So it comes to this. Tiger Woods has been in the headlines for having a few mistresses. I’m sure they each have their own stories to tell however it’s one in particular that has grabbed the headlines recently. Jaimee Grubbs, dubbed Mistress Grubbs in this article from the SMH online, has decided to share her story on national TV, bless her. The article starts with her apologising to Tiger’s wife, Erin Nordegren, for the immeasurable hurt and emotion she has caused her. Right there I’m thinking ‘Ok, really, an apology on national TV? That’s pretty poor form right there love.’ Following that though, is a quote from her saying ‘If it wasn’t me, it was going to be other girls.’ So what, that makes what happened ok does it? Well, thank God you were there Jaimee to stop that from happening. Oh, wait a minute…

Not only does she go on to share the details of her relationship with Tiger, I mean she even talks about their first kiss, but she has the gall to talk of her own personal anguish and hurt at finding out she wasn’t the only woman in Tiger’s life, and she’s not referring to Tiger’ wife! No, it’s the 10 other women he’s seduced over the years. According to Jaimee, what they had together was a relationship of respect, sacred intimacy and trust. He made her feel like she was the only woman (again Jaimee, apart from his wife).

Are you kidding me Jaimee?! What do you think could possibly be gained by sharing this on Extra TV? Let’s see, if I check out their website maybe I can see why you thought this would be the perfect platform for you to air your grievances. Yes, your story fits really well alongside others like David Hasselhoff’s wife asking his fans to help save him, some playmate who is about to pop out a baby any second and, surprise, surprise, other celebs airing their own dirty laundry about exes. Yes, this is a great opportunity for you to tell Erin how sorry you really are.

Here’s a clue. Next time you feel hard done by by some man and feel the need to share, buy a book, call it a journal and write it in that. If you’re not up for that (ie, writing is not your thing, or if you are illiterate), go the tried-and-true method which is to get a bunch of your girlfriends, get pissed and slag him off that way.

As for the excuse, and I quote,’ “I wouldn’t have pursued him if he didn’t pursue me. I mean, when he did, I just figured he was single and I didn’t think to ask,” she says ‘, well, I have some news for Jaimee. Dear, dear simple Jaimee, we live in fairly modern times here and there is this thing called a computer and you can access like, loads of info on lots of different things, including the marital status of celebs. So when he said ‘Hi, my name is Tiger and I play golf’ or whatever he said, did it occur to you that at any point you could find this stuff out. Shame on your friends too, clearly they don’t read tabloid gossip mags, use a computer or are illiterate, because they too may have been able to slap you around the face and tell you to wake up to yourself.

To top this off, Jaimee confesses that her motivation for wanting to share her story was when she found out she wasn’t the only woman in Tiger’s life, I mean apart from his wife (again, that last bit is for you Jaimee).

I’m going to call it. Bullshit. How can you use that excuse as justification for your decision to tell your story on TV? Maybe you wanted to get in first and be seen as the woman Tiger really cared for, that these other women didn’t matter as much as you did to him? That what you and Tiger had was ‘special’. Maybe you wanted people to understand it, to see things from your perspective. Well I’m telling you, far better that you had kept your mouth shut.

Stuff like this great song by Root, called “Joe Blogs“. It’s a bit TISM 2.0

A woman here just ordered a large, half strength latte. Why not just order a Horlicks & be done with it?

A large latte is already weak, because as a rule it has no more coffee, just more milk, so to ask for it to be made half strength really begs the question, what the hell do you think you’re buying?

I have no problem if people don’t like coffee, whether it’s the taste, the caffeine hit or because you’ve only ever been given international roast, but if that’s the case, why order it? People confuse me no end.

Click for full size image.

Very different feelings evoked by each image.

So why do they wrap it in plastic?

There’s a lot of tax churn in our system, taking money with one hand and then giving it back to a particular demographic that’s politically useful. Possum Comitatus has looked before at the way that voters receiving Family Tax Benefit Part A impact the ALP vote but it’s certainly not the only game in town. Baby bonuses, first home buyer’s grants and funding grants to private schools are just a few more examples of people being handed back their own tax almost directly, albeit expensively, after multiple government departments have had to administer the payments.

In addition to handouts, our tax system also has a huge number of exceptions built into it so that people can claim certain expenses against their income tax. There’s a fairly good argument that can be made that we’d all be better off if we cut out tax deductions, government handouts and the cost of administering them, and cut everyone’s tax rate to offset it all. I’m fairly sure that if you put that proposition to almost anyone they’d tell you it was a great idea, however neither side of Australian politics seems to be rushing to embrace it as a policy. Why not?

You could argue that the ‘tax and spend lefties’ in the ALP aren’t interested in it because they have a fundamental addiction to stealing people’s money, but this doesn’t explain why the ‘small government’ Liberal Party didn’t do it during their eleven years in power. In fact, during the Howard years middle class welfare boomed seemingly counter to one of the traditional philosophies of conservative politics.

The simple answer is that everyone loves a handout, a windfall, free money. There’s perhaps no better example of this than pensioner lobby groups who argued after the 2008 budget that an increase in the pension equal to the Howard government’s annual pension bonus payment was not an acceptable policy change, there’s something that we like about receiving a lump sum payment.

But why are we so enamoured with getting a wad of cash rather than receiving the same amount of money, or potentially even more over a longer period of time? Certainly there’s an element of the desire for instant gratification, but I think that there’s more to it than that.

I think that a lot of us have simply lost the ability to manage our personal finances, tax time is an opportunity to undo all of the reckless financial decisions of the preceding year and go through the ritual paying off of the credit card balance. It’s no secret that many of us spend more than we earn, so without these little income supplements through the year plenty of people would be in a lot of trouble. Increasing people’s regular income wouldn’t fix the problem, it just changes the point at which they get over their heads, so in effect the taxation system has become a forced method of saving for people. While this is the case there is no chance of either major party making serious changes to the tax churn that people have not only come to expect, but have come to depend on.

If we are going to seriously reform our taxation system to make it more efficient and less complicated, we will also need to help better educate people about their personal finances. This is no small task, it took me ten years of working and making mortgage payments before I truly came to grips with our household budget, and it took the help of a professional financial planner to do it. There’s no ad campaign or series of brochures that’ll suddenly make the populace financially literate and so I fear that until we find another way to achieve it we’ll be saddled with the churning of our taxes.

What lost causes do you still pine for?

Consider this an open thread, say what you please.

The Dreamtime at the G concept is great, but when you show around half an hour of pre-match entertainment on a telecast which is already delayed, it quickly grates. So for almost an hour now Buster Boy has been patiently waiting to see some footy, while I have been assuring him that the game would begin any minute now.

The final result, Buster Boy fell asleep just as the opening bounce went up. I doubt he’ll be in a hurry to stay up and watch the footy next week.

This year’s budget is going to be disappointing for lots of Australians who have spent the past few years being conditioned to think that the federal budget is all about what new handout they will be receiving. During the mining boom, Peter Costello as Treasurer was lucky enough to receive enormous revenue from corporate taxation, which he then used as an electoral tool to bribe voters with handouts and tax cuts. The result of this as that our tax mix is heavily reliant on corporate tax receipts, which is fine during a booming global economy, but suicidal in the long term as the economic cycle inevitably turns, leaving a huge revenue shortfall.

The deficit budget that will be handed down tonight is due to the revenue shortfall caused by an over reliance on corporate taxation. We are all about to have to take our medicine for the unsustainable tax cuts that Howard and Costello used to win voters’ favour since the turn of the century. Naturally, the opposition will attempt to lay this disaster at the feet of the Government, and a lot of people will fall for it.

There have already been plenty of hints as to how this budget will play out, but the coverage of the it will inevitably focus heavily on people who regard themselves as being hard done by. Here is my list of predictions of people who will squeal the loudest about the budget, and why they should shut their whinging pie holes.

Self funded retirees. This is such a stupid and inaccurate phrase, the Howard government bent over backwards to keep the grey vote locked in and in doing so pretty much extended every benefit designed to keep pensioners out of poverty, like health care cards and other services, to people who were ineligible for the pension, but were over retirement age. In addition to this, these people were gifted enormous amounts of money through foolishly generous superannuation policies and by the debasement of the capital gains tax system.

As the baby boomers race towards retirement this mess needs to be unwound, it is unaffordable and unsustainable. Expect to hear this group claim that unless they are heavily subsidised by the government they will spend every cent they have and live off the pension, thereby forcing the rest of us to pick up the tab. So much for being self-funded. The reality is that most of these people would sell their own children rather than live on the aged pension and will simply whittle away their kids inheritance to support their lifestyles. Boom times for reverse mortgage providers.

High income earners. Another group who were trained to suckle at the government teat during the Howard years. One of Howard’s most socially regressive feats was instilling in people a sense of downward envy, demonising welfare recipients as being unworthy of government assistance, and then quelling the disharmony he’d created by handing out cash to people who didn’t need it. Policies like the Baby Bonus and the Private Health Insurance Rebate scheme should have been means tested from day one, because one of the basic tenets of the welfare system is that you only provide assistance to people actually need it.

High income earners, like talk-back radio hosts, op-ed writers for our major newspapers, and their friends, will be especially critical of any means testing, claiming that it is ‘unfair’. The reality is that everyone loves getting something for nothing, and free money is the pinnacle of that principle. Expect to hear this group claim that the changes are a disincentive to hard work and that their tax contributions entitle them to some government largesse, while their accountants desperately search for new ways to reduce their tax liability.

Businesses whose business model is leeching off taxpayers. The private health insurance industry is the first that springs to mind, but there will no doubt be plenty of other businesses whose profits are largely derived from providing services to the government who will foreshadow thousands of job losses, should their place at the trough be threatened. The reality is that if there is a genuine market for their products, then they will survive. Government interference distorts the market and usually ends up with all sorts of perverse unintended consequences, reducing these effects is a good thing.

People without children. Apparently people without children do not use any government services at all and are subsidising us breeders. Fuck off. Sleep in on a Sunday, go to a movie with your partner after dinner and hope like hell that the rest of us pop out enough kids to pay for your health care bills when you get old.

There will no doubt be others crying out this year, and the opposition will be full of sympathy for them as this will be their first real chance at drumming up some resentment towards the government. But the reality is that the massive budgets we came to expect for the last decade were underpinned by the same assumptions that have bought the commercial world to its knees in the past year, the boom could not go on forever, we could not keep deferring the cost of government spending and it is now time to face the consequences of our reckless actions during the good times.