Posts by Keith Ng
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...are you saying they (landlords) will use dodgy reasoning to hike rents if any cost is passed on to them and that Trev is in support of this ?
I'm saying that:
a) They'll pretend the cost is more than it actually is.
b) There's a limit to what they can pass on to renters. The rest they'll have to cough up themselves.
c) Trevor was doodling some crazy shit on the back of a napkin.So, yeah, it'll probably make rents go up. But it might make property prices come down. It'll do a whole bunch of stuff, and we don't know who will get hit more. But it's not by as much as the Property Investors Federation says, and they've been consistently full of shit for quite a while now.
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I'd like to see some figures on how much depn is actually clawed back, I bet it's a small % of what is claimed as deductible.
Writing the OIA now...
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Nic:
Yeah, what Glenn said. Flip/hold relates to whether profit from sale of property is taxable or not. Whether you're a landlord (your main business is holding your property so you can rent it out) or a flipper doesn't affect depreciation.
And the rent market isn't a static market. (I *HATE* this argument from the landlords.) If landlords sell up and get out of the rental market, they must be selling the house to *someone*. Either it's someone who's currently renting, or it's someone currently a owner-occupier, in which case *they* have to sell their house to someone, who could be currently renting, etc.
Unless landlords set their properties on fire (or, I suppose, repurpose the house into something other than a residential property), they are not decreasing the housing stock.
Also, yes - it's a double standard and it makes no sense. But the problem is that we don't have a capital gains tax, so people can treat all their gains as capital gains and load up on depreciation at the same time, so they double dip. It would be much more logical to just have a CGT. But hey, tell that to John Key.
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Or they could choose to tell you to take your out of touch middle class bullshit and just fuck off.
Christ Tom, did you not read the sentence immediately after that?
You just need a small group who is flexible and responsive to price. If they vote with their wallets and push down prices, those who aren't flexible will get the benefits too.
Nor is accommodation flexibility necessarily a middle class thing. Overcrowding occurs precisely because people are flexible, share rooms etc.
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buy a t shirt ?
Sorry, but I already have my next politicised cartoon zombie t-shirt purchase sorted: Ben Franklin and the Dead Presidents doing Thriller.
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I remember when I used to get outraged about people failing to adjust shit by CPI and drawing inappropriate conclusions from indicies.
Now, the frontline in the war on numeracy has shifted to "4 - 4 = 0, not 4 mutherfuckers!". Clearly, this is not going well.
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It was a dark day when KLF burnt a million pounds (wiki)
Wo-ah.
"Intellectual dry-wank", yes. But full points for commitment.
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Also, don't you realise this is the internet? Specifically the NZ blogosphere? You don't admit that you may have been working under false assumptions - you grow increasingly hostile and tangential to the mounting body of evidence.
Nah. I'm a respectable print columnst. We don't do that. We just make meaningless predictions ("A land tax seems certain, unless Key changes his mind, which is quite likely, in which case he will go with capital gains tax, something else, or nothing at all, according to my sources."), and when even *that* strategy goes south, just pull a complete Stalinist-revisionist, and pretend that we never made the prediction, that the event never occured, or that the time period in question does not exist ("June? What is June? THERE IS NO JUNE.").
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If they do that - 30% rate alignment paid for with depreciation changes and ringfencing of losses, with a rise in GST matched with a $5-6000 tax free income threshold I'd actually be pretty impressed (sorry, that may not go down too well here*). But after the massive overestimate, underdeliver of today I don't feel like they're going to go that far. But perhaps I'm being negative without even giving them the chance.
Actually, a GST increase with 100% of the revenue returned to the tax system via a tax-free threshold would actually have a net *progressive* effect (mostly).
Say, a person on $20,000/year has to pay an additional 2% ($400) of their income to cover the GST increase, but they'd get $750 in tax cuts from a tax free threshold of $6,000.
Whereas a person on $80,000/year only has to pay an additional 1.5% ($1,200) of their income to cover the GST hike (for reasons explained above), but they'd also only get $750 in tax cuts.
Thus, this combination would actually have the net effect of making the tax system more progressive.
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The decline in income taxes will be sufficient to compensate those who are not eligible for any benefit - as the goal is to set the GST rate + income tax rate to the same level as it is now anyway, so that labour income is taxed in exactly the same way.
(More seriously: I'll believe that when I see it, especially for very low income earners, c.f. Keith's figures.)
They can - but whether they will is a different matter.
Matt, the government asked the TWG to put up revenue neutral proposals, but I haven't heard them say they want total tax on labour income to stay the same.