Tax cuts for the rich must have seemed like such a good idea a month or two ago. I mean the public had already sucked up the ACC hikes, forgiven the tax-cuts that never came (except for the rich) and shrugged off the cuts to education. Hell they’d even let subsidies for private schools and no-rights periods for vulnerable workers slide.
Surely John’s team could sell a few more breaks for the rich and an increase in gst. In fact all their polling was saying the punters were ready to make sacrifices for the good of the country. What with a recession and all.
And it’s it’s not like the media didn’t give them a green light. This was supposed to be the year of action they said, the budget that would showKey had steel. Sit on his hands? Not this guy – he haz vision!
It should have been a spindoctor’s cakewalk.
But like they say, a week is a long time in politics. And whether it was the mining of conservation parks, the dodgy double-cross of Tuhoe (which has raised some eyebrows in business circles) or rising unemployment or maybe the gallery just got tired of the bullshit. Whatever. The mood has turned.
And now the nats are getting desperate. We saw that with the “don’t be jealous” line and they’re trying it again this evening. The problem is nobody’s buying it. They got over-confident.
So what do you do when you can’t spin your way out of a problem?
You reach for the cheque book.
That’s why we’ll see the Nat’s pull a rabbit out of the hat tomorrow. It might be dropping the 33% rate.
But that’s really, really, really expensive (like several Whanau Ora’s a year expensive).
It might be income-splitting.
But that’s going to make Peter Dunn a lot happier than anyone wants, doesn’t do much for National’s single white male core and is also very costly.
It might be an increase in the tax credit for WFF.
But they’ve already said they’re going to crack down on that sort of thing.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see. But one thing is for sure: whatever the rabbit is it’ll be coming out of our pockets one way or another because you can’t give the likes of Paul Reynolds and Rob Fyfe tax breaks of thousands of dollars a week, balance the books and not be taking the money from somewhere.
One way or another the government plans (to quote mc 900 foot jesus) to buy you a new car with your own damn money.
It’s the great tax switch.
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