Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Ok, so I've just looked up tax rates and teachers pay scales for 2008.
The top tax rate came in at $70,000. Maximum base salary for a teacher, even today, is $68,980. Allowances add an average $5,600 to this, but 97% of teachers (being in salary group 4 or below) make less than $50k base, so are very unlikely to get to $70k.
So the "teacher paying top rate tax" is pretty much a myth.
(Sure, *principals* can make big dollars. Even more if they manage to run a few little scams and fiddles. But not classroom teachers.).
It'd be nice if teachers *could* make enough money to pay higher rate tax. But that would involve government raising more money to pay them. And it doesn't help that the wealthy are able to use their lightly taxed wealth to buy their kids into expensive schools that isolate them from the main ordinary system.
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News International (and Associated, the Telegraph, etc) are in a complex symbiotic relationship with the UK government (whether Tory or Labour). The government lets Big Media do what it likes, Big Media props up the government and ensures that any real opposition is vilified out of existence.
It's exactly the same as Pravda was, but with deniability.
APN/Fairfax are in a similar position with the NZ government, just in more of a bush league way.
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Hard News: A Capital Idea?, in reply to Deborah,
In the UK you can claim losses forward in the same way as you can with business losses. It’s mostly ringfenced to other gains (so if you sold a house one year at a $100k loss, then next year sold another at $100k profit, you’d have no tax to pay, but you can’t take capital losses against unrelated income).
Also, in terms of admin costs, the IRD spends around 75c to collect $100 of tax. Even if CGT were substantially harder to collect, it's hard to see how it would be other than substantially renumerative.
(The simplest way to collect would be to require that, when selling a house, a tax clearance certificate was produced before the title could be transferred. You'd have to declare if you wanted to claim it as a family home, etc. and meet the tax payment. Charging for the certificates would make the whole thing self funding).
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My experience of Lexii is that they aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, even if you don’t care about them being ugly and boring. Paint that scratches with a harsh glance. You want a BMW, get a BMW. Or a Volkswagen.
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nice in theory, impossible in practice on a global scale.
You’ve heard of Mondragon?
Five times larger than Telecom NZ. Operating in businesses from supermarkets to white goods. Run on a one person/one vote basis, with an average ratio of maximum to minimum wages of 5:1.
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we’ll have turfed the current lot of numpties
They'll be back, unless we manage truly radical change.
They've got the money, they own the media, they can convince the drones that making people put their name on election material is dictatorial corruption and we should vote for a change. If that doesn't work, they'll entryise Labour - it happened before.
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What, exactly, do you think a cooperative is? Communism?
I think you need to do some reading around the concept of Syndicalism. A true cooperative (which is very different from a company where workers have minority, unequal shareholdings) enables ownership and control to be vested in those with an interest in the enterprise's success. It's not "communism" (where a centralising state owns everything) or capitalism.
not unless Act destroy the Commerce Commission, which I grant is a possibility.
Well, NACT have already overruled CoCom in a few areas, like 10 year regulatory holidays. I'd say there's every chance they could get a waiver for a telco merger, especially with a few hundred million in slush money behind them.
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Also, let me tell you what will happen to 2degrees if they succeed.
Vodafone (or maybe Telecom) will buy them. They'll take a write off of all those accumulated losses against their taxes (ensuring they avoid any contribution to the community for a year or two). They'll then take a further write-off against the value of the acquisition (as they did here).
End result - we're back to a duopoly and the telecoms industry has avoided a whole load of tax.
[I'll look forward to pulling this back from Google in a few years time when it happens..]
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We need 2degrees to succeed
I’d dispute that. We’d be better off with a natural monopoly like telecoms being community owned through something like a worker/customer coop. I’d be happy to see such an enterprise pay negligible tax, as the profits are going to people entitled to them, not wealthy rentiers.
I think the key difference between us is that you want to improve capitalism, whereas I want to get rid of it.
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I can’t see it being a good idea to ever put caps on how much profit businesses can make.
How is this a cap? It's for the type of company that contrives to book their sales in Ireland to evade paying tax. Or generates bogus interest charges in order to reduce declared profits.
We don't need those kind of crooks. They *don't* generate GST and income tax (which is their usual defence). If they weren't around, people would work elsewhere and buy goods and services elsewhere, generating just the same tax revenues.