Posts by Gareth Ward
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OnPoint: Budget 2011: A Credible Path to…, in reply to bmk,
This may not be legal
It wasn't. Until National explicitly made it so (2009 I think?).
That is exactly why the "employer/employee" split is crap - it's all employee so long as it's voluntary and they can consider "their" contribution to be your payrise. -
Keith I'd love your take on the asset sale implications. They claim to expect to raise $7billion, which will only lose them $300million in revenue, but save $400million in debt servicing. That seems to mean that the power companies, Solid Energy and AirNZ aren't even covering their cost of capital at the moment?! I find that very hard to believe, but if true then who the hell is going to buy them at that rate?
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to Sacha,
And more on Budget alternatvies from the Greens.
That really is excellent (although DPF's critique of the big hole in their minimum wage modelling does hold - they've ignored the drop in the company tax take that will accompany it)
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to Sacha,
The tax cuts were supposed to cause growth (they didn’t), and the growth was supposed to pay for the cuts (it didn’t). Now here we are with record borrowing and debt instead.
Not a big Standard fan, but that's a pretty good summation.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to Russell Brown,
Ideally, there would be an "at your own reasonable risk" standard
For sure, but I'd presume that at that standard, a few "commonly" taken drugs would still fail the grade.
I don't have a detailed understanding of relative drug harms but if, say, P failed that standard we'd still have a ban. I guess I'm wondering if there would not still be all the existing problems of prohibition, or would they be "watered down" enough by the:
a) availability of other drugs
b) eventual faith that the bans are actually there for harm-minimisationAnd how would you deal with breaches of that ban under that sort of regime? Possession would presumably be nothing (if you want to harm yourself, away you go), but supply would need criminal charges around endangerment I suppose.
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to Islander,
On other matters - Key is saying the "budget will forecast higher wages"
Wow, read "our forecasts will be based on a significant uptick in tax revenue from higher wages and yet there'll still be a massive deficit". If those forecasts are wrong, then the 2012 Budget will be even uglier...
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"an approval process managed by the Ministry of Health"
I've been intrigued by this for a while - if we took a pure "fit for human consumption" angle on various drugs, would they all pass muster? Could the Ministry of Health really approve P as fit for consumption?
And if they don't, aren't we just back in the same state we're in now? I suppose that if people genuinely believed that the "ban" decision was driven from a health-based, harm minimisation view that the illicit demand for it would be significantly reduced... -
Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to Matthew Poole,
One of the scariest things about Brash is that he hasn't changed his economic views in over 20 years. He still believes ardently in minimal regulation of the financial sector, for example, even with the evidence from the last five years.
Of course he does - otherwise he might actually have been punished for governing a Kiwisaver company that was actively misrepresenting its investment returns and whose staff are now facing fraud charges. I can't believe he's getting away so lightly there - even if he didn't know what Hulijch was doing, he was chairman and is therefore guilty of the worst negligence of governance. And I believe governance is kinda what political leaders are meant to do.
Any time Brash makes any comment on Kiwisaver specifically, and financial regulation in general, Hulijch Wealth should be mentioned in the next sentence...
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And I hearby patent OTTER (OTT Engagement Rules) for reference to a great deal of counter terrorist activity...
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The killing of Bin Laden and reference to the SEAL team's ROE made me think of the poor Brazilian guy killed on the Tube.
Defense officials claimed that the team was specifically told to assume OBL was wearing a suicide vest and therefore unless they found him stark bollocking he was always going to be shot as they couldn't confirm no threat. Not so much an extra-judicial killing as an OTT ROE that had no other likely outcome.