Posts by Paul Campbell
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yes, Emma a good idea food banks are pretty empty right now
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Mike: I'll go one further - I welcomed my 39% marginal rate (it was less that what I was paying in California) and happily pay it, I believe in a progressive tax system.
For years my accountant has been trying to sell me on various ways to avoid paying tax at that rate, mostly because my wife and I own a company - so far I've resisted for purely ideological reasons - and today there was spam from the accountancy firm in my inbox talking about how I should change my affairs to make the best of the new tax regime ....
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Like kiwi, kakapo seem to leave an unpleasant earthy aftertaste - heavy pickling as described above is a great idea - we prefer the 'stone soup' method and indeed eventually found that leaving out the kiwi or kakapo provides the best tasting pickled ground fowl
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Hmmm - I mostly earn US$ - because of the drop in the NZ$ in the past week I'm earning ~6% more than I was - if you're a farmer on the top marginal rate you just got 5% from the budget and 6% more from the accompanying drop in the value of the dollar.
Mind you the (overdue) drop in the dollar, while timed with the run up to the budget may have as much to do with external forces.
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Hmmm - I mostly earn US$ - because of the drop in the NZ$ in the past week I'm earning ~6% more than I was - if you're a farmer on the top marginal rate you just got 5% from the budget and 6% more from the accompanying drop in the value of the dollar.
Mind you the (overdue) drop in the dollar, while timed with the run up to the budget may have as much to do with external forces.
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they did equal it with the trust rate though didn't they? that will probably stop a lot of middle class rorts instead
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I'm also very leery of this whole "if we don't give them tax cuts the rich will leave" argument - my argument is very simple: "no capital gains tax" - now if they'd traded that for lower taxes at the top end I might be cheering.
The argument that Australia has lower taxes doesn't apply here either - the top marginal tax rates there are 45% (over $180k) [plus indirectly state payroll tax] - and capital gains are taxed at your marginal rate
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There is a calculator at http://www.taxguide.govt.nz/ - it doesn't explain the math and assumptions behind it so treat it with a large grain of salt - it could also be considered propaganda ....
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There's no reason why we can't be doing R&D on designs for mass production - that's what I do day to day - what we probably wont be doing is doing that mass production ourselves here - we're still a relatively high wage economy, and even when China and India go all middle class on us there will still be low wage economies around to do that stuff.
But designing stuff to be built in China (or Vietnam or wherever) is something we can do - there are giant 'factories' in China waiting for us to use them, really empty buildings where you rent the space by the week, they bring in the rented manufacturing machines, skilled labour to run them, source the parts, fill a bunch of containers for you and send them off while they tear your temporary factory down and move onto the next company .... get your sales volumes up enough and your factory becomes semi permanent and your costs go down ...
Anyone can do this from the small entrepreneur to a large company wanting to outsource .... there's no reason why we can't have bright ideas design them here, build them in China and sell the world wide just like everyone else - in fact if we don't we're missing out.
Of course 50 years from now it's all going to change, shipping will be a thing of the past and there will be a fabber in a store downtown that will make whatever we want, including one for home .....
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My experience of R&D (given it's about half of what I do) is that the really neat game changing stuff happens in small companies, not so much in big ones - it's hard to innovate in a company that has mature products, they are where the time and money go - in fact some of those small places are refugees from big companies - probably the same can be said in a way for Universities where the main product is students, not research.
I think there's a big fear of failure here - most startups crash and burn - it's the nature of the beast - people lose money on most of them - but then make a killing on the ones that do fly high - in Silicon Valley failure isn't such a big deal - it's often more about how well you rode the beast than where it ended up - if you were a good manager or engineer and now have more experience then it's time to move on to the next big idea.
I'm glad they're funding science - I do think it's really important for lots of reasons - eventually that stuff trickles down into my world - but it worries me that Key et al are conflating "Science" and "R&D", which aren't always the same thing, and thinking their job is done - if they want medium to long term growth in the economy (past the next election or two) they need to create a better environment where new little companies can start up (and fail) and grow to make more new middle sized companies