Posts by Keith Ng
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Party votes, Angus.
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Yup, my numbers were purely looking at Federal rates. There's a more comprehensive tax comparison on NZIER's website.
In the meantime, check out my HoS column on the Aus-NZ wage gap:
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Keith when you're happy to write this:
"So let's talk about interest rates, not bloody cheese."
Knowing kids are hungry out there, well we're not on the same page are we?
My point there is very simple: If they can't afford cheese, it's not because the price of cheese increase by $6, it's because they're spending $80 more on housing. Drop the cost of housing (e.g. Lower interest rates), families will have more money to spend on whatever. Cheese, even.
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The perverse limitations of these types of calculations hold a family on the East Coast or Northland living in shacks and caravans to be on a par with the mansion in Remuera, if it's paid off.
Dude, you're going to make me cry. These calculations do no such thing. It does not say, nor claim to say, anything about *every* family, or anything about any specific family.
Another recent example is (in my view) the way the Real Estate Institute is always quoting average sale prices etc., where the median would probably give a more realistic picture. However, I suspect the average real estate agent (and journalist) wouldn't understand the difference between the mean and the median.
You just made me factcheck you. I can't speak for every real estate agent or journalist, but the REINZ use *median* sale prices as a matter of course.
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Averages are simple tools. There are limitations to what they can tell you, but at the same time, they're really easy to use and can be useful in many situations.
It's like a hammer - you really need to know what it does, when to use it, and when not to.
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I can't speak for Christopher, but the point that I took out of that was that the samples were mismatched.
i.e. Because the average mortgage payments of the HES sample was only $81/week, clearly, they are not the same people as the ones which pay $247/week. Therefore, you shouldn't match the income of the $81/week people with the mortgages of the $247/week people.
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Kyle, not all households rent or have a mortgage. The average that Christopher quoted from was the population average.
So, if one person rented, one person had a mortgage and another person owned their house free-hold, then the average rent and the average mortgage would be much lower - but it would be useful, in that it reflected the average expenditure on housing.
The figures you quoted was "average mortgage for those with a mortgage" and "average rent for those who rent".
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How? Seems impossible.
The OCR has risen from 5.25% (March 2004) to 8.25% (March 2008). The OCR is set to meet an inflation target band, excessive inflation drives increases. The band is defined by government policy.
Reducing inflationary pressures by reducing government spending - i.e. running a surplus? 8-)
It's an interesting one that I'm trying to tackle. Bill English has been going on about how the reason we have high interest rates is because of high government spending. Tax cut is *less* inflationary than direct government spending, but not spending is even less inflationary than tax cuts. My back-of-the-napkin guess is that 1% decrease in interest rates will be worth as much for Hickey's "average family" as a 2% across-the-board tax cut.
These are more doodles than calculations, though, so if anyone has more thoughtful analysis, I'd love to hear it.
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Christopher - excellent points. Any advice on when it is more useful to use QES or Income Survey data? I was quite reactive in looking at HES data (i.e. because Hickey did), but if you were doing it from scratch, given the need to take into account food/petrol prices, what would you use?
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And would it be overly-cynical to say that we're going to get a lot more 'constructs' thrown at us as election year grinds on?
Statistical constructs aren't useless, they just need to be handled with care. There are only certain types of conclusions that you can draw out of certain types of data, and if you don't know the limitations, *then* it becomes a problem.