Double Standards

Written By: - Date published: 12:19 pm, September 26th, 2007 - 1 comment
Categories: activism - Tags:

rickards.jpg

We’ve had a few emails from readers this week asking whether this website has anything to with the NZ Standard posters that having been turning up around Wellington.

Just to set the record straight, while the The Standard shares the anti-Rickards sentiment, the posters are nothing to do with us. In any case, we’d like to think our satire is a little more biting than that. I mean, come on, Gordon Copeland as Mickey Mouse? Pure comedy gold, my friends.

One comment on “Double Standards ”

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  1. Sam Dixon 1
    26 September 2007 at 1:00 pm

    To be fair, that picture of Copeland did come straight off his offical website.

    A mate of mine wrote Copeland an email which called him up on his support of Bill’s SOE sell-off (which Copeland said would free up fiscal headroom for tax cuts):

    Dear Mr Copeland,
    Fiscal headroom is that part of the Government’s income which, after expenditure, is available for new spending or tax cuts. Because using headroom for either purpose involves a permanent change in the Government’s expenditure or revenue, ‘headroom’ only includes revenue from continuing sources (eg not revenue from capitalisation of assets).

    Therefore, your statement that partially selling SOEs will increase fiscal headroom is exactly wrong. There will be a one-off capital gain for the Government but fiscal headroom would actually shrink due to a permanent loss of revenue from those SOEs’ dividends. The Government would have less spare money for tax cuts (or new spending), not more.

    To put it another way, you are arguing that the Government could fund a permanent reduction in revenue (tax cuts) out of a one-off revenue gain(the partial sell of the SOEs) and a matching reduction in revenue (the loss of future revenue from those SOEs, the present value of which should equate to their sale price).

    That simply does not add up. If you keep making such elementary mistakes (this is far from your first), I fear your new Christian party will be unable to attract any meaningful percentage of the right-wing vote next election, which is something I’m sure we both want.
    Please try harder. Yours, { }

    Copeland’s surprisingly prompt response misses the ambiguity in that last sentence, and confuses the SOE sell-off issue with cash funding of infrastructure:

    Thanks { }. You are of course quite right. However as you will be aware Michael Cullen endeavours to fund capital expenditure from current operating cash flow & I have used a short cut to highlight that in “layman’s” terms [fiscal headroom is a layman’s term?]. I will do as you suggest.
    I appreciate the sentiments you have expressed.
    Gordon F Copeland MP

    Any suggestions what the ‘F’ stands for? I can think of a few ideas.