tax

Categories under tax

capital gains (104)
gst (55)

Tax is the price the elite pay to maintain their privilege

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 10:27 am, January 23rd, 2010 - 53 comments

John Roughan asks: “Nearly half of all personal tax revenue is contributed by just 10 per cent of us. Is this socially healthy?” To which I reply: “That 10% get 34% of the country’s income and own 52% of the country’s wealth, compared to the 50% who get 16% of the country’s income and own […]

Pascal’s Bookie says…

Written By: notices and features - Date published: 1:05 pm, January 22nd, 2010 - 20 comments

Pascal’s Bookie said in comments 3 pretty graphs, Median Income Average income of the bottom decile Average income of the Top decile one of which has NZ in the top half of the oecd. Lookie here Source

Who wins and who loses from tax reforms

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 9:33 am, January 22nd, 2010 - 70 comments

You’re probably up to your ears in this tax reform issue by now, but just one more. It’s a good ‘un, promise. I’ve made a pretty graphic of who would lose and who would gain, and how, from the tax working groups’ proposals: The huge tax breaks for the few people on very large incomes are paid […]

33% nonsense

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 9:00 am, January 22nd, 2010 - 13 comments

David Farrar has one of his dodgy maths posts, where he argues that getting rid of the 33% rate is necessary because typical New Zealanders are paying it: “You see [not] only should people not be paying a 38% rate, most FT workers shouldn’t even be paying the 33% rate.” Quite why 33% is such a […]

Tax cuts for tax cheats

Written By: Zetetic - Date published: 7:39 am, January 22nd, 2010 - 55 comments

The Right’s main justification for the highway robbery of cutting the top tax rate to 30% then funding it by increasing rents and charging the 78% of people who earn under $48,000 2.5% more GST is: ‘Half of the richest 100 avoid paying the top rate anyway. May as well reward them and all the ones who don’t rip us off massive […]

A little knowledge

Written By: John A - Date published: 7:46 pm, January 21st, 2010 - 17 comments

David Farrar on Kiwiblog says When Labour reduced the top tax rate from 66c to 33c in the 1980s, the amount of tax paid actually increased. Wasn’t that because they introduced GST as a new tax?

The lucky country: Aussie tax system more progressive than NZ’s

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 10:25 am, January 21st, 2010 - 57 comments

It fascinates me that in all this talk about ‘catching up with Australia’ via tax cuts, nobody bothers to look at the Aussie tax system to see what they’re doing. Keith Ng has a cool interactive graph on the portion of all income earnt by different income groups and the tax they pay. He compares what […]

Nobody else is doing it so why should we?

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 7:26 am, January 21st, 2010 - 70 comments

A commenter asked an interesting question yesterday: of the countries that are wealthier than us, how many have aligned their top income, corporate, and trust tax rates? And which countries are they? Well, I did some looking and here are the countries with higher GDP per person than us and their top tax rates: […]

Foreign banks buggering NZ

Written By: Zetetic - Date published: 4:34 pm, January 10th, 2010 - 86 comments

I’m no big city banker. But I was under the impression that profit is the income that is left over once you’ve paid your costs. Once you pay your tax on that, your net profit is what is left to pay to the owners as dividends or reinvest. So how the hell did the Aussie-owned banks […]

Tax Working Group is inherently flawed.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:40 pm, January 8th, 2010 - 16 comments

Marty wrote on taxation expert Craig Elliffes opinion series in the Herald a few days ago. The third in the series wound up with statement at the end that exemplifies the major issue with the Tax Working Group and its process. At the tax conference of the Tax Working Group, Susan St John of the […]

Right’s threadbare excuses for tax gifts for the rich

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:16 pm, January 5th, 2010 - 71 comments

The Right is trying to build momentum for more tax cuts for the rich. The argument comes on three fronts: ‘if we don’t lower company tax rates even further businesses will run away’, ‘if we don’t lower income tax on the rich even more, they’ll run away’, ‘tax rates should be the same or people […]

$400 mln xmas gift for banks

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 10:30 am, December 24th, 2009 - 21 comments

The banks, who tried to rip us off to the tune of $2.6 billion, have agreed to pay us $2.2 billion. I don’t get it. We’ve spent tens of millions so far on court cases to get our money. We’ve won every case. The judgments have been damning of the banks. So, why did the IRD agree […]

Neolibs’ great experiment in meltdown

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:45 pm, December 15th, 2009 - 41 comments

With huge infusions of EU cash and deregulation that brought in foreign companies looking to make a quick buck, Ireland’s economy grew pretty quickly over the past 25 years. On the back of their new-found wealth, Irish governments implemented a neoliberal revolution – cutting taxes for the rich, privatising public assets, the usual formula for […]

Just asking

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 10:40 am, December 11th, 2009 - 11 comments

It has been treated as gospel that if the Australians, for inadequately explained reasons, drop their corporate tax rate from 30% to 25%, then we, for inadequately explained reasons, will have to follow suit. Why? Where is the proof that the $900 million a year that cut would cost us is justified? Did the economy […]

Guaranteed minimum income + capital tax, the way forward?

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 9:19 am, December 2nd, 2009 - 49 comments

Occasionally something in politics really surprises you. Like when I turned over to Campbell Live last night (I’d seen the Family Guy episode too often) and there was Gareth Morgan proposing a guaranteed minimum income funded by a comprehensive capital tax. Guaranteed minimum income/negative income tax is hardly a new idea (I’ve been meaning to […]

Tax working group disappoints

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 8:27 am, December 2nd, 2009 - 2 comments

I’ve had quite high hopes for the Tax Working Group. I thought it would be a genuine, ground-up review of the tax system with no assumptions that would start with basic questions (1. what do we want the tax system to do?). However, I’ve been reading through the papers from the Tax Working Group conference yesterday and […]

Tax Working Group report preview

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 9:59 am, December 1st, 2009 - 26 comments

Let’s hope the Tax Working Group’s report out today is more worthwhile than the effort of the 2025 Taskforce. The basic idea that has emerged from the interim reports is that we should try to take tax off income and put it on land. If you tax stuff that can”t moved out of the country, […]

Tax reform for everyone, not just the rich

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 7:26 am, November 27th, 2009 - 42 comments

Why is it that whenever you see discussion of introducing capital gains tax, land tax etc, the assumption is always that the money will be used to cut the top tax rates? That seems completely misguided to me. Why should tax reform be all about taking tax burden off those most able to bear it? […]

A good reform, but a minor one

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 9:00 am, November 4th, 2009 - 37 comments

I watched Terminator 3 last night. It’s the worst in the series but that’s still better than watching another Guyon-National lovefest*. Which is a long way of saying I didn’t see the Bill English ‘debate’ on TVNZ7 last night. But apparently the most interesting part of it was English didn’t rule out changes to taxation […]

Treasury provides cover for Nats’ rightwing agenda

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 9:07 am, October 30th, 2009 - 19 comments

National’s favourite public servant (who got himself a nice pay rise), John Whitehead, has been offering dire warnings of the future. $2 trillion in debt by 2050! Something must be done! Naturally, the Treasury has an extreme right-wing solution – cut everything: cut health – yeah, a less healthy workforce that’ll be great for the […]

Rich Germans demand higher taxes

Written By: Michael Foxglove - Date published: 12:37 pm, October 26th, 2009 - 17 comments

From the BBC: A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes. The group say they have more money than they need, and the extra revenue could fund economic and social programmes to aid Sometimes the cultural dimensions of NZ’s rogernomic “greed is good” […]

Flat tax: works for Lithuania and Albania, eh?

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 1:33 pm, October 13th, 2009 - 34 comments

Predictably, the ideological vanguardists at Treasury are rolling out the flat tax argument again. For some unknown reason Radio NZ hasn’t published the Treasury papers they obtained under the OIA but the idea this time seems to be to use the money raised from higher GST, capital gains tax, land tax, changes to tax treatment […]

Nats find no government waste

Written By: Zetetic - Date published: 12:30 pm, October 12th, 2009 - 8 comments

I missed this one a few weeks ago but it’s worth pointing out. National spent $300,000 hiring half a dozen supposed business geniuses for $2,000 a day to find places to cut costs in the public sector. Called them ‘purchase advisers’. They ought to be able to find heaps to cut eh? I mean, National […]

Taxpayer shafted again

Written By: r0b - Date published: 3:53 pm, September 15th, 2009 - 52 comments

National seems to be making a bit of a habit of shafting the taxpayer. Before the election we were promised significant tax cuts, “North of $50” per week. We had John Key’s personal guarantee. Key said “New Zealanders will be able to believe our tax cuts, they will be able to trust our tax cuts…”. […]

To my friend

Written By: Guest post - Date published: 4:34 pm, August 29th, 2009 - 17 comments

We haven’t talked lately and that has partly been my fault. Just doesn’t seem that we share as much in common now that you have moved away to a more succesful life in your new job. What happened to the carefree person I used to know for whom money was never a problem and just […]

Tax reform mustn’t be a gift for the rich

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 5:25 am, August 21st, 2009 - 16 comments

Vernon Small’s pieces on tax in the Independent and Dom this week have been interesting. He provides a good overview of the issues around a land tax, capital gains tax, and raising GST. He points out that most economists argue we should tax things that can’t be taken away or avoided and things we want to discourage […]

GST up? It depends

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 5:08 am, August 19th, 2009 - 40 comments

The Government’s Tax Working Group has proposed increasing GST to 15-20% to pay for cuts to income tax. I’m not automatically against GST or even raising it, if it’s part of the right package. Here’s the issues as I see them: Points in favour of increasing GST Taxing spending is better than taxing income: generally, […]

A question of trusts

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 1:17 pm, August 18th, 2009 - 52 comments

Here is Bill English in the cocktail tapes talking about Working for Families: “the reality is if we had been the government, with the surpluses they had, we would have done something similar, like Working for Families… there’s a set of inevitable problems, it’s like physics… If you give people cash [that abates as income […]

Double bubble trouble

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:56 pm, August 13th, 2009 - 19 comments

It’s a rare day that I agree with Bill English but he’s right about the danger of another housing boom. The last bubble has not deflated yet we are already seeing prices start to grow again. There are now projections of 24% growth housing prices over the next three years, in a period when GDP […]

Taxing times

Written By: Guest post - Date published: 2:30 pm, August 7th, 2009 - 7 comments

In my opinion Pundit is one of the treasures of the NZ news/blog space. The posts are frequently excellent, in a world where quality journalism is increasingly rare. A recent piece by one of the founders, Tim Watkin, is a case in point. After a brief topical hook: It’s been fascinating to find out that […]

Govt backs tax cheats

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 1:35 pm, August 7th, 2009 - 35 comments

There is $4 billion in overdue tax owing. Every dollar of that means someone is pocketing cash that should be paying for schools, hospitals, superannuation etc, leaving those of us who pay our tax to pick up the tab. Tax cheats are criminals free-riding on the rest of us. Fortunately, it’s very cost effective to […]