Posts by Paul Campbell
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I think the BRT are pretty much out of touch with the realities of doing business here and overseas - same with taxes (so much lower here than the US - and health care is thrown in for free).
Running a small business is really easy here - takes me 10 minutes every 2 months to manage GST (AND they send me a check) another 10 minutes a month to do withholding - and maybe 1/2 an hour a year to figure out what this year's magic spreadsheet formula to use for the rest of the year (for heavens sakes why don't the IRD publish that). Brilliantly simple!
Getting to that state from a position of ignorance is hard though - when I moved back I paid a lawyer and accountant a non-small amount of money to hold my hand through the process - when really MED or some such could easily provide the same information for free as part of information to help attract people home. Some independent analysis of the costs of various ways to move money in/out of the country for businesses of different sizes wouldn't go amiss either - I always feel I'm getting ripped off
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While I mostly agree with you I don't really see the difference between that and Fonterra - private monopolies are just as bad as public ones, often worse since there's no public in put to counter the worst excesses of monopoly
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aerosol chocolate mousse crossed with pepper spray
you're still not going to get away with claiming that's a good as a great mexican chilli-chocolate ....
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Someone in this group said it'd be nice if there is a list of tips and pointers... well there are! Maybe not printed in your newspaper.. but they are there... just look harder :-)
That would have been me - what I was getting at was aimed at returning kiwis - coming back from OE after a decade or two is hard, much harder than you can imagine - you're arrive in a place where you're expected to know how to perform as an adult, but you missed a chunk of your growing up - how do you register you're kids for school? a doctor? etc etc and you have to figure it all out at once
Bringing your job back with you is hard too and we're all just as unprepared - starting a company for example - I could have walked you through it in California - coming back to NZ I had no idea where/how to start - setting up PAYE, GST, moving money, how do deal with disparate tax regimes etc etc - I spent 1000s of dollars learning this stuff or having people set it up for me, in reality it's probably easy to DIY
After all we're the best kind of immigrants, ones who bring their work with them and who become instant exporters, every month.
The problem is that we're largely invisible to the traditional business sector and the government, we don't show up in containers leaving the ports, it just looks like people just keep sending us money. The nice lady in the bank I chat to every month probably knows what i do by now - I worry that anyone else looking at my bank accounts probably thinks I'm a drug dealer - I had to get the accountant to have a word with the IRD about my GST and why I get a refund every 2 months .....
So what I was suggesting was that if the govt is spending time trying to lure people back from OE - they should be doing things to encourage people to bring their jobs with them and to make it easy to do the bits that are completely non-obvious and opaque from 10,000km
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actually it was the Lindt's that I was referring to as being excessively wimpy ....
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We need inovation and new ideas which will come from constructive leadership. New initaives not old solutions please.
Don't depend on leaders to come up with new ideas - motivating people and creative thinking don't always go hand in hand.
As I've said before to me Key is "that marketing guy I've always worked with" - they come up with new ways to sell existing stuff - they don't tend to think up radically new product ideas - he's there to sell stuff to us, so far he's done quite well at it.
What a good leader can do is encourage new ideas, and recognise and promote good ones - of course politicians tend to want to 'own' the ideas they promote
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I really miss Mexican chocolate - the stuff with the evil chillis in it - I found something here recently but sadly you can't have the same discussion with a bar of chocolate you can have with the guy at the Indian restaurant about how yes you really do want it that hot
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deepred: the US has in essence a 'McMansion Tax' - they tax all capital gains by default as any other income, if you can prove they're long held (3 or more years I think) you get a tax reduction on them.
However there's an exemption for primary family homes (the one you live in, be prepared to prove it) something like $500k (that's $500k increase in value) that you can claim every 5 years or so.
They used to instead allow you a single total writedown over your lifetime (ie when the kids have left, you retire and sell the big one)
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Kyle's right - the guy who can make something locally cheaper or better that we buy rather than importing something (mmmm Emersons ...) has essentially the same effect to the current account deficit as someone who exports something of the same value
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having made my rant above here's another view - we have a legacy of 3rd world poverty, be it Africa or rural China I see free trade as a way to solve those problems - it will take time, there's ma lot of wealth transfer that has to happen for those problems to be fixed - a generation or two
In the mean time our blue collar workers are competing with them and are going to lose, unless they want to live in 3rd world conditions - the free marketeers have created a situation that is hopefully helping out the 3rd world but is ruining a lot of our local economy - in particular we're losing a lot of our primary industries, not our service industries - we need more of the former
An economy can't just be a service economy - you need to inject new wealth from somewhere whether you lure it from elsewhere through tourism, or create it by adding value to dirt, sun and water to make meat wool and milk, or by turn random bits into music or websites or programs of beauty or making widgets from raw iron etc etc we need to focus on those sorts of things - if you're good at that all the cool cafes and bars will come for free