According to John Key the proposed tax on capital gains if a property is sold within two years of purchase is not a capital gains tax, there is no housing bubble in Auckland, and the proposed new tax does not represent a complete about face by the Government.
Auckland house prices have exploded again. Houses get more capital gains than their inhabitants do in salaries. So what is the government doing about it? Nothing. They haven’t tried the economic basics.. Capital gains tax to decrease demand, or a building programme to increase supply. Meanwhile National’s landlord MPs laughing all the way to the bank…
This week the Reserve Bank recommended adopting the Labour / Green capital gains tax, the National party denied and dithered, and Don Brash explained the truth about the property bubble.
(Image credit Foxy.)
A guest post by Deborah Russell responding to Government claims that we already have a capital gains tax on the sale of land.
John Key’s latest pronouncement is that achieving a budget surplus is as difficult as landing a 747 on a pinhead. Michael Cullen must be a super airline pilot if this is the case.
UK Labour have promised “all-out war on tax avoidance and evasion”. NZ Labour should follow suit.
Gotcha politics is all good sport when the opposition makes a mistake. How about Key’s self-inflicted blunder?
Another big tax evasion scandal with links to NZ. Don’t expect the government to spend any time looking in to this.
Rob Salmond has a bite at Eric Campton’s rather ideologically naive ideas about balancing up the GST playing ground between local and overseas retailers. Rather than not doing anything about it as Eric suggests and leaving local retailers flailing. Why not just make it simple as local collection of GST?
Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century came to the strong conclusion that capitalism left by itself will increase inequality and cause increased risk of social, economic and democratic upheaval. He has an unlikely supporter, albeit critical, in Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world.
The lied about surplus in the run up to the 2014 National Election is looking like matching Penn and Teller for magical skills. […]
Click-bait, moi?
Nothing so clearly demonstrates John Key’s contempt for the New Zealand voter as his confidence that we will believe whatever he tells us. […]
Nationals hypothetical tax cut package has not gone down well. People do not appear to like the fact that it is small, hypothetical, and irresponsible, all at once.This is what you get when you have a prime minister so weakly desperate for public approval that they make up policy by accident and then push that poor decision through their cabinet and caucus.
The economy is a mess, the Nats have no ideas, and their current policies (e.g. hypothetical tax cuts) are getting laughed out of town. National is useless on the economy, and the sooner we the people wake up to this fact, the better off we will be.
Duncan Garner asks – “when we’ve just borrowed $55b over 6 years how on earth are tax cuts suddenly affordable?”. Presumably it’s a rhetorical question…
I was in the front row of the audience at the Press leader’s debate between David Cunliffe and John Key. While the media in Auckland and Wellington might have called it one way, the people in Christchurch were only presented with one leader who understands the issues in this city, and it wasn’t the Prime Minister.
So National are both so out of ideas and so desperate to take the spotlight off their Dirty Politics that they’re now promising tax cuts. Tax cuts straight after we have a panel of our most prominent economists warning that the ‘rock star’ economy is going to hit the rocks.
According to the PM, Bill English saying there won’t be tax cuts was both true and untrue at the same time, like a fiscal Schroedinger’s Cat.
Labour has the bold set of policies to take New Zealand forward into the 21st century – National’s “same old same old” tinkering will see the Kiwi skiff swamped. That was the clear conclusion from the debate between David Parker and Bill English on National Radio this morning.
For me the funniest thing that happened last week was Cameron Slater proudly announcing that he’d put in a privacy complaint about the someone hacking his data. Three days later he finds out that he was the target of a privacy act prosecution for similar acts.
“Why would an overseas buyer pay more for an asset than a New Zealander? … But Chalkie reckons one reason stands out – tax. There are huge tax advantages available to overseas investors that simply cannot be accessed by locals.”
To say that ACT’s new company tax policy is complete and utter drivelling crap would be a bit of an understatement.
The extent that the National minister have been pork-barreling the roading budget for their electorates is crazy. The OIA’s show that most of the $212 million announced by John Key at the National party conference is pure pork for ministers. They are assessed as costing more money to build than they will ever produce in benefits, even using NZTA’s infamously overoptimistic assessments. National MPs and Ministers want to be seen as delivering something for their electorates before the election. So much for assessing needs based on merits. They must be really worried about this election to misuse so much pork.
An interesting idea out of the US for how to fairly tax multinationals around the world. Declare a worldwide profit, find out where they made their sales, an apportion the profit to various jurisdictions.
The British public estimates the poor pay around 24% of their income in tax, while the rich pay around 35%. The truth is very different. Once you add up all taxes, the poorest actually pay around 43% of their income in tax, compared to only 35% for the rich. We have the same perceptual issues in NZ especially if you listen to the whining of Kiwiblog. Here the poorest pay the same tax rate as the rich, and the middle classes have the lower tax rate.
Russel Norman has announced a business-friendly policy for a “smart, green” focus on innovation. A move towards a “Green New Deal”, working with the current system, and away from neoliberalism. It won’t dismantle capitalism, but exists within a framework for a fairer NZ.
Rob Salmond has been looking through the newly released Ministry of Social Development’s Household Incomes Report. It really is invaluable.
If the aims of National/ACT’s education policy were, genuinely, to to improve the learning, education and career choices for our children, including the ones that are failing at present, they would not be following policies which have signally failed to achieve any of these goals, anywhere else they have been tried.
Capital gains tax is now accepted by a more people than who oppose it. But for a policy long considered a “third rail” of New Zealand politics, its a significant shift. It ought to put paid forever to the idea that parties must go with the flow of public opinion because they are unable to affect it. Weak parties are. But if Labour stops being scared of its own shadow and afraid of its left-wing heritage, it can actually change things, and build the majorities it needs to govern.
I’m a glass half-full kind of a guy, so I want to start by emphasising the parts of Labour’s just-released fiscal plan that I like. The good: commitment to paying off government debt during economic good times, tax rate changes are welcome, and targeting tax avoidance by large multinationals. Bad: the top tax rate is still too low, and no need to signal second term tax cuts. Overall I would give this package a B+.
Rob Salmond at Polity has a series of posts in recent days that have been well worth reposting but alas they missed due to travel. Who gained from National’s tax switch? and May TV polls. But he is on fire since he got back from aussie – perhaps they spiked his drinks? But this one looking at the probable shifts in inequality in NZ in the future is pretty damn sobering to anyone who thinks that we need a more equal society.
No Right Turn on paying private schools and childcare as being charitable ‘donations’ and thereby trying to defraud taxpayers.
John Key is clearly lying about tax again. He claims that most of “all nett tax” is paid for by the wealthy. As usual he ignores the 15% GST tax, the various sales taxes on things like petrol, and the many other sales and consumption taxes. GST and other consumption taxes are largely paid for by the not wealthy. Which is why they were raised to pay for National’s tax cuts for the wealthy.
Local bodies points out a couple more of the National government’s sad-sacks. For some strange (but obvious) reason a warmish market for milk powder doesn’t do much for NZ apart from destroying our environment. English’s taxcuts for his wealthy mates have destroyed the fiscal base of the government and done nothing to cause any investment in the productive and employable parts of our economy. Tim Groser has also made an artform of making NZ worse off.
In my previous post on how a UBI would address inequality, it turns out I figured out something that is already known as a measure of inequality called the Gini coefficient and the Lorenz curve. A lower Gini coefficient is better and represents a more equal society. It is a recognised way of measuring and comparing inequality between countries, changes in equality overtime and for the effects of taxation proposals. Looking at it for NZ shows the effects of the last 30 years of neoliberal “reform”.
