Posts by Rob Stowell
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Congratulations! Well deserved.
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What I meant to say is there's not likely to be anything like enough magic new tax money to pay for this - even though we badly need a cht and tax change. Most people's ubi would be paid for straight out of their current wage/salary.
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I love the idea. I think the first issue around cost is to recognize - indeed insist - that taxes need to go up to pay for it, but that most people will be better off. In my family-at-home-currently if we got an extra $200 each a week per person we'd be getting an extra $1000 per week. And we're currently comfortably off - certainly compared with how things wereally in the past. So we'd need to be paying at least $1000 more per week in tax. That a huge increase in tax (cue DPF howling 57% income theft!) BUT WE'D BE JUST AS WELL OFF as we are now. Maybe better - because we'd be more secure in terms if losing a job not meaning financial catastrophe.
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Polity: Decrypting “social investment”, in reply to Tom Semmens,
the only public voice heard is that of a particularly isolated, provincial and grasping philistinism
Get a radio. Be careful! With the volume way down, tune to FM101.7 (or thereabouts). You can then safely raise the volume and fine-tune :)
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"Decrypting" - nah. Back in the crypt. Bury it!
As a mate said on facebook - Andrew Little - try it this way -
“Social investment”?!
Why is it a good idea to use the language of business and banking to talk about people’s welfare?
Words are how we understand and think about the world. Words take their meaning from their relationships with other words in the same domain. When we use words from one domain to describe another, we transfer a web of concepts – and values and relationships – along with the words.
This can lead to insights, to the transformative thinking of metaphor. But we have been using the language of markets to talk about more and more of what matters – from commerce to art to education, health, welfare.
When we talk about welfare as an investment, we’re directed to think of it as something that makes a return. We are likely to evaluate it in terms of loss and gain.
If we think about something – say the look in a hungry child’s eye – in the language of business, we’re more likely to think in terms of a “market solution” – and less likely to talk about it in terms of morality or empathy.
And once we give in to this – it happened in NZ in the 1980s and it’s still happening – we’ve lost. There is just money. We might as well give up on electing politicians. All we need is a king to rubber-stamp treasury decisions.
I know there are those in Labour who say we need to be hard-headed and business-like to get anywhere. But we’ve had that approach for decades. Now people are living in cars while the viaduct basin is full of super-yachts. -
Speaker: A simple strategy for Trump to…, in reply to Greg Pittams,
Being outside the GOP mainstream opens a bunch of attack vectors that wouldn't be open to a more conventional candidate.
The question is: will Trump's 'unorthodox' policies and approach attract more independents than it alienates conservative base/establishment voters. I think it's dead right that Hillary aiming for the 'establishment republicans' (many of whom probably are sympathetic to where she's positioned) will lose her the election.
If Hillary can get Bernie on side, working hard with her and mobilising some of his support, she should be able to win handily. That's compromised by the many Sanders supporters I see echoing all the old GOP attack lines against Hillary, and adding a few new twists of nastiness and entitlement.
Sanders is walking the line here: mostly keeping it clean, but sometimes stepping over the line in his criticism of Clinton and the primaries themselves. -
Nicholas Shaxson at treasureislands.org - reckons secret money is about being outside the law - at least as much as tax cheating.
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Polity: Is being a tax haven worth it?, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
how much they pay their teams of glorified beggars to annoy people on the street.
It was the 'living wage' when my daughter did it - 2 summers ago, I think :)
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That Deborah, Nicky and Andrea Vance think it does is interesting but not decisive.
No. You'd have to look at the reasons they give. Deborah is very clear. You might also take into account that our trust regime was being questioned by other countries' tax depts and our own IRD.
Having done your homework - do you think we qualify as a tax haven? Or were we simply the unwitting dupes of clever Panamanian lawyers?