Posts by BenWilson
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Feeling sorry for her for marrying the dork would just be pointless.
I expect she actually feels pretty damned proud of him, generally. He's achieved a lot, even if I disagree with his politics.
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Owning a residential pptty is not an unproductive behaviour - you provide accommodation and use services such as ppty maintenance etc and you do this in NZ.
I said speculating on property was unproductive. I was pretty damned clear about believing that building property is a highly productive thing to do.
Ben Wilson expressed no faith in innovation which was regarded as just a 'buzzword' I wonder if you or Ben actually have any positive ideas or insight on how to encourage economic growth that will expand GDP and create jobs?
You're twisting what I said, which was:
Innovation is OK, but it's also way too much of a buzzword for my liking. You can have good solid growth doing something quite unoriginal, like raising sheep, or putting down railways, or growing trees. Innovative is usually synonymous with "risky". I'm not so sure the government should be gambling with our money. Better would be if they provided the infrastructure for some kinds of targeted growth areas.
So my idea was building the basic infrastructure needed by targeted fledgling industries. The government still owns the infrastructure, so it's not intended to just run at a loss to pump money into private businesses engaged in risky developments, which will lose heaps if they flop, and make the owners heaps if they succeed.
Indeed, most infrastructure grows business. More roads does that. More rail. Better telecoms. Reliable cheap electricity. It doesn't need to be free, it just needs, in some cases, to be torn from some rip-off monopoly that's sitting on some sweet position, milking it, and doing jack to improve it.
I don't want to comment too widely about what's need across all industries, because I don't know. But my own one would definitely benefit from NZ having much faster internet, both internally and externally. That means a lot more than just changing the way the internet is charged for, like LLU acheived. It means actually laying cables. That means lots of people getting paid to do actual work that makes something, after which the infrastructure pays for itself because it's so damned superior to anything we already have. It means businesses can more cheaply deliver hi-tech services.
I don't like this idea because it's innovative. It's not. It's an obvious idea, and I thought 20 years ago that it was going to happen now that Telecom was freed from the shackles of inefficient government bureaucracy. But they never did it. Instead, foreign innovators invented DSL, and Telecom cashed in big time, delivering faster internet without having to put in much infrastructure at all, and charging HEAPS for it.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Steve Parks,
I think the editors expect it may give them a certain air of authority, but if anything it has the opposite effect for me.
Me too, especially since writers within the paper disagree very much with it.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Rich Lock,
Shall we talk about the changes to the Rescource-Management Act now?
Well you can't be blamed for starting it, anyway. Go for broke.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Paul Campbell,
You have to think there's someone NP analyst who's been agonising over "do you think they will win?" for months now
And contemplating the "South African Method". Nothing like a bit of food poisoning...
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Jim Cathcart,
Why would it be difficult?
Depends what you're suggesting, of course. I was talking about removing the ability to claim interest as an expense. You're talking about removing the ability to borrow money so that the expense is greater than the return, which is a much lesser proposition (not a bad one either).
I'm trying to think how much tax that might generate. I worked out once (and it may have changed) that the break even point for residential property here was somewhere around 30% equity. So if the current average equity in investments is 10% then we're talking taking away 20% of the interest payments as write offs against income tax. That's a lot of writeoffs, which means a lot of tax.
It would mean a massive selldown, though, if brought in just like that. Property would crash, big time. That might even cause banks to fold. So it would need to be done slowly.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Saint John can coast them home with warm fuzzies of him and Richie McCaw holding aloft the Rugby World Cup
Seems like a pretty risky strategy to me!
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There is nothing spontaneous about organization! It's not Facebook that organises people.
No, nor does a phone talk. But they help with that.
Whilst I agree, the technology doesn't make the revolution happen by itself, it can still be a big factor. It can also be a big factor in suppressing it. Armies aren't loaded up with technology with no reason, and smashing the enemy's technology is also a popular first strike for a reason. It's a massive driver of most kinds of human change. Not always for the good.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Fairly sure it's the same in Oz, that the contributions to the super funds are tax-reduced by virtue of coming out of pre-tax income. IIRC, if you want to take your money early, you have to pay back the difference. You also have to have a good reason (I think genuine hardship counts). Or you can opt to manage it yourself, but that has a lot of rules, and you can't draw on it, or the same payback applies.
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Doing something about negative gearing would be one hell of a difficult. Not being able to treat interest repayments as a business expense would be a major change in accountancy practices right across the entire economy. Yes, it would dwarf CGT.
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