Posts by Paul Campbell
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as my kids old primary school teacher would say "words! use your words kids" - Hooten claims to be one of the best and brightest, he writes for a living - he should be able to come up with better adjectives
Of course the real reason is that he's a blowhard - he thrives on the attention, it's how he makes his living and without it he'd shrivel up and die - most journalists want a byline, he needs to be the story - I bet he's already tried to land an O'Reilly-like show somewhere
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He basically did explain it - they're not going to take care of an investment that's been made on the stock market/etc through your bank - CDs and savings will be OK - this is SOP for deposit insurance schemes world wide
I do like the US scheme more - it requires banks to maintain particular liquidity requirements to qualify and puts a cap on how much per customer per bank they will cover (means you have to diversify that $5M across many banks both spreading your risk and the govt's). However I understand they have to do something right now - hopefully once parliament is back in session they will formalise this and be a bit smarter about it long term
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On another board friends play "Caption DIY" - I offer:
"I'm turning this in, ACT have need of my talents"
"Weren't there leaves back there when we walked in?"
"I have a new strategy - look into my shiny tie ... are you feeling sleepy ..."
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If you're going to mention "The Great Schlep" you have to include Sarah Silverman's promo
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Yeah it was Angus - the whole Tait trust thing is just weird though and more a result of family politics and paranoia as far as i can tell - it's certainly not going to be the norm for any other NZ companies
We have to face facts - our companies grow up an leave just like our kids do - it's the way our world works - just like with kids we have to keep making more companies - what we need for that is smart people (check, got that covered), a risk capital market ie VCs (not really all our money's tied up in real estate - Kiwisaver looks like it will help with this in the long run, if it stays around) and a big enough pool so that people will make some money (ie lots of startups to spread the risk over - most will fail, some will be spectacular - VC investments are risky, you make money by doing enough of them)
We do have some real structural problems compared to other countries - in the US for example there's the lure of long term capital gains - you pay a lower tax rate if you invest money for the long haul (other wise it's just normal income) - here because there's no capital gains tax at all it's pretty hard to build that incentive into the economy - all investments are the same - the quick buying a house and flipping it and investing thru the ups and downs of creating real wealth. You have to think of capital gains taxes as a way to encourage productive investment, not just as a way to soak the rich - it's how we get real gains in our standard of living, not by moving real estate around.
We also don't really have a tradition of people getting rich through stock options - not founders, but the guy who joined Apple/Sun/Google as employee number 10, earned that 'fuck you' million at 28 and retired at 30 - Silicon Valley, where I lived for 20 years, has all that - everyone knows someone who knows someone (even I know some people who've retired at 30 and are terminally bored) - here we laud the founders of companies in the media but there aren't those 'folk tales' that inspire people to go work for startups with dreams of making it big (hopefully we can change that).
R&D credits are a small part of what you need to make it easy to make lots of real companies - they're just a start
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In a sinking economy ....
I wonder how much John Key spends on household help .... -
Well JK has an independent income - probably far above any salary he gets from parliament - I suspect his income is far above that of the PM
It's actually a great question for ALL the leaders in a debate - "how much more will you personally be earning if you become the governmen under your tax scheme?" - not only does it tell us if they understand their tax plan, we also get some idea if the candidate can do simple math on their feet (and besides you just know they already worked it out anyway - to say otherwise would give us some idea of their truthiness)
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Eddie - I'm in the same boat and mostly agree with you (I don't mind paying tax, I think it's a civic responsibility) - but I think it's a fair comment - the well off make out with this big time because of the 39->33% tax cut
Maybe we could personalise it - the PM makes $375K a year - Key wants the job and he wants a 6% tax cut on income over ~75k - that means that under a National govt the PM will be getting 6% more on $300k of their income - $18,000 a year - or $346 a week - or 20 blocks of cheese in today's currency
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I spent many of my teenage geek Saturday nights in Brockville in the 70s ripping off signals from weather satellites - it was just us and the hoons (a venerable kiwi word sadly fallen on tough times)
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yeah - if you want to stop stupid people from voting you have to educate them and make them not-stupid