Hard News: Budget 2011: While you wait
63 Responses
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Caleb D'Anvers, in reply to
It really used to grind my gears when friends of mine whose parents had multi million dollar farms would be getting full student allowances ...
Uh, yeah. My (then) best friend at University had a property-developer father who operated a similar set of tax dodges. This was back in the '90s, so the benefit to him in terms of allowance was only something like $88 a week, but the whole process seemed so craven and dishonest that it made me finally realize that said friend and I had divergent moral values and it was perhaps time I moved on. I believe he now manages a multi-billion-dollar investment fund at a major insurance company in the City of London ...
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Russell Brown, in reply to
And it wasn’t the day for offering concrete policy alternatives – sometimes you just have to make the point that the government’s recipe is bankrupt and leave it there.
I think David Cunliffe's point that you can't present an alternative without knowing what the numbers are is entirely valid.
Also, I think Labour should hire someone to take the graphs Cunliffe has been posting at Red Alert and work them into a killer Keynote presentation for him to deliver to as many roomfuls of people as he can. I regard Cunliffe's recent efforts in arguing from evidence as a rather cheering development for the Labour Party.
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it made me finally realize that said friend and I had divergent moral values and it was perhaps time I moved on. I believe he now manages a multi-billion-dollar investment fund at a major insurance company in the City of London …
Watch out. He'll be a cabinet minister in a dozen or so years.
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Sacha, in reply to
a killer Keynote presentation
do you really see him as a Mac user?
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
I regard Cunliffe's recent efforts in arguing from evidence as a rather cheering development for the Labour Party.
Here he is on the budget on Checkpoint.
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nzlemming, in reply to
That's nice work. Thanks.
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nzlemming, in reply to
The RoNS is only supposed to be $11B, which is coincidentally the same amount as JonKey reckoned he could get from selling off some assets.
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I think Labour should hire someone to take the graphs Cunliffe has been posting at Red Alert
Cunliffe's deficit predictions back from 2008 weren't based on Treasury forecasts were they? That might be a bit risky.
Has he tried to reconcile his claims that National is borrowing $380m a week to pay for tax cuts to the rich when his own graph shows this not to be the case. That the earthquakes and financial crisis have made by far the largest contribution to the govts financial problems.
I'm all for evidence, when there's evidence.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
The RoNS is only supposed to be $11B
I couldn't help thinking "That's an awful lot to pay for Barker and Corbett"
/coat
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Sacha, in reply to
"That's an awful lot to pay for Barker and Corbett"
Their benefit-cost ratio would compare extremely well with Joyce's vain follies
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Trust me the and live in hope that the recovery is just around the corner; the budget is a work of optimism largely in response to voter research and polling. The end result will be that National retains the treasury benches.
Hooray for them and Hooray for us.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
And the second graph on this associated post is quite chilling.
At the local level every year our senior executives have predicted revenue increases that are exponential. Every year revenue tracks exactly where it tracked for the past 20 years. Every year at the halfway point in the financial year there is a panicked e-mail, saying revenues are below forecast and we (you) will have to sacrifice. In our case that means no travel to conferences and no new equipment.
This National government appears to have gone to the same seminars as our managers. sigh.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
I’m going to deduct my mortgage interest against my income as an expense too. I’m also going to deduct my petrol bill as I drive to and from work as expenses, along with the clothes I have to purchase for work, and food I need to eat in order to be able to carry out the functions of my job.
Unless of course I’m not allowed to live by the same rules of others.
The rules as they apply to other wage/salary earners do apply to you. And those rules allow none of those things to be deducted.
If you’re self-employed, those things are deductible inasmuch as they’re unavoidable expenses incurred wholly in the pursuit of generating your income. Clothing and food mostly don’t count, and even when wage/salary earners could deduct expenses they were still mostly excluded from being deductible.
Farmers are covered by the same rules as apply to any other business, and that includes the self-employed. Getting bitchy and snarky doesn’t change the fact that the rules as applied to agriculture are no different from the deductibility rules that apply to others.
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