#topic4

On 25th May 2018

Watch me rant about the tax cuts ohohohoho

The proposed tax cuts will deliver ‘middle income’ earners $44 mil AUD in the later stages of the plan, and $144 billion over a decade in tax reliefs.

This is expected to boost aggregate demand as ‘low to middle’ income earners has a higher MPC, bringing more economic activity in this period of slow growth as they spend it on necessities.

However, as the tax plan extends to the full range of tax brackets, and the extension of tax brackets, this scales the recipients of the tax reliefs to the high income earners.

Analysis from the Australian National University, the Grattan Institute and the Australia Institute has shown that households on higher incomes get a bigger proportion of the tax cuts over time

This will in effect increase disposable income inequality

By increasing inequality, this will reduce Australia’s’ PPP in the future, as the reduction in government tax revenue will reduce the ability to fund other social services, such as healthcare and education

It’s true that reducing the burden of personal income taxes is a desirable goal, particularly at a time when households are feeling the pinch of slower wages growth.

But Australian politicians have simply not done the hard work to reform our tax base to ensure finances are in a sustainable position before Australians can be relieved of the burden of bracket creep.

- Jessica Irvine

The foretasted budget revenues to fund propsed services such as the NDIS is reliant on positive global economic conditions, however with the increased tensions between the US and China currently it will most likely stump growth.

On 1st June 2018

The latest minimum wage decision has inceased the base wage to $719.20 per week. It is estimated that over 2 million Australians are covered by the award, and will therefore receive the addistional $24.30 a week.

The new hourly minimum rate of $18.93 will take effect from July 1, affecting workers on a 38 hour week.

The Australian Council of Trade Union argued for an increase of $50/week, however this was rejected as the commision ruled that this risked increasing unemployment, especially for low skilled and younger workers.

Due to the currently high level of unemployment, the existing slack in the labour market does not increase labour demand

This does not increase competition for labour, and thus no incentive for wage increases

Iain Ross, commission president, said the real value of the national minimum wage had increased by 5.8 per cent over the past decade and by 4.3 per cent in the past five years

"However, this has not resulted in improvement to the actual or relative living standards for many categories of national minimum wage and award-reliant households due to changes in the tax and transfer system"

The latest minimum wage decision increased the wage price index by 0.5 points, as wage growth is at 2 of WPI. This is extremely low in comparison to historical averages of around 3,5 %.

As households on the minimum wage has a higher marginal propensity to consume, by providing them with increased disposable income it will help facilitate greater economic growth from household spending

In a similar trend to the previous years, wage growth grew in the same proportion as CPI, resulting in little to no real wage growth

However, the income tax cuts in the 18-19 budge should be able to provide more disposable income for those on a mimmum wage, as the government seeks to accelerate GDP growth

Monthly prompt:  How do you go about making your own sacred/temple space to worship? Do you even do this at all? If not do you just set up an altar wherever you can and call it good enough?

Been chewing over this month’s hellenicroundtable‘s monthly prompt for a bit now and the answer is: fuck all if I know.

For me this is an un-quantifiable question and answer. Because it begs the larger question of what makes a place holy or sacred and I will never be smart enough to answer that. I don’t have a set altar space--our apartment is much larger than our last few but it’s still not very big. We do have a covered balcony but our bikes and such take up almost all the space. I do have a little side table that I will use as a witchcraft/worship table--it tends to be where offering plates end up while the offering is active. Not because it’s sacred but because it’s the only consistently clean flat surface in our space. If it is a very big or important offering I will light a candle and pray over the space before putting down the food but...that’s about it. I don’t consider the space itself sacred, it’s just a temporary call to the gods that something is there for them if they want it.

I don’t really feel the need for a dedicated altar space or temple space--my gods are always with me. Not in a “watching you all the time” sort of way that Christianity approaches the subject but I don’t think the gods are bound by human understandings of time and space. If I call upon Athena at the head of the trail* and she wants to answer, she’ll answer, whether or not I’ve cleansed the area or have performed any rites prior to the call.

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because I devoted myself to Hermes first** or perhaps because I’ve moved so much I have zero concept of a permanent space for anything but a set altar and temple space seem like a waste to me and my worship. I think it’s fantastic that others do have and use those spaces but I cling to my very Christian idea that every place is sacred and every moment has the opportunity for worship if I so choose. I think also the fact so many of my devotional acts are acts, not set offerings, means altar space is meaningless. For me.

On a slightly related note: I do love seeing altar pictures because it’s very cool to see people who do have that sense of permanence and who devote a physical space in their daily lives to the gods like that.

*For the new people--I do devotional workouts as part of my offerings to Athena and I trail run.

(eep first time actually responding to one of y’all’s topics)

I have a very small space to work with...my room haha, so I needed to think carefully of where in my room was the right space to set up my altars and make it sacred. I decided I wanted it by my window, since it has a lot of natural light. I consider access to natural light and nature forms of natural cleansing and sacredness. From my window, I can get some of the first lights of the rising sun and the last lights of the setting sun. So in the corner, facing the window, I set up a bookcase and each shelf is a designated shrine (except the bottom two shelves, I feel like they are too close to the ground and find that kind of offensive).

Also, I’d like to mention that I didn’t just decide on the window because of all the natural light but also because nature is a huge factor in my practice so I needed my sacred space to reflect that. Especially since I can’t do this outside, which would be nice but not practical atm. I enjoy having plants on my shrines as well, again it’s a big part of my practice, so being by a window would be a ideal. I don’t want to displease the gods by having light-deprived/dying plants on their shrines. Also, the corner that this space is in is actually slightly secluded from the rest of my room so no one ever goes over there, and it really makes it feel sacred since the only person that goes there is me.

As for other things that go into it, I make sure it’s clean, smells nice, and cleansed. I like to have just the right amount of objects/trinkets on each shrine so that it pleases both me and the god, while not looking too cluttered. It’s usually an offering bowl/plate at the front, some physical representation of the god at the back, on the sides/surrounding area I put two or three trinkets that make me think of the god and that I can tell they like (usually a plant that I consider accurately represents them), and then a few candles.

This topic is a fairly simple one. How do you go about making your own sacred/temple space to worship? Do you even do this at all? If not do you just set up an altar wherever you can and call it good enough?

First of all I think, it is important to realize that coming out is a steady process. It‘s not something you do once and that you‘re totally out, because you will always meet knew people in new jobs, on vacation, when you move or just when your good friend brings someone new to the group. So I think, it‘s pretty normal to have a bunch of coming out stories (because everyone you tell it will react slightly differently) and some may be bad, others good, some may be awkward and hopefully some may be funny because they are worth telling.

I am just out to my boyfriend (because I thought it would be unfair if I didn‘t tell him) and to some random friends, because we coincidentaly talked about it. Today I had another of this coincidental opportunities, and since I promised myself on Coming Out Day to be more open about my bisexuality, I took the chance and it went quite funny, so I thought I‘d share the story here:

There is this tumblr-screenshot going viral on lgbt-facebook-pages saying: „you can‘t be just friends with people of the gender you‘re attracted to – myth actually true. I, as a bisexual, can confirm that i have no friends. --- pansexuals spend their lives in solitude, with only rocks for company --- meanwhile asexuals are friends with everyone. Literally every single person on the planet. I do not know how i remember so many names“

I found this post yesterday and laughed my ass off. Today, a friend of mine, who I know is an ally  but whom I wasn‘t out to, posted this on her facebook timeline with the caption „Makes sense :-)“. I commented, that I laughed so hard when I read it for the first time, but then have been sad because I have no friends to share it with :-P My friend , who knows that I‘m struggeling with mental health issues that sometimes make me believe nobody likes me, thought she needed to comfort me and told me, that my  first reaction (to laugh about it) was right, but my second reaction (to say I got no friends) was wrong. I wrote her with a weird smileyface, that I was totally right with both (remember, the text said: bisexuals have no friends). After a while I got a response to that, really short and accompanied by the same weird smiley:

Since today is National Coming Out Day and Bitalks theme of the week is coming out, I've been thinking a lot of my own relationship to coming out lately. And I realized something. I've never come out to anyone before. Not to my family, my partners, my friends, or even myself. 

There has never been a moment in my life where I engaged in the coming out ritual. Maybe this is because I have been relatively privileged having lived in California during the internet era, but this narrative of being closeted, then figuring out who I am, then engaging in a revelation neither resonated with nor appealed to me. I've know I am queer since I was a child, since before I had the words to describe my queerness. But growing up in an abusive household and being an immigrant meant that I had never been seen as normal by my friends and family, and had, by the time I began to experience my sexuality, already figured out that keeping myself safe meant presenting a fractured version of myself in different contexts. I hid my sexuality much in the same way I hid a B grade on a test, or my accent. Unless I felt your knowledge of the B/my queerness/my accent would endanger my safety I never attempted to hide it. 

So many people know that I am queer without my having had to engage in the coming out ritual. I am completely open about my bisexuality around those important to my life that have proven themselves to be trustworthy with this aspect of me. I'll talk about my ex's of various genders and non-heterosexual crushes openly and often. And unless someone is being biphobic I rarely ever explicitly state my sexuality. I live as if my queerness is as normative as heterosexuality. And have found that because I am read as a femme cis woman, heteronormativity, bi-erasure, and compulsory heterosexuality makes it so that unsafe people rarely ever figure it out. 

That's how I've ended up where I am today with about 2/3 of the people important to me knowing I'm bi, and the rest assuming I'm straight. And I'm perfectly ok with that. I've never really felt the need to sit my parents, for example, down and tell them that there is something about me that they will never really understand or accept. I've also never felt like it's this horrible secret that prevents me from being my true self (I honestly really hate this understanding of identity. It's very Western and foreign to me). There are very few people who know all there is to know about me, I would argue that there are three at most, which makes me as "closeted" about my sexuality as I am about my childhood abuse or my immigration status.