Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Well, it’s not so I struggle to see the point of the whole exercise
We have nothing better to go on, and want to know the answer, for any number of reasons? Because one can adjust strategy to optimize the chance of winning? Because one might want to know if it's worth putting their vote in one or other place due to the chance that a threshold might make it count for nothing? Because we might have investments that will be affected by the outcome? Because it bolsters a case that it has some form of roughly known support? Because we want to know what our compatriots think?
It can actually be quite informative. The huff and puff by each party about how much support they have for their views, and by everyone else for that matter, is dragged at least somewhat towards reality by data, however imperfect.
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The auction is live and it's currently going for about $7 more than new.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Tom Semmens,
I agree with some of that. There does seem to be big disparity between its self image and how it is seen from the outside. But there are elements of inevitability to all of this, so I'm not sure that the prescription of going old skool and hardening up is useful.
There are harder core socialist parties around, but they get very little vote share. It's nowhere near as popular an idea as purists (like I think you are) seem to believe. You can disparage "third way" politics, but I have never thought that there were only 2 ways, or 3 or any finite number, for that matter. I agree that wealth disparity is growing and Labour don't seem to have a real commitment to fixing that, but social liberalism advancing is nothing to sneeze at.
In that, they pretty much won the political right over completely. It only really causes any sense of identity crisis because it's been won so completely that the Right do it too. To that extent they lost their identity also, and there are always going to be a small hard core of recalcitrants like Peters who nag at the center Right in exactly the same way that the hard core socialists nag at the center Left. But both have been marginalized.
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Here is Scott Sumner on the issue explaining it no doubt much better than I am.
Not really. In his explanation thrifty brother gets to be a lot richer than spendthrift brother. He does exactly the same work, but gets 96k to spend instead of 60k. It just happens to be some time into the future. And it's an example, like so many economic ones, that deliberately avoids the context of the saving of 120k over 20 years being absolute peanuts compared to the kind of capital gains people get from large assets, particularly highly leveraged ones like property, and particularly when the period spans more than lifetimes.
I do not have that much of a problem with people earning large sums of money by simply being patient with it and investing it wisely. But I do think they should pay tax on however much it went up, just the same as people who lifted how much money they had through long and equally patient toil. At some point a reckoning must be made that this wealth acted like an income and if income is something we consider it fair to tax, then it should be taxed.
I'm not so convinced that income should be taxed. But that's a whole other question.
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Hard News: Labour's Fiscal Plan:…, in reply to Swan,
If you only tax realised gains, then you are basically advantaging people who choose not to sell, and distort the market accordingly.
It's a distortion worth wearing, though. Eventually, they sell. The longer they wait, the higher the tax (because the higher the profit). And is "it distorts the market" really a reason not to tax something that makes people millions? Poor market, it gets distorted. Like it isn't already under our current regime.
On the fairness argument: Capital values are essentially the NPV of future capital income. So if you get a capital gain, that means future income is expected to increase. That future income will be taxed when realised, so it is a form of double taxation.
That doesn't make sense. If you sell, realizing the gain, you won't have a future income from the asset because you sold it.
A stronger and slightly different version of the above argument is that neither capital income or capital gains should be taxed as all capital income derives from savings of labour income
That also doesn't make any sense. A person who buys a house worth a million one year and sells it the following year for 1.1 million without doing anything to it at all has not gained that 100k from any labour of any kind. They may not have even laboured to get the million in the first place, if they bought it all on tick, with an inheritance as the deposit.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Personally I’m glad that no-one’s managed to convince him that the Party’s fucked.
Of course people standing for the Party have to believe that. But that doesn't much influence my judgment any more than Colin Craig's optimism of breaking the threshold influences my opinion of whether he actually will.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Rather, it’s been losing vote share to the Greens (I was one of them)
That's one of the things the link shows is a pretty minor effect. Which is kind of obvious, since the Greens move in a much smaller range than Labour.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
are you saying they are some sort of sub-sainted vampires!
No, just that they were formed from older existing parties. Also I should correct that Labour was not born in the 30s. That was just when they became seriously relevant. Anyone who was calling them irrelevant in 1972, when they had 46% of the popular vote, and built that up to 63% by the election in 1972, is not coming from the same place I am in saying they're tired out.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Joe Wylie,
True. But a lot has happened since 1972. That's pretty much my entire life. During that time, Labour got almost twice as old. It went from being a middle aged party to a venerable one. National did also, but National was really already venerable when it was born.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Chris Waugh,
It’s good, isn’t it? Casts light on just how weak the claims of voters moving from party to party are. It really is about getting undecideds to vote.
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