Posts by Matthew Poole
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OnPoint: Budget 2011: Now with 70% less wordiness!, in reply to Bart Janssen,
it’s a bad idea mostly centred around the cost in administration of such a one time levy
Yeah, nah, not buying that one. Yes it'll cost to administer, but it'll still raise a hell of a lot more money than it costs.
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OnPoint: Budget 2011: Now with 70% less wordiness!, in reply to James Butler,
Well exactly, it’s one bit of revenue which they couldn’t get away with turning into a top-end tax cut. I hope.
I suspect their objection is more grounded in the fact that the Greens dared to suggest that such a levy could be rated progressively. And I have to say, a lot of people on Your Views got very bitchy about the whole "we're in this together" only being applied to people earning at least the median wage instead of being applied at the same rate to everyone who has any income whatsoever.
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OnPoint: Budget 2011: Now with 70% less wordiness!, in reply to Bart Janssen,
heck I’m not certain wtf they did with the money but it’s gone.
Some of it hasn't been spent. It's just sitting there, accumulating servicing costs. English said as much a couple of weeks ago, when he said that some of the borrowing recently has been far in excess of need in order to take advantage of the interest rates available.
more taxation tends to depress economies
It can't depress our economy much further than the slash'n'burn approach taken by National has already achieved, and if it's spent wisely on transfer payments to the lowest-income families and on training people for the Christchurch reconstruction then the growth effect should be fairly significant.
One of the most infuriating aspects of how National have buggered things up royally is the absolute refusal to impose a levy for Christchurch. It would be accepted by most people, particularly if it had an entrenched expiry clause, and would deal with a reasonable chunk of the projected borrowing.
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OnPoint: Budget 2011: Now with 70% less wordiness!, in reply to giovanni tiso,
yes, the Tories are right that we need to cut spending
Depends where one cuts the spending. Cutting spending on Roads of Dubious Significance in order to spend money on social policies is objectionable to you? You'd rather than the RODS and the social policies were funded?
National have fucked the economy in a craptacular fashion. Economic incompetence on a grand scale. Even Craig doesn't dispute that English qualifies for an "F" for "Fucking useless" when it comes to how he's handled the economy - though the precise phrasing of the crimes is open for debate.
Given that, Goff doesn't have a hell of a lot of wiggle room. National have been pre-loading debt, for one thing, so a lot of the borrowing has already occurred and must now be serviced. The best we can really hope for is a shuffling of spending priorities to try and minimise the damage and hopefully get the recovery going properly. -
Hard News: Budget 2011: While you wait, in reply to Yamis,
I’m going to deduct my mortgage interest against my income as an expense too. I’m also going to deduct my petrol bill as I drive to and from work as expenses, along with the clothes I have to purchase for work, and food I need to eat in order to be able to carry out the functions of my job.
Unless of course I’m not allowed to live by the same rules of others.
The rules as they apply to other wage/salary earners do apply to you. And those rules allow none of those things to be deducted.
If you’re self-employed, those things are deductible inasmuch as they’re unavoidable expenses incurred wholly in the pursuit of generating your income. Clothing and food mostly don’t count, and even when wage/salary earners could deduct expenses they were still mostly excluded from being deductible.
Farmers are covered by the same rules as apply to any other business, and that includes the self-employed. Getting bitchy and snarky doesn’t change the fact that the rules as applied to agriculture are no different from the deductibility rules that apply to others.
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OnPoint: Budget 2011: A Credible Path to…, in reply to SteveH,
The ridiculous comment refers to the allocation of 95% of ADSL2+ bandwidth to download, not to the speed itself. If it were 15Mbit/s down and 5Mbit/s up or even symmetric it’d be a more useful service.
Except that that's not how the technology works. If you want symmetric, you need SDSL. The "A" stands for asymmetric, so it's not designed to be equal up/down. And the specification does not provide for the kinds of upstream speeds you want, it only allows for a maximum of 3.3Mbps upstream and that's with a recent revision of the 2+ standard.
DSL is a hack. That it's a hack is evidenced by the steep negative relationship between distance and speed as the speeds get higher. VDSL only achieves its maximum speed out to about 500m from the exchange, and drops down dramatically from there. To suggest that fibre is merely "incremental" improvement on copper is to suggest that email is a mere incremental improvement on snail mail.
Fibre is theoretically infinitely upgradeable. I'm unaware of anyone who's suggested even a theoretical maximum bandwidth for fibre (or copper, admittedly, but the improvements aren't happening on twisted-pair POTS-grade copper).
Gigabit to the the home won't happen with copper, except maybe distributed from an in-building aggregation switch in apartments. We need to be looking well into the future, rather than doing the typical Kiwi thing of babying along our crappy copper cables and pretending that we're playing in the big leagues. -
OnPoint: Budget 2011: A Credible Path to…, in reply to Sacha,
There’s also plenty of room before the election for Labour to empahsise their difference from National by reflecting Auckland voters’ preferences in transport policy
They could flick Pull'ya Benefit to the kerb in Waitakere by promoting the CBD Rail Link as cutting 10 minutes off the rail trip into the city on the Western Line, which would increase the area of improved property values. Her margin was tiny, and a lot of the residents of Mrs Bennett's electorate won't have been doing terribly well under the current regime.
Goff's unequivocal dismissal of Puford is heartening. Be nice if he explained that any transport project with a standard BCR < 1 is for the chopping block (pretty much every Road of Dubious Significance), but since National are playing the "explaining is losing" game I'm not surprised he's going for the bold rather than the nuanced.
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OnPoint: Budget 2011: Radioactive Space Donut, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Rail was another big infrastructure winner, with $250m to go towards the KiwiRail turn-around plan, which aims to turn it into a self-sustaining freight business within 10 years.
Well, that came as a surprise, is Steven Joyce in a coma or something?.
What Josh said. KR isn't now getting $1b of taxpayer money towards its turnaround plan. Rather, this is instalment two, of three, of the taxpayers' $750m towards said plan.
The way it's being reported is highly misleading. -
OnPoint: Budget 2011: A Credible Path to…, in reply to SteveH,
Much as I’d like faster Internet access, I’m still not sure there has been an economic case made for it
And if you go back a decade, for many businesses you could remove "faster" from that sentence and you'd be repeating statements/questions of the era.
Many world-changing technologies have no real apparent utility when they are first established. Look at the infamous quote from a 60s-era CEO of IBM, who said that he didn't think there'd be a need for more than maybe five or six computers in the whole world. -
Hard News: Budget 2011: While you wait, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Interesting too, to see the information that came out this week about the low rates of taxation asked of NZ dairy farmers. They probably have family trusts for each cow.
But I doubt that National would have the courage to tackle this
I'm quite happy to buy the retort from Federated Farmers that farmers do actually have low net incomes once debt servicing is taken into account. They're running a business (a proper business, not just being residential landlords), and I have no problem with them deducting mortgage interest against income as an expense.
However, they then get to sell the farm and pocket all of the increased value. That is the problem I have with taxation of landowners. And National are sure as hell not going to close that particular loophole. If we ever get a CGT, it won't be under B'linglish's watch. He's got too much to lose if they ever sell Dipton Manor.