Posts by Bart Janssen
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My impression is that anyone (be they architects, lawyers, doctors, actors, or others) who works in New Zealand is working at an inferior rate to the rest of the OECD.
Yup. For science it's variable but equivalent roles in Aussie are paid 25-100% more. Just a part of choosing to live in New Zealand.
Is it my misunderstanding or is SAG simply a US union and mostly Californian union that is trying to dictate wages in New Zealand? That really seems very odd indeed. Why would New Zealand actors want to join a union based in, and clearly only interested in, another country? Same applies to the MEAA.
Just weird.
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Ben
might change any of their habits over this, and even then I'm very dubious
I'll go along with you on some of your other points but I'll dispute this.
The WHO study Russell linked as well as many other studies prove that consumer purchasing patterns are heavily influenced by price. It is the single biggest driver in purchasing choices between similar products and has been shown (in controlled statistically significant studies) to alter long term buying patterns.
In short if you make it cheaper people will buy more of it and the reverse is true.
It is one of the problems in the nutrition field that unhealthy heavily processed "foods" can also be very cheap and in that situation it doesn't matter how much education you do it is almost impossible to get people to change from cheap unhealthy to more expensive but healthy. Even though in surveys they say they would make that change!
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But, as others have mentioned, then whoever did that would be the Nanny State.
So wear the badge with pride.
Seriously the job I want my government representatives to do is manage the things I cannot manage on my own. I want a government that is willing to take on that responsibility and if they do that then I'll be happy about paying them.
A huge part of that responsibility could simply be described as being a good nanny.
taking care of my piggy bank = nanny.
taking me to the doctor when I'm sick = nanny
making sure the toilet flushes = nanny
looking after me when I'm old = nannyAnd yes sometime stopping me doing things I might want to do that would do me harm = nanny
FFS having a really good nanny in government would suit me just fine.
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Coming late on this but I think Tom has a valid point on this
No he claimed we were only arguing because we were brainwashed. In fact we are having a discussion between more and less knowledgeable people about the complexities of the proposal.
@Ben
Ok I accept your opinion that implementation is more complex than I thought.@Matthew
Yeah enforcement is always the area where I thought this would come completely unstuck.Isn't the correct question; do the benefits of making the system more complicated outweigh the costs?
I don't think so. Yes that question has implications on the value in dollar terms of the change. If the costs of making the change are so great that income taxes need to be raised to simply cover the implementation cost then it is a stupid idea in every sense.
But the real question here is
"How do you encourage healthier eating habits and make is easier for the lower income brackets to achieve those habits?"Part of the question is purely political philosophy. Some folks believe the government has a role to play in helping people eat better food and also a role to play in supporting the poor. Some folks believe governments have no role in those things.
Another part of the question is around what constitutes healthy food and how can you define that reasonably simply for legislative purposes. Assuming you are going to legislate.
And another part of the question is around whether we pay enough tax in New Zealand to support the government run activities that we want (eg health care, education etc).
What I find personally annoying at the moment is that there is an accepted dogma in New Zealand that we should pay less tax. Hence this policy is framed around reducing tax.
If you instead say New Zealanders should want to pay more tax so that our government can afford to pay for the things we want out government to supply, then this policy become much simpler to implement.
Identify broad categories of manifestly unhealthy foods (which BTW is much easier to do scientifically) and add a duty to them. And I know for certain that adding duties is easy for supermarkets and grocers etc because they already do it for other manifestly unhealthy things.
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I find it hard to believe that the cost of implementing a GST exemption would be that high. Exemptions already exist which suggests the systems have the ability to define exemptions and all you are doing is changing what fits that definition.
There is however an enforcement cost which is real.
However the fact I find it hard to believe does not mean that Ben isn't right.
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purity of the economic model
Boggle.
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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.
I'd seen similar stuff elsewhere. The problem is that most of the easily identifiable unhealthy food makes money for some business. So the argument gets trotted out that governments should protect business.
Interestingly the other half of that statement rarely gets mentioned, that is, that governments should sacrifice people in favour of businesses.
From the WHO report
The four peer-reviewed studies on food consumption all found that a subsidy, tax or change to a tax altered consumption in the expected direction.
But the problem seems to be that it's one thing to reduce consumption of a particular type of food and entirely a more difficult thing to show that change results in a change in health.
Also from the report this gem
Bahl et al.21 found that a 20% reduction in a soft drink tax resulted in a 6.8% increase in average soft drink consumption.
What kind of moron actually reduces tax on soft drinks!!!!?!?!?
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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.
The arguments over what is healthy are long and very messy. Especially since the science around what is known to be healthy is actually pretty undeveloped. There are a lot of small studies and even more anecdotal reports about healthy foods. But most of the hard science has been reductionist in nature - looking at specific compounds only. The scientists doing that work freely admit that when such compounds are blended in a whole food and then digested much of what is learned from the reductionist studies becomes irrelevant.
Last time I looked I actually couldn't find a study that showed that eating fruit improved health! The best long term study (the US nurses health study) showed no significant correlation between fruit and health*.
However, there have been quite a few studies showing various "foods" are unhealthy. A simple summary might say the more processed it is the more likely it is to be unhealthy.
So how do you make a reasonable pass at encouraging healthy food habits? Well there is pretty good data that suggests that eating things that you can recognise as being food is good ie unprocessed. And eating mostly plants rather than animals (mostly not exclusively) and eating not too much food is a pretty good rough guideline. This is Michael Pollan's thesis and I find it pretty compelling.
Having a tax policy that goes some way towards encouraging that seems sensible.
This punt by Labour isn't far off. If I were king I'd go further by taxing processed foods more (eg anything with lots of sugar in it) and I'd also probably take the time to work through exempting things like frozen peas which are by most measures better than peas that haven't been frozen.
But in the end it comes down to a nanny state argument. Should a government spend money (or not tax) in order to improve the health of the population OR should a government just let people make mistakes and die (slowly or quickly) as a result of those mistakes?
*I think there have been a couple of recent studies that show some correlation but I haven't read them yet.
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these things might have been hard to do in 1960 when the ledgers were done longhand with quill pens.
When GST first appeared this was a real issue and the low cost of implementing New Zealand's simple system was a huge advantage.
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.
But the cost of enforcement might still be an issue. Some scumbag will try and rort the system and there is a cost involved in having the IRD capable of detecting such a rort.
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The problem seems to be that most folks seem to know both wasted potheads and people who use cannabis safely and sensibly.
The same is true of alcohol.
And my guess is the same is true for most drugs, although for some drugs there appears to be no safe consumption.
The problem is that neither legal consumption (in the case of alcohol) nor prohibition (in the case of cannabis) works terribly well at identifying and helping those people whose consumption is unsafe (for themselves or others).
Ranting for or against prohibition isn't helpful nor is piling abuse on people whose opinion differs from ones own.
My own feeling is that prohibition makes it difficult to properly study the effects and use of drugs. But for the legal drug alcohol all the study in the world hasn't really helped as much as society needs.
As for the relationship with crime not even that is straightforward. Some dealers are decent folks running a reasonable business that happens to be illegal and some are scumbags. And it isn't clear to me how to favour the decent dealers and put the scumbags in jail (assuming that's the best place to put them).
That said we don't have much money in New Zealand to pay for a huge police force. I don't feel comfortable with the police spending huge amounts of time and energy policing cannabis. In simple practical terms given a limited number of police I'd rather they worked on crimes that did more damage to society (note I said more which means I am aware cannabis does some damage). I also don't feel that I know enough about that criminal world to know the answer for sure and I'd tend to trust those people who have made enough of a study of the field to be genuine experts.