Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Only what we would expect a…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
That'd be the thugby vote, no?
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Paul Williams,
English also couldn't get elected. I mean, he even got rolled for Don Brash!
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Speaking of children, our illustrious PM will be having a weekly slot with Veitch on Radio Sport. From one inane douche bag to another, it seems. Maybe he doesn't like the fact that Corin Dann isn't the soft touch that Paul Henry was.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to BenWilson,
argument against CGT, other than to say that it won’t bring prices down
Which is not the purpose of a CGT. Its purpose is to increase tax revenue, and discourage property speculation. At best it might cap property prices for a while, allowing wages to catch up and thus bringing housing back within affordability limits relative to incomes.
In South Africa's case, as stated in the OpEd in Granny from Craig Elliffe, the CGT brought in dramatically more tax than anticipated. It was also done with relatively minimal need to close loopholes and no tinkering to create new ones for special interests, so compliance was high.
If the CGT increases tax income significantly, it limits the need to increase income taxes. That's good for those on lower incomes. Or it can fund a tax-free threshold, which is also good for those on lower incomes. Either way any impact on rents (which, as has been pointed out, must be naturally self-limiting because there is a free market for supply and demand of rental property so people can avoid gouging landlords) will be offset to some extent by other tax effects.
On the self-limiting rents thing, if you're a landlord who's intending to hold onto your rental properties through retirement and draw on the income stream why would you need to increase your rent? The CGT does not create a loss for you, or a cost that must be recaptured. It's only if you're planning to speculate the property away that you want to capture the lost capital gain, and in that case the market effect from landlords who aren't gambling on property prices helps cap what you can charge. -
OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to DexterX,
What was the “brilliant idea”?
Reduce building industry regulation and demolish the apprenticeship scheme. Lo-and-behold we ended up with untreated timber used for framing, poorly-constructed buildings with no wall cavities, and lots of builders who hadn't learned the trade in a proper, structured apprenticeship system and thus didn't know that they were constructing shitty buildings.
Leaky buildings is pretty much entirely on National's head. Making it cheaper to get stuff built by way of deregulation ended up with the entirely-predictable consequence of low-quality shit going on the market. And trashing apprenticeships because education wasn't worth any investment, well, let's not go there.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to BenWilson,
You’re conflating sovereign borrowing and private borrowing. Downgrade would be for sovereign rating, and only affect sovereign borrowing. Private debt is meant to be rated by the individual lending institutions, which in turn have their own ratings based on the ratings of their debtors.
So getting sovereign borrowing in order requires reducing its levels relative to GDP. Which means increasing GDP or decreasing borrowing, or both. Since they go together, with increased GDP meaning increased tax income which reduces the impetus to borrow, if the government can stimulate the economy things will improve. Flogging off assets won’t stimulate the economy generally, so it’s rather a pointless exercise.ETA: Even though our private borrowing is significant relative to GDP, it’s still pretty inconsequential globally. As I said yesterday, Spain’s private debt relative to GDP is more than double our net foreign debt relative to GDP. So we’re not at great risk of a rating downgrade on the strength of our private borrowing.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Sacha,
Perhaps someone could tell them that grey on grey breaches the government’s web standards and makes their taxpayer-funded content hard to read.
pfffft. Standards are for the prolles. We're innovating here!
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Sacha,
That's awesome and all, but how much of our trade dollar comes from these "470,000 small businesses run by smart, inspired Kiwis" rather than a handful of massive single-trading-desk agricultural entities? Fuck-all of a fraction of a polar bear's feathers? Yeah, that'd be about right. We certainly have some, but they're not getting a lot of support from central government and they don't have much to do with our primary industries.
We can have all the smart, inspired SMEs you can handle, but it doesn't change the nature of our majority export earners or their real commitment to innovating cleaner, more-sustainable business practices that don't have a multi-generational scorched-earth effect.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Even with slightly higher taxes on these groups, Cullen had the budget in surplus and borrowings reducing.
Cullen also didn't have a huge increase in transfer payments coupled with an unavoidable reduction in taxation income. Even without cutting taxes National were still going to be in for a world of hurt when the GFC really hit home and our unemployment rate ballooned. Their choices simply made it significantly worse, both from paying-for-it perspective and from an ending-it-quickly perspective.
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This article from the Economist points to a (presumably moderately near) future where "Chinese and Indians consume like Japanese and Germans and Americans". The upshot, it predicts is "a redistribution of economic activity away from resource-intensive goods and toward labour-intensive goods or free, virtual goods, the consequences of which would be increased labour demand in innovative and non-innovative areas alike, helping to absorb some unemployment. And second, it should spur a great deal of research and innovation into new technologies, needed to boost energy efficiency, food production, cleaner transportation, and so on."
Right now, NZ is not really working towards this innovative future in any great way. We're especially not working towards the resource-scarce future with a view to improving how we use our natural resources sustainably. The dairy industry, in particular, is being thoroughly insulated from the true costs of production, and that bodes poorly for a coming world of real resource scarcity where the ability to continue to milk (thank you, thank you) every last drop of productive capacity from a given hectare must be sustainable for decades.