I’ll never give so much as a single dollar to the Herald, and if Stuff ever disappears behind a paywall then I think Stuff itself will disappear in short order as well.
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Fair is at a minimum paying at least the same percentage tax rate on all income compared to an average worker. Though, ideally more if a tax system is progressive.
Not making an already regressive tax system like NZ's worse.
I gather the Left want to tax *unrealised* capital gains. This is how they calculate that the system is ‘unfair’. Anyway, Lefty’s spend their whole lives fretting over ‘fair’ and yearning for revolution; with every intervention left wing governments do to try to make things ‘fair’, the law of unintended consequences kicks in and you get greater distortions and problems.
Let’s also consider that you’re average ‘wealthy’ property owner has to shoulder the burden for funding local government themselves, while the ‘poor’ renter does not. Hey, is that ‘fair’? Is it fair that an elderly person on govt superannuation sees their rates bill go up by 14% while they struggle with a cost of living crisis? What’s ‘fair’ about that?
I would be OK with National's tax plan..
IF it was funded by a CGT with a 2% one off solidarity surchage (ie wealth tax ;) ) on Net assets over $5m to cover the revenue gap until it kicks in.
Though they're not interested in any new ideas just the same old stuff we've heard for 40 years.
Their only environmental agenda is recycling bad policies.
Maybe if I answer the second question first. A capital gains tax is not a panacea for everything wrong in the world (I appreciate you are prone to hyperbole though). It is a way to broaden the tax base so we can reduce the burden on hard working people running businesses or trading their time for money as we currently tax income not wealth. Maybe we could lower the GST rate.
One thing that has been happening is that a smaller and smaller amount of people are accruing a greater and greater amount of the wealth and income from society. I would suggest they are being amply rewarded despite what David Seymour and Richard Prebble think by the fact that the disparity in wealth and income continues to grow. I don't think it can be all put down to good looks and hard work as FP might suggest. In fact if they are just collecting rents or dividends then they are probably contributing very little to society other than providing the consumption for the people who are producing the goods and services. Do rentiers add much to productivity? I want to be a rentier but I don't think holding existing assets adds much to society. maybe if I had built the business myself but not just holding wealth and collecting rents and dividends.
Rather than trickle down we could call it the wealth effect. Do you think Adrian Orr did the country any favours pushing house prices to where they are? He explained why he did it, the "wealth effect" has this made the country better off? Has the wealth effect provided greater opportunities for our young people or has it entrenched the wealth divide and reduced social mobility?
Sorry to hear you can't afford a herald subscription, it is the preeminent source of information in NZ based on the awards it earns.
I need to stop posting now, like the main stream media, constantly talking about ACT and David Seymour only makes them more popular.
I agree with you that a CGT - had it been brought in 2 decades ago - would have broadened the tax base and resulted in a significant revenue windfall that *could* (though it may not have been) have been used to build much needed infrastructure. Sadly, the horse bolted with the gains many years ago. Today we have young people buying bog standard houses through raiding their KiwiSaver and a few other tricks and stretches - with an eye-popping mortgage by the way - and finding themselves in negative equity & on the sharp end of interest rate rises.
The ‘wealth effect’ was very much central bank driven and was very much the rage after the GFC when the Fed was coming up with creative ways to stave off a second ‘Great Depression’. So we got QE, ultra-low interest rates, and the focus on creating the ‘wealth effect’ artificially through boosting asset prices. The ‘wealth effect’ was about making people *feel* richer so that they went out and kept spending. And that’s the issue and the problem with the wealth effect: you are boosting peoples wealth ‘on paper’. And when they felt richer, they borrowed more to spend on consumer goods & they chucked cars and boats and travel on the mortgage by way of a ‘top up’. But now with real estate prices falling that ‘paper wealth’ is exposed & the consequences of that spending and borrowing are coming home to roost. The risk involved in the decisions these individuals (and households) took was much greater than what they had calculated it to be.
This is the issue with taking a risk - and maybe it’s something that the left wing mind finds it hard to consider as well; todays ‘rich prick’ might be tomorrows bankrupt.
I’m not paying anything to the Herald because I don’t support their clear political bias. Nothing to do with what I can and can’t afford. The number of awards a big fish in a small pool may or may not win is also not a factor for me. Emmerson is apparently an ‘award winning’ cartoonist: I find his style to be ugly, his humour to be as weak as water, and his bias to be readily apparent and over-bearing.
Ask a first home buyer whether the "paper" gains on real estate has mattered to them.
What really f*cks me off is when central banks keep stepping in every time the "risk takers" look like losing. Instead of "risk takers" suffering any downside in NZ we have a "cost of living" crisis whereby average conservative savers in term deposits are getting their wealth stolen from them through inflation to bail out the "risk takers" and the average hard working person's life is getting tougher through the inflation tax as we are all paying to bail out the "risk takers".
And as it turns out the risk takers are doing OK as long as the asset inflation stays ahead of the cost of living crisis.
So what is wrong with being hard working, honest, successful , diligent , caring focused, generous AND rich ?