Bernhard Hickey

[Bjauck]

You really should visit Scandinavia for a while, or maybe even live there for a bit to fully appreciate how those societies work. Their public sector is much larger than it appears once you factor in indirect public sector activity. Nepotism, incompetence, groupthink, petty squabbles and attitudes. It's all alive and well there.

The hog isn't a National or ACT voter by the way.

Yet Scandinavia and NZ always score well from various corruption surveys. The bigger English countries with slightly smaller (than Scandinavia) public sectors such as the UK and USA don’t score as well. Have you got any studies that corroborate your perceptions?

NZ has a great tax system, and other policies, for developing a low-skill low-productivity agrarian feudal (or ante-bellum Southern-style) economy with a small share market.

https://www.worldeconomics.com/Natio...ls/Sweden.aspx

[Panda-NZ-]

NZ has a great tax system, and other policies, for developing a low-skill low-productivity agrarian feudal (or ante-bellum Southern-style) economy with a small share market.

https://www.worldeconomics.com/Natio...ls/Sweden.aspx

You risk your knighthood saying that.

Mind you they only seem to go to politicians these days (who have all let us down).

[Ricky-bobby]

I don’t see any benefit in paying higher taxes. Why would I give more of my hard earned money to public service who even struggle to do up their shoes laces? If the money was spent wisely and actually improved peoples lives then I would be open to it. I challenge people to name one thing (public sector) that has got better over the last 10 years?

[Recaster]

The have got better at placing more orange cones on every main road.

[Lego_Man]

If i'm to allocate money to a fund manager, they need to have a demonstrable track record of astute capital deployment. I look at government the same way.

Looking at the last Labour government and regardless of ideological stripe, there's no doubt they were simply the worst spenders of public money in the history of NZ. They squandered a unique historical moment (zero interest rates and prior to that, good surpluses) and an absolute majority in their second term, spending was either ephemeral or straight out wasteful, and we have zero long term infrastructure progress to show for it. They were a talentless bunch of student politicians playing at government. "Old school socialists" in the manner of Clark, Cullen etc would have accomplished much more.

[Valuegrowth]

I have read some of his good articles in the past.

AFAIK the financial system has not fixed once and for all. As a result of it we could see different types of financial crisis, housing market crisis and other digital and physical asset crisis in the future too. Easy money led to one of the longest uptrends in asset prices over the last 5 to 10 years. On top of that the world is sitting on an over 300- trillion-dollar debt bomb.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/...ancial-system/

Is it time to modernize global financial system?

[Aaron]

I don’t see any benefit in paying higher taxes. Why would I give more of my hard earned money to public service who even struggle to do up their shoes laces? If the money was spent wisely and actually improved peoples lives then I would be open to it. I challenge people to name one thing (public sector) that has got better over the last 10 years?

Immigration NZ is really pumping.

[LaserEyeKiwi]

I don’t see any benefit in paying higher taxes. Why would I give more of my hard earned money to public service who even struggle to do up their shoes laces? If the money was spent wisely and actually improved peoples lives then I would be open to it. I challenge people to name one thing (public sector) that has got better over the last 10 years?

The intention is not to redesign the tax system to pay higher taxes, it is to redesign the tax system to collect the same amount of tax, but in a way that encourages capital to be directed towards creating/growing productive businesses rather than towards property as it is currently.

Income taxes, corporate taxes would be lower, R&D credits & depreciation/amortization on investment in productive assets more beneficial. Those lower taxes would be paid for by increased taxation on property/capital gains.

[warthog]

[QUOTE=Bjauck;1043254]Yet Scandinavia and NZ always score well from various corruption surveys. The bigger English countries with slightly smaller (than Scandinavia) public sectors such as the UK and USA don’t score as well. Have you got any studies that corroborate your perceptions?]

To be honest, the hog hasn't looked, but has lived in Scandinavia.

https://www.worldeconomics.com/Natio...ls/Sweden.aspx

Corruption is everywhere. It's more a matter of how hidden it is, how widespread, and the scale.

[Count von Count]

I don’t see any benefit in paying higher taxes. Why would I give more of my hard earned money to public service who even struggle to do up their shoes laces? If the money was spent wisely and actually improved peoples lives then I would be open to it. I challenge people to name one thing (public sector) that has got better over the last 10 years?

I am going to disagree with you about the public service. I / the family have had some contacts with the health sector over the last 15 years, and they have been uniformly excellent - especially the hospital-based services. Good healthcare does not make newspaper headlines. My kids are getting excellent educations in the public sector - one of them has learning needs, and her last two schools have been responsive, creative and encouraging. She is doing well, and remains really engaged in her learning. When something happened a while ago, the Police were amazing, and this helped with insurance claims and so forth.

The problem with the public sector is often not a lack of competence, but a lack of investment. Talking to the health staff that have been managing us at Starship, they have the same number of positions that they had 20 years ago, but the population they are dealing with is close to 50% bigger. Their IT is antiquated - they were still arm-wrestling with Windows 7. Our local Intermediate school finally got a new build completed for some new classrooms - the MoE had a leaky building nightmare they had to deal with at other schools - but their roll has increased by 40% in 12 years, with the same number of funded teaching positions.

The issue is that when our economy was smashing it, it was mostly based around immigration and protein production. We put those savings into largely meaningless tax cuts, incentivised property investment and thought that we could continue to grow the population (and reap the benefits in terms of the labour force and economic gain) without bothering to look at what sorts of resources those people might need, and plan ahead accordingly.

So my experience is that the public sector is pretty good. My hypothesis is that they are strained due to successive governments either kicking the can down the road, or not having the skills and awareness to properly plan for the future. My belief is that the public sector isn't like a tap - you can't turn it on and off depending on what the government of the day does. It needs steady investment to properly thrive.