Posts by Matthew Poole
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DR, Muldoon wouldn't have got the chance to abolish compulsory super if voters hadn't given National their tick. It's not like he sprung it on the country by stealth, as opposed to a lot of what happened with the subsequent Labour and National governments and their unannounced slash-and-burn policies. Whose mistake was greater: Muldoon's, in doing it? Or the electorate's in letting him?
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I think you'll find Craig is gloriously ill-equipped to be a token anything.
Maybe, maybe not. You have to admit, though, he does fill the "flag-waving National member" niche for us with great panache.
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Steve, I knew he was in Labour, and probably peripherally knew that he was from a long line of "real" Labour-ites. It was more the "Doesn't he still claim to be a socialist in some sense?" that got me.
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Peter, if you want to debate the virtues of low taxation, with government staying the hell out of the provision of any services except external relations, criminal justice, official documents (DIA and Treasury/RBNZ), and defence, this is not a forum that will be sympathetic. We all believe that the state is obligated to provide healthcare, education, and all kinds of other social services, and to do so to a level at least roughly comparable to what the private sector can provide. That is what socialism is about.
Saying that "tax is a symptom" is, as gio says, to treat government spending like a disease. To those whose way of thinking is like Sir Roger's, that may well be so. To the vast majority of the occupants of PAS however, even including our token National member (there's one in every group), cutting state spending to the bone and then saying "Let the market sort it out" about the unequal quality of services available to the poor vis the rich is not how we view the world.
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Europe has that. In fact every other country in the world has that, pretty much. Are they all stupid?
What Russell said. Stupid, self-interested, selfish, and globally destructive. A lot of the sorry economic state of the third world can be traced fairly directly to the protectionist agricultural policies of the US and the EU. I'm glad that we can at least say, hand on heart, that we're not party to the depredation of the third-world subsistence farmers. How much foreign aid would we not have to contribute if it were possible for third-world farmers to actually make a living from their efforts?
Tax rates at 66%
What's the problem? If that bracket kicked in at, say, $750k would it really kill anyone? Stop anyone affording a roof over their head, food and clothing, education, transport? Of course not. Anyone affected would be able to afford a standard of living better than that available to well over 99% of the world's population, and better than at least 99% of the population of NZ, even before they got into that bracket.
High top tax rates aren't a problem, so long as they don't kick in until such a high level of income that the small percentage of the population paying them simply won't notice that they're only getting 34 cents in every extra dollar. The benefit to the country would be enormous.Peter, the problems are less with the policies of Rogernomics and more with the attitudes, and the policies that followed. The selling-off of Telecom (it was doing very well as an SOE, by all accounts), BNZ, NZ Rail, etc. All things that have ultimately had a very negative effect on NZ's economic effectiveness (well, excepting BNZ; the issue there was more the bail-out) over the long term. Busting unions and turning workers into economic units rather than partners in economic activity. That attitude came from the Rogernomes, but it was the acolytes who followed in the last National Government who really fucked us over. Roger simply opened the way, and also paved the road for a National Party full of objectionable functionaries to get into power because the electorate was so completely, utterly and heartily disenchanted with Labour. One of my lecturers told us of his grandmother's cheers at National winning the 1990 election: a grandmother who was a card-carrying member of the Labour party and had voted Labour at every previous election. The stories of people burning their membership cards are so rife as to be beyond mere anecdote. That is Roger's legacy, and how do you roll back an attitude?
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Wasn't Roger Douglas in a left-wing party? Doesn't he still claim to be a socialist in some sense? I'm confused.
Yes, he claims to be the only true socialist. It's at the beginning of every speech he's given since 1987.
You're kidding, right? Or inhabiting some weird, bizarre-o, parallel universe where Craig thinks Goff is the Messiah and the Petroleum Cetacean writes of a world inhabited solely by rainbows and unicorns?
Has he missed the bit where socialists, at least notionally, like paying taxes because they recognise that many things that make a society civilised are most-efficiently provided by the state? To quote Oliver Wendell Holmes, "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization." -
Here is where I do my semi-regular rant about poor Cookie Monster now being forced to sing 'cookies are a sometimes food'. He's fucking COOKIE MONSTER.
I really hope that that was a scene from
Monsterpiece Theatre presents: One Flew Over The Cookie's Nest.
Otherwise, another small part of me will die inside.Sorry to kill another small part of you, but she's not wrong.
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Does a voter actually control a pollie?
Depends how big the voter's wallet is, dunnit?
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Bennett on matters beneficiary.
On matters beneficiary, I'd call Pull-ya Benefit more hypocritical than short-sighted. The "Fuck youse, I've got mine and now I'm going to kick out from the top the ladder that I climbed" attitude.
Collins on matters criminal.
I giggled. Rather hard.
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This political sensitivity is perhaps why there was a no show from the regional director of the NZTA, who had been scheduled to speak as well, but pulled out at the last minute for fear of being expected to discuss Government policy in the area. Snort.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if few people at NZTA agree with Joyce's attitude of "roads uber alles", they just can't say what they think because it's unprofessional. Wouldn't be surprised if the NZTA director didn't show because he'd rather be labelled a coward than an unemployed turncoat after speaking out of turn. Nothing like an angry mob to get your true feelings to the surface, and a reported comment along the lines of "I disagree with this entirely, but he's the Minister so what can I do?" is a good way to ensure that you're looking for a new job.