I used to have a half-interest in Austrian Economics. The idea that utility is unquantifiable always made me slightly uncomfortable with the seemingly-quantified way in which neoclassical microeconomics uses it. It had not occurred to me that whilst the simple charts and graphs we use imply ordinality they don’t necessarily imply cardinality. This made me feel a whole lot better. Utility functions are cool again!

There are other principles that are soundly destroyed in that piece (how Austrians address continuity etc.) that I hadn’t really considered (perhaps that’s a signal that I should be thinking more critically about what’s being taught to me?). In any case, it’s a good read if you want a perspective on some aspects of Austrian economics, and how they differ (or surprisingly, don’t differ) from neoclassical microeconomics.

If this was correct, a person earning $85,000 would take home $51,000, and a person earning $75,000 would take home $52,500. Why on earth would anyone accept a salary in between those two figures? I’ll tell you why. Because that’s not how the system works.


So, how much tax do you really pay? Simplified, your tax payable is equal to income tax minus deductions. Deductions are an individual thing, based on assets, income, dependents, all kinds of things. I’m not going to go into that here. But I will show you how to calculate your income tax.

First of all, you need to understand that your income gets divided up into brackets and each bracket is assigned a tax rate. In Australia, the lowest tax bracket is $0 to $6000, upon which you are not taxed at all. The next bracket starts at $6,001 and goes up to $34,000. This bracket carries a tax of 15%. The last three brackets of $34,001 – $80,000, $80,001 – $180,000 and $180001+ carry taxes of 30%, 40% and 45% respectively.

To calculate your tax, you start with your total gross income. Up to the first $6,000 you’ll pay no tax. For every dollar above $6,000 up to $34,000 you’ll pay just 15% on. Did your income exceed $34,000? By how much? Between $34,001 and $80,000, you’ll have to pay 30%. And so on, and so forth. Money within a bracket is only ever taxed at that bracket’s rate.

I’ve taken the liberty to produce a simple Excel spreadsheet to calculate income tax in Australia. You can download it here. Just enter your taxable income in the top left box and the spreadsheet will tell you how much tax you’re paying inside each bracket. There is a total in the bottom right.

I’ve also included an Effective Rate box. The Effective Rate is is the average rate of tax you’re paying per dollar. For people whose income is reasonably steady, this should give you a far better idea of how much of your weekly paycheck you will have to give up as tax.

I leave it to the reader to figure out their own deductions, payable levies and the like.

Only through extreme cleverness and guile can these sharply-dressed chappies keep their gold-plated money clips filled with the filthy lucre of their exploits. Or the extreme cleverness and guile of someone they’re paying to be extremely clever and guile..y. Enter: the marketing dudes who work for Maloney and Porcelli, who have been applied to the problem of not being able to afford aforementioned lavish culinary expenses and in their infinite wisdom have emerged with a twofold solution.

Said solution is Expense A Steak. This website takes a dollar value (ostensibly the value of your dinner bill) and generates a PDF file containing scanned images of receipts for things that could reasonably be added to a business expense account. Office supplies, cab fares, budget lunches and the like. As you’d expect, these receipts (which look extremely authentic) total to the same value of the dinner bill you entered on the previous page. Staple that sucker to your expense report and BAM – the evening out is on the boss.

Sadly, the receipts generated are specific to New York, so unless you live there this wonderful little loophole that could lead to full reimbursement of what I gather is rather expensive New York cuisine is unavailable to you.

Since I’m a very much a PC man, I am happy to provide Cracked an infinitesimally small improvement to their PageRank scores by linking to said article right here.

First of all, you need a table of data. Here’s one I’ve prepared, showing Quantity, Total Cost, Average Total Cost, Average Variable Cost and Marginal Cost:-



And this is what ATC, AVC and MC would look like in a graph:-



Except that’s wrong, because the MC line should start a half-tick to the left of the other data lines. So, how do we do this? The first step is to add another column to our graph. I’m going to call it MCx. I’m then going to fill it with the x-axis values for each corresponding MC value. (For large amounts of data, you can usually make this faster by observing that it’ll be the same as “Quantity – .5″.)



Now, here comes the tricky part – applying the custom x-values to the MC curve without affecting the other data. The first step is to change the type of graph you’re dealing with. You don’t actually want a “line graph” anymore. What you want is an “X Y (Scatter)”, specifically Scatter with Smooth Lines. You can see the graph type you need in the image below.



Colours notwithstanding, it looks pretty much like the last graph. Scatter plots have one major advantage though – you can select a custom x-axis for each set of data! So whilst the ATC and AVC lines will get their x-axis values from the Q column, we can change the MC line to use the MCx column for its x-axis values. To do this, right-click the graph and go to “Select Data”. Highlight “MC” and click “Edit”.



Now you can set the x-axis values to the column we created earlier. All you need to do is delete everything in the “Series X values” box, and replace it with your own data, in this case everything from F2 to F9.



Press OK a couple of times to get out of those menus and your graph will now show the MC line shifted half a tick to the left – where it’s supposed to be. Technically this trick can be applied to give ANY data offset values on an axis. The secret really lies in using an X Y Scatter plot.