Posts by Russell Brown
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OnPoint: It's real, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
You didn’t agree with Ganesh Nana and think David Farrar is a partisan hack who’s never seen a stat he can’t bad touch into gibberish? And sorry for being harsh here, Russell, but how exactly does a low-quality post on Farrar’s blog balance out, mitigate or give a pass to Nine to Noon failing to properly disclose a bleeding obvious COI?
Jolly good. Radio New Zealand, who are not controlled by the Labour Party, didn't note that Nana's company had done some of the modelling for Labour's policy. They ought have done so, I quite agree, even though Nana is a fairly frequent commentator on RNZ.
But did Nana give misleading information? Was he partisan? No. Did David Farrar, whose own interests with National were not acknowledged either, do those things? I think he quite clearly did.
I'm not outraged by him being tapped as a commentator, but I'm quite shocked by how disingenuous his commentary was. And I think a comparison with Nana is, in this case, quite insulting to Nana.
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More Farrar apple-and-orange action:
Labour also announced a new top tax rate of 39%, for those earning $150,000 or more a year. They obviously feel those people are not paying enough tax through 33% income tax, 15% GST and now also a 15% CGT.
Hey, yeah -- and when you add all those up, that's like 66% tax ... isn't it? Fark.
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For the mystified, Danyl fisked DPF’s graph.
Amazingly, he’s trotting out the exact same misdirection in his Herald column today.
Households who earn $150,000 or more currently contribute 71% of the net income tax (tax less transfers) of all households. So 10% of the households pay 71% of the next tax. If you take households over $120,000 then you have 17% of the households pay 97% of net income tax.
At the other end of the tax scale, you have 44% of households with income under $50,000. Those 44% of households play $1.7 billion in income tax and receive $7.7 billion in welfare transfers such as Working for Families, Accommodation Supplements etc.
He knows damn well that the top tax rate doesn’t apply to household incomes over $150,000, but to personal incomes. He’s deliberately and misleading conflating the two. If someone else did this, he’s go to town on them.
Good to see the Herald includes DPF’s disclosure statement at the bottom of his column. It has never been more needed than it is today.
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OnPoint: It's real, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I think I can be atypically terse on this: No.
If Curia is writing the costings of National policies (prominently displayed on their website) and David Farrar is on a panel discussion of those policies without a very full disclosure at the top of the interview, I’ll be calling bullshit too.
M’kay?
I'd be more inclined to agree if pretty much everything David Farrar has said on the issue since yesterday afternoon hadn't been such obvious, disingenuous, unmitigated party spin.
I was actually quite shocked by the way he presented that graph on his website.
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Hard News: An inspirational record, in reply to Danielle,
Right there. That’s where you had me.
You, beat-lovin' lady, need to open your digital wallet and get yourself some local hip hop in that @peace record.
Just sayin'.
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Hard News: An inspirational record, in reply to recordari,
see you at The Adults
Yep. In tonight.
I'm going tomorrow night with some of my Media7 crew. Might tap you tomorrow for set times.
MagikJ has been remixing them already too.
Tune!
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And one more from the archives:
Fiona has scanned and posted a hugely important Listener feature from August 1981, in which Tony Reid and Phil Gifford reporting from the Springbok tour find a country "unrecognisably changed, angrily divided and threateningly alien."
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Field Theory: Bicycle Race, in reply to James Butler,
Russell, the other day I was going to compliment Cactuslab for enabling YouTube redirect on iOS, but I forgot. Now it’s gone again…
Ah. There's a bunch of new stuff waiting to be switched on. It'll be back.
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Hard News: Angry and thrilled about Arie, in reply to petard,
There appears to be a sub text here that i have missed . The case has become a hot potato with the Judiciary saying to the police “here you deal with this ” and the police saying to the Judiciary “no no you deal with this”
I think in repeatedly referring the case back to police with the implication that they reconsider diversion, the judiciary has made its view pretty clear.
And, as tussock notes, the media have been all over this case from the beginning – because the police made the remarkable decision to subject the two young men to a “perp walk” for the cameras. Arie was “the face of looting” long before he was the persecuted Aspie.
And the police made this decision knowing that the news audience would see his injuries. It’s bloody hard to avoid the view that they were using the media to make a point.
Now, of course, the point they were seeking to make has come back to bite them. The police fucked up, and they continue to fuck up. Someone needs to call off this idiocy.
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OnPoint: Why Rightwingers Should Support…, in reply to Sacha,
the over reach of WFF and the depressive effect that it has had on wage bargaining
You may have the causality backwards. If pay rates as a proportion of total company profits and productivity improvement had even stayed the same over the past few decades, a wage subsidy would never have been proposed.
I'd have to say you're both right.