Posts on the economy, work, business, income, and labour
We keep getting told that government is the problem and that the private sector is the answer. But the reserve bank numbers clearly show that it is the problem. When are the private sector going to deal with their burgeoning debt levels?
The Tax Working Group canvassed the many reasons why New Zealand should have a capital gains tax, before rejecting it by majority decision on the basis it was too complex and hard to administer. According to Auckland University’s Professor Craig Elliffe and Chye-ching Huang this is not borne out by the example of South Africa’s successful introduction of a CGT in 2001. Surely if the South Africans can make such a tax work our officials can too.
The genius of Labour’s (not yet official) capital gains tax is not just the policy itself but the way it has picked the public mood. Support has been near-universal. The Left loves the fairness aspect – workers won’t be subsidising landlords anymore. The Right loves the implications for capital allocation, interest rates, and the exchange rate. The Nats look isolated and hysterical.
Yesterday, hundreds of parents protested cuts to early childhood education on Queen St and gave Phil Goff a 60,000 signature petition to take to Wellington. 1000 people in the Octagon called on the government to consider Kiwi jobs when awarding contracts. What is wrong with the priorities of this government that puts tax cuts ahead of kids and job?
We are going to have to have this debate some time. Maybe it will be possible now that Labour has shown how to stare down supposed “electoral suicide”.
Even Bill’s readers like the CGT…
It has been a rare and sincere pleasure to see National walk straight into a trap carefully laid by Labour. Goff and his team haven’t even publicly confirmed their capital gains tax policy but proponents to the Left and Right are winning the pre-launch media framing for them, while Key’s contradictory ranting is undermining his credibility.
Yesterday’s Morning Report interview with Sydney Morning Herald economics correspondent Peter Martin was a real gem. The picture of capital gains tax that emerges is one of simplicity, fairness, and closing loopholes. No wonder the Nats hate it.
The landlords’ lobby group is making a lot of noise over Labour’s, still unannounced, capital gains policy. They say rents will go up, the supply of housing will fall, and it won’t stop house prices bubbles. Examining those claims shows that there would be little impact on rents while housing bubbles would be reduced and home ownership would be more affordable.
The right’s leadership resembles a merry go round of disgraced old white failures. Brash, English, Shirtcliffe, Douglas had their time at the front, were disgraced. Now they’re back. Thompson was fired for his appalling behaviour but got a payout. He’ll be back in due course. While Brash says he’d welcome baby ID stealer Garrett back to Parliament.
Labour have started setting out a bold, fair and plausible policy framework for the election. Rumours of their tax policy have generated more interest and excitement than anything the National government has done in the last three wasted years.
A conservative council in the UK sacked it’s entire workforce and offered them their jobs again the next day if they accepted a […]
The Nats are all in favour of pay equity for women. Or so they say. But their actions speak louder than their words.
What keeps John Key & Bill English too busy to comment on their own government’s dismal performance, but not so busy that they can’t comment on absolutely anything to do with Labour?
There’s an odd contradiction in right-wing ‘thought’. On the one hand, they’re Randian heroes, the wealth creators, modern day Atlases who support the world while ‘parasites’ try to take their wealth and bring them down. On the other hand, they’re victims who need subsidies and special treatment. Fed Farmers CEO Conor English embodies the contradiction.
The buzz around the traps is that Labour will be announcing a capital gains tax next week. The journos are already calling it a bold move and John Key is ranting hysterically. That Labour’s winning the media battle is great but, more importantly, this is a much needed policy: it is fair, it is good for the economy, and it will pay for good policies.
John Key’s government celebrated KiwiSaver’s 4th birthday on July 1 with cuts to your entitlements. (Zet mentioned this here, but this is my take…)
Bravo France, the first country in the world to ban fracking. But for every step forward in this world, we seem to take two steps backwards…
In the Herald today, Mark Lister says the lack of investment in the productive economy is due to the favourable tax treatment of housing. On Thursday, Brian Fallow wrote how Kiwis are being shut out of home ownership by investors who see capital gain from housing as an easy win, and workers’ taxes effectively subsidise property investors who pay none.
From today, the government’s contribution to your Kiwisaver has been cut in half. ‘What?’, you say, ‘Didn’t they say that would only come in if they got re-elected?’ Yeah, nah. They were lying to you. From today on, the government contribution is a maximum of $10 a week. Remember, this was the central plank of National’s savings budget.
Treasury has confirmed that National’s plan to sell public assets would need foreigners to buy a lot of the shares because domestic demand would be too small for the government to make as much money as it is counting on. Forget ‘mum and dad investors’, the big buyers would be foreign sovereign wealth funds.
Two years ago, this government sparked the biggest protests in a generation when it tried to open up the most precious parts of our conservation estate to mining. The policy got canned but the agenda has continued below the surface. Now, 100 DoC staff have been sacked while the MED unit for oil drilling and mining will nearly double its staff.
New Zealand Defence Force staff are not covered by employment law. Hundreds of them are being sacked, so as to get “more work out of fewer people”. If they’re “lucky” some of those cast aside might get civilian versions of their old jobs back, with huge pay cuts as a sweetener. Welcome to the epitome of National’s flexible labour market.
John Key was elected promising to stop the exodus to Australia. He has failed. More and more Kiwis, especially the young, are leaving. And is it any wonder?
Employers and Manufacturers Association head Alasdair Thompson’s sexist outbursts have drawn near universal condemnation, and are likely to cost him his job. But while we’re about the business of punishing sexist dinosaurs, we should set our sights a little higher than Thompson.
The snows haven’t come and the ski industry is in trouble. Is it a “cruel blow” from mother nature?
The National Research unit has created National pollster David Farrar has taken time out of his holiday to create a graph showing the reduction in tax across incomes. Supposedly it shows National’s tax cuts weren’t for the rich after all – we just imagined it! But the research unit Farrar have avoided some inconvenient facts.
Your morning Facebook-related Alasdair Thompson lolz.
This man is pure comedy gold.
Sure Alisdair Thompson’s comments today were sexist.
But they were also so dumb it’s hard to be offended.
Queen of Thorns explains
No it’s not a virus. It’s our dollar surfing on a dumper. Gareth Morgan and Neville Bennett have both written about it recently. Bennett says “There is increasing evidence that New Zealand is ailing. The symptoms are a high exchange rate, excessive foreign debt and a decline of the manufacturing sector.” The resulting damage if nothing is done, says Morgan, is “a hollowing out of our non-commodity producing businesses, no correction in our household savings rate and in time, a balance of payments/external debt crisis as those factors conspire.” Bennett is not in the camp of those who say nothing can be done and offers some ideas backed up by the IMF. We need more thinking like that.
Up to forty jobs are at risk at Dunedin’s Hillside Railway Workshops, because the government would rather send money to China than invest in Kiwi jobs and industry. It’s crazy. Come along to the public meeting tomorrow Wednesday at 7pm.
Low-paid, crappy job? It’s obviously your fault, according to the Right. You mustn’t have enough qualifications, or the correct ones. The good jobs are out there, they’re just hiding. Or, if they’re not, you can weave one from thin air. But, even if this free market magic were real, what’s the end point? The crap jobs still need to be filled.
The autocratic National government is changing the Kiwishare obligation of Telecom without consultation or notice. They say obligations will be the same, but they will no longer be legal restrictions, but changeable company “deeds”.
Are we “roaring out of recession”? No. Is there an “aggressive recovery”? No. What’s going wrong? The problem is that the Nats are squeezing the life out of the economy.
John Clarke and Bryan Dawe calculate the cost of the European debt crisis…
