Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: Radio NZ: Sailing on in…, in reply to nzlemming,
doing it accessibly
and produced an example that puts government departments to shame.
#onya -
Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you, in reply to James Butler,
CGT
/threadmerge
Quite. Over here.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Russell Brown,
And curse the day the Building Act 1991 was passed into law.
Bless those fervent deregulators; Atlases all.
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Lew admires Labour's handling of the politics so far.
And then there’s the class-consciousness, demographic wedge, which Chris Trotter got pitch-perfect: property speculators are “landlords”, and the object isn’t to win back disgruntled National voters, but to engage the 20%+ of the electorate who didn’t vote last time because they felt none of the parties spoke for them, and the thousands of people who were too young to cast a vote in 2008 and are now even further from the possibility of home ownership because even the worst recession in half a century has failed to bring sanity to real estate markets.
This is positive-sum, strategically sound and tactically smart politics. Now what remains to be seen is whether Labour can win the battle of ideas over it.
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Gordon Campbell interviews Rod Oram on tackling NZ's corporate under-performance, and addresses CGT.
Oram : “It would be one useful thing to do among quite a wide range of things to do. It would send some very good messages. It would send a very powerful message to many New Zealand businesses that their whole long term business model is about capital appreciation and not income along the way. Whether you buy a rental house hoping to sell it off later for more money and you don’t care if you don’t make any money in the meantime from rent….Or if you’re a dairy farmer, you are farming for capital gains.”
“You load up with debt, you go hell for leather to pay that off, you don’t pay much tax along the way….but the problem is, easy money comes along, as it did before the global crisis and dairy farmers increased their debt fourfold in then years, to $43 billion dollars. And all that did was drive up the price of land. So not only then can you really struggle to keep your head above water – just to make that work economically, but you’re entirely dependent on somebody to come along to pay more, to take it off yur hands.
Enter the Chinese, with an entirely different business model."
What he says next is dynamite, highly recommend a read. Also adds that part of the value of a CGT is smoothing cyclical govt income.
“Our government finances look pretty bad at the moment, because [they] are the most leveraged to the economic cycle in the OECD. The vast majority of government revenue is from things like GST, income tax and profits. Which are, of course, dependent on the economic cycle. In boom times, when all those are going well, the government gets disproportionately more revenue than the rate of growth [would indicate.] Which was to Michael Cullen’s great benefit….”
On the downside though, it goes the other way around. “Government revenues fall disproportionately more than economic growth does. And that’s what we’re seeing now.” Other countries, by contrast, have sources of government revenue that are not so dependent on the economic cycle. For example, Oram explains, pretty much every other developed country has a social security tax on employment, a flat tax that helps to cover things like health care and pensions. “ Instead, we pay for those out of general revenue.”
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Hard News: A Capital Idea?, in reply to Russell Brown,
But on this occasion, did not
But that just proves. something
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Isn't the problem politically *farmers* as much as residential property owners? Can't upset them, now..
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Te Listener has some detailed stories about people's situations after the announcement of colour zones.
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Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
pesky kids
how do they work?
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Up Front: Life on Mars, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
sexism
Again, in your head.