Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Not to mention the number of people that have created great things and generated wealth while existing on an academics wage, or no wage at all:
- Tim Berners Lee
- Linus Torwalds
- Ernest Rutherford -
I’ve no objection to people wanting to play rugby (or soccer, billiards, polo, Papua Rules Lacrosse or any other game).
What I object to is giving our money to Big Sport and bending our laws to accomodate them.
If I might make a suggestion to those keen on rugby, why don’t you try and take the game back from the plutocrats (as people are doing world wide in many sports)?
Why does holding the Rugby World Cup need to be a competition for which country can fork out the most dosh, build the biggest stadia and impose the most autocratic laws? Why not have the event held in each rugby nation in turn, by alphabetic rotation? New Zealand, Samoa, Scotland, South Africa, Wales and back to Argentina
You’d have a year with grass roots rugby in the islands, then another year up in Scotland, etc. Everyone would get a turn (over a period of some years). It would be nice.
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they might be quite a shitty CEO
I was working to list the various failures of Telecom management - but hey, I don't need to - it's all on their own website: http://www.telecom.co.nz/content/0,8748,200633-1548,00.html
First Media, Ferrit, AAPT, CDMA, Yahoo!Xtra, Yellow Pages....
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people already paying by far the lion’s share
I questioned the assumption that these are the wealthy $150k+ taxpayers. The treasury has a page which shows totals of taxable income in bands.
I've crunched that into a spreadsheet which I've shared through Google Docs. (I would have attached it, but hey..)
The green zone shows people earning half the total taxable income ($121bln/2 = $61bln) of NZ: that's everyone with an income up to $25k a year.
The green red and blue zones show people paying half the income tax ($23bln/2 = $11.5 bln): that's everyone with an income up to $39k a year.
What happens if you take GST into account? The total GST take ($11bln) is approx 9% of total taxable income - the difference between this and the GST rate is accounted for by a range of things, like savings, houses and foreign holidays). If you apportion this between all taxpayers, you get the columns on the right.
Basically if you include GST, half of all personal tax is paid by people on less than $34k a year.
So the "lions share" is not being paid by the wealthy, but by ordinary working stiffs.
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You wanna see the people already paying by far the lion’s share of the tax all fuck off overseas?
Yes.
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Cracker: Another Capital Idea..., in reply to Damian Christie,
I think finding the teachers pay scale for every year of the 21st century would require actual research in one of those library places. Not today. Sorry.
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Cracker: Another Capital Idea..., in reply to A. Theo Logian,
Which rather gives the lie to the argument that top public service wages must be limitless in order to compete with the private sector. If in the uber-capitalist US they can recruit for all of their top jobs without this limitation (including paying the chairman of the Fed under $200k, rather less than a junior trader on Wall St), why do we need to pay top dollar?
Personally, I'd say that $361k is a reasonable salary for any job, and that an organisation that limits its top bod to that *is* being a good corporate employer. (Given how that figure is many times what grass roots staff and clients make).
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I have a suspicion that way back when, the telecommunications services of NZ were run by the "Chief Clerk of Telephones" within the Post Office, and that that person earned about the same as a school principal and took the bus in from Ngaio every day.
Maybe we should aim for that kind of society, where people work for the challenge and benefit of the job, not to get rich.
(One could start by capping public service salaries at the amount paid to the Prime Minister. Why should anyone get more?)
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Giovanni, even if the top tax bracket came in at $250,000, you'd find that there was somebody working as a teacher who had a multi-million dollar trust fund and was paying top rate tax on the interest.
A tiny minority of teachers paid top rate tax under the last Labour government's rates.
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Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
the Sun will go 7-day
Highly likely. Which would make it rather cheaper to operate, given economies of scale from a 7-day newsroom, common back office, etc. So Murdoch wins out financially.