleblower’s submission was published after a blockbuster day of hearings on Friday in which Lendlease’s chairman criticised a “fundamental breach of trust” by KPMG and former independent director Mike Baird said he had been too trusting of the firm…
Mid-tier audit firms are circling to capture expiring KPMG contracts worth nearly $200 million amid the firm's ban from bidding for new federal contracts. However, a current loophole in the fine print may hinder those opportunities.
Captain Kirk said ‘risk is our business’. At the ATO the mission is the same but the tax office fails to collect. Picture: CBS via Getty Images
ATO commissioner Rob Heferen and ASIC commissioner Kate O'Rourke. Picture: John Feder
What is the middle income for Australians? Each year, the ATO Taxation Statistics provide some insight into this topic, and this year’s release is particularly pertinent because it covers the 2023-24 financial year – the same one in which the government made changes to the Stage 3 tax cuts.
Six years ago, then opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, suggested that he did not “regard someone who’s earning $200,000 dollars a year as being from the top end of town”.
At the time, such a statement was pretty extraordinary from a Labor Party leader, given that in 2019-20, earnings of $200,000 would have put you in the top 4% of income earners in Australia.
But what about in the most recent figures? Is $200,000 still at the top end, or has it become common? After all, in January 2024, Anthony Albanese announced changes to the Stage 3 Tax cuts that would increase the top tax threshold to $190,000 and lift the 30% threshold to $135,000.
It might surprise people to realise just how little a majority of Australians earn.
We are often told about average earnings and even average full-time earnings. But averages are not “the middle”. They are merely the sum of all earnings by all people working in Australia divided by the number of those workers.
The old line is that if you had 5 people in a room, each earning $50,000, and a person came in who earned $6m a year, then, on average, everyone in the room would now be a millionaire ($6.25m/6 = $1.042m average).
We also know (as I wrote about here) that men earn a higher average salary in 96% of all occupations in Australia. This mean the average earnings of men is higher than the average earnings of women, and the same goes for full-time.
But the median earnings is the amount at which half earn less than, and half earn more than. (In the previous example, the median earnings remain $50,000, regardless of whether the person earning $6m is in the room or not – half earn $50,000 or less, and half earn $50,000 or more in both scenarios)
To work out the median, the ATO divides all 13.239m Australians who paid tax in 2023-24 into 100 blocks – called percentiles. So, the 132,399 Australians who earned the least amount are in the 1st (or lowest) percentile, and the 132,399 who earned the most are in the 100th (or top) percentile.
From this, we can work out where lies “middle Australia”.
In 2023-24, the median income was $72,794. Earning $169,664 put you in the top 10% and as for $200,000, that still had you earning more than 95% of all Australians. Pointedly, 25% earned less than $47,302, which was just above the full-time minimum wage of $45,905 for that year:
But the story doesn’t end there. Because men earn more than women, there are more men in the higher earning percentiles than there are women (and vice versa)
What this means is that half of women are below the 43rd income percentile and half of men are below the 58th percentile. In effect, if you are a woman and you earned the median income of $72,794, you earned more than most women, but a man earning that amount earned less than most men.
The end result is that for 2023-24, these are the following average and median earnings:
So, always be aware that when you hear a politician talk about average Australians, that is probably not a majority of them.
