Hot Air Ballooning | Come Fly Today…

Walking in the air…

Quite a few comments have disappeared from the end of this thread? There was a debate between myself and Ancient Greek that was quite interesting – it’s gone !

My fault – I had a database glitch a while after moving the site, and some records were lost after the database checked and repaired itself. It appeared to be from a difference in the collation and charset in MySQL on the new server after I moved a recent MySql database into a 5.0x version and from win32 to linux. You will notice that some of the older pages have interesting characters in them.

I have the missing records in the hourly backup from 0200 just before the system went down, and I extracted the missing records from the backup database last weekend. I’ll insert the missing records at the same time. But that will be this weekend at the earliest.

Cullen Over-Taxing 352,000 Kiwis

“In 1999 Labour introduced a new top tax rate of 39 cents in the dollar,” Mrs Roy said.

“At that time, Dr Cullen stated in Parliament that:
‘ninety-five percent of people will not be asked to pay more tax. Instead, only the top five percent of income earners will pay more’.

“The promise to tax only the top five percent of earners was never kept: had it been, the Minister would have adjusted the initial $60,000 threshold so that by the 2005/06 financial year only those earning over $79,000 would have had to pay the top tax rate of 39 percent.

“Instead, the threshold was left at $60,000 – and 352,000 New Zealanders were over-taxed by a total of $273 million – an average of $775.56 each – for the 2005/06 financial year. Given that the level of over-taxation was initially only $60 million in 2000/01, it is clear that this situation is steadily growing worse.

“Over-taxing 352,000 Kiwis has contributed to Dr Cullen’s huge surpluses year after year, and shows that he has a complete inability to balance the country’s books.

Imagine what the threshold would be today if it should have been $79,000 as at the end of tax year 2006!

Quite a few comments have disappeared from the end of this thread? There was a debate between myself and Ancient Greek that was quite interesting – it’s gone !

rOb

The whole interest free thing is a red herring Burt.

It seems you have missed a few vital facts: See Average student now owes $28,838

The Government’s student loan scheme annual report showed the total amount owed leapt 25% in two years, to $9.4 billion in 2007, while voluntary repayments plummeted more than 40% to $142 million.

But also what is very interesting from that link:

Students can borrow up to $150 a week from the Government, a figure which has not changed since the student loan scheme was introduced in 1992.

This just proves the importance of indexing tax rates/thresholds and benefit to keep pace with inflation. It’s just laughable that Labour hasn’t changed the weekly allowance in 8 years. It had remained the same for 7 years under the failed policies of the 90′s and it’s still unchanged after 8 years of Labour. I guess Labour don’t want to lift this amount or student debt would just go completely bananas as students borrowed enough to live on.

How much was $150/week in 1992 ? I reckon it was probably about 30 hours of minimum wage after tax, what is it now ? Come on Labour – get it together.

Sorry Burt, I was in a hurry before and made a quick flippant reply, which seems to have caused you some confusion.

You are a fan of Mr Key’s 10% payment discount, you think it’s a great solution to the student loan repayment question, you challenged us to come up with something better. I flippantly replied that a 15% discount would be better.

Explain how a 15% early payment discount would work.

It would work exactly the same as Mr Key’s 10% discount, only it would be better.

But perhaps if you explain the idea rather than make jokes about 5 minute abs we could debate it.

It’s the same as Mr Key’s idea only better. Yes, ‘Sod is correct, the 5 minute abs thing is a joke (if you haven’t seen the movie “There’s something about Mary”, well – you should).

As it stands – still nobody on this thread has any better ideas than Key for how to address students not repaying their loans because it’s interest free.

The whole interest free thing is a red herring Burt. Many students were failing to repay their loans long before they were interest free. The real question, to my mind, is why we even have a system that lumbers young people with insane amounts of debt.

I wouldn’t invest my money for zero percent return, especially when the OCR is sitting at 8.25%. For this reason I think interest free loans is a crap idea.

Student Loans do have a return although there is no interest charged (Unless you leave the country). The return is in a more educated populace that can increase productivity making NZ wealthier overall. They will also be able to operate more effectively within the market and so make the market a freer place to do business allowing those gains to be consolidated and built upon.

This is the reason we ended up with ‘free’ education in the first place. For this reason I would like to see tertiary education become completely free (as long as you stayed in the country for a contract length). As society gets more complex the population needs a better education as such it is best if the community supplies access to educational facilities to provide it.

If I paying for it I certainly care – are you saying you think it’s being funded secretly from the National party? If so is that going to make what the standard might have been doing OK – you know the drill – others were doing it too. Or is it going to be a case of hold them both to account. I’m all for holding both to account – how about you ?

captcha: undiluted colony – Excellent.

That’s a priceless link. You guys have gone completely bananas banning people for asking if the standard was being hosted on a Labour party server and then you post a link like this. You just don’t understand the word hypocrite do you!

Personally I’m a big supporter of student loans as a concept, I always have been since I came from a poor family and couldn’t afford to go to Uni when I left high school. I took a gap year to save some money and…. I’m still working 24 years later.

However as I’m not prepared to invest my own money for zero percent return I don’t see why I should expect the govt to invest other peoples money for zero percent return. I guess it’s part of not be a socialist – I don’t expect other people to do things I wouldn’t simply because I like the outcome.

So lets separate the debate – interest free loans is not the only way to provide