Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Buggered if I know how banks and real estate agents escaped GST other than voices in high places. But I ask myself: would Labour introduce a capital grains tax?
I'd imagine if every time you sold your house you had to hand over 10/12.5/15% to the government of your sale price, on top of the $15 - $30 grand to your real estate agent, house sales would head towards the floor. Same thing with banks, you'll kill the flow of money.
If there was a tax on selling houses it should be set low, like 1%, or put only on the capital gains.
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I suppose this is a start, but if you really wanted to lower food prices you'd set up government run supermarkets that offered produce at fair cost plus running expenses only to the public.
Or buy it off the peasants at a centrally determined price.
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Because having larger electorates makes it impossible for voters to vote tactically for their own advantage?
No. Because if the numbers of voters in the electorates increased, the proportion of the list vote that the Maori party would earn would increase, as they got higher relative list votes in the Maori electorates.
So their list vote percentage would increase from about 2.5 to 3.something.
And yet they wouldn't pick up any additional electorate candidates, as no more electorates created.
Eventually the list vote would give them 5 MPs, which is the number of electorates they won.
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However boundaries are drawn with respect not to the voting age population, but to the electoral population, which includes non-voters, especially children.
I had always assumed that electorates were based on voter numbers, not total population, but that makes a great deal of sense.
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It's not tricky to legislate for this. Existing food legislation *already* distinguishes between fresh, unprocessed, and processed foods.
Labour haven't promised to remove the tax based on a processed/unprocessed division.
They're going to split it on fresh produce, which as far as I know doesn't match current legislation.
I'm not saying it's not possible, just saying that it's somewhat complex, and it's not a lot of savings for not a massive benefit.
If we're going to have a tax break for healthy foods, it would seem to make more sense to have it for all healthy foods of a certain standard, rather than just picking an aisle in the supermarket that most of them appear in, and then forgetting that we want people to eat healthy frozen foods, healthy meats, healthy breads, healthy snacks etc etc. That's even more complex, but at least it makes more sense than "remove the tax on green shit!" which is, as Russell called it, an opposition headline grab.
It seems to find more virtue in punitively taxing unhealthy food and drink, based on their contents, rather than what food group they fall into.
This presumably would have the impact of moving many of those products just over the line into the non-taxed bracket through adjustment of ingredients. Which would be a good thing I guess.
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But given most retailers run software that tracks and reports who, what and when specific brands are purchased let alone mere food types then implementing different taxes for different product is not nearly the cost burden it would have been a few decades ago.
I don't think it's a problem of the computer figuring it out. It's a problem of putting in place laws which can be sensibly implemented by a human entering data into the computer.
"Fresh produce" is pretty easy. That clearly includes my lettuce. Does it include the loose lettuce leaves that are in the same section? What about the pre-made salads in the next bay over?
Are nuts in their shells fresh produce? what if they're shelled but not packaged? What does it matter as nuts don't get worse for you by putting them in a bag.
But if it's about healthy foods, dried fruit are very healthy!
None of this is impossible to do. But there has to be good reason to do it and I'm unsure if a 3/23rd reduction in price does it for me.
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To me the GST on fresh produce is pretty arbitrary. In theory it's to help people buy healthy foods, but it only includes some healthy foods. If the list of things exempt from GST was to be expanded to be some sort of healthy/unhealthy dividing line, it would suddenly become complex. And it's a pretty small price cut. Decent amounts of fresh healthy food is still expensive, GST or not.
I agree with Russell that it's an opposition policy that doesn't really make much sense once you're in government.
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We do actually have the data, and my interest has been piqued, so I might do some analysis tonight.
I took Angus' claim to be that there are enough Maori voters on either the Maori roll, or on the general roll, to have elected 13 PR reps, plus 2 with the overhang in a big tactical vote.
Which is assigning a whole heap of intent to Maori on the general roll that would require some pretty good data to back it up.
And also means that those Maori that voted Act have really got some explaining to do back on the Marae I'm guessing.
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The Maori electorate votes tactically and in 2008 under MMP effectively elected 15 MPs (13PR + 2 overhang).
Well that's really over-reaching based on no data.
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Not quite sure I've got the point of that -- I live just inside the boundaries of an electorate National's held since 1949.
I think the point was, if the boundaries were redrawn under FPP, you might end up living in a labour stronghold, and then your vote for anyone else would be about as influential as toilet paper.
Though I don't seem any great momentum for FPP these days. Even the anti-MMP campaigners seem to have largely retreated to Supplmentary Member as a fallback compromise they'd happily take.