‘Taxpayers union’ – too ‘stupid’ to understand tax?

• lprent
• 5 years ago
• Categories: capital gains, Dirty Politics, Economy, journalism, Politics, tax, uncategorized
• Tags: nz taxpayers union

There is a classic piece of waffle in the NZ Herald this morning with a stupid title about when capital gains tax applies to the family home. Now the conditions are pretty simple. There are two cases:-

• When a ‘family home’ is used in part as a business and collects business taxable deductions for that business. When it is partially (less than 50%) used as boarding house by running as an Airbnb, have flatmates in to pay the mortgage, and using the family home as an office for a business.  Then if the owner claims business expenses from taxation like interest of rates then they forgo the protection against CGT because the property has been used as a business.
  
  
  
  This isn’t rocket science. Double dipping on tax relief may be beloved by the greedy, but is irritating as hell to the other taxpayers who have to pick up the tab.
• If the building and the land is more than 4500m² – which to me seems eminently fair. If it is that that damn big then it clearly isn’t a residence. It is either monument to waste or being used for a commercial reason.

However like many things involving  fairness, this confuses the ‘taxpayers union’.

The Taxpayers’ Union says the caveats were confusing.

“Taxpayers have been told by the Working Group and the Government that the family home will be exempt, but it turns out that in a variety of circumstances that’s not quite true,” a spokesman said.

I guess that the economists in their organisation couldn’t explain it?

Possibly because the ‘Taxpayers Union’  is a well-known mouthpiece for the greedy who try to offload paying taxes from the excessively wealthy to actual taxpayers. But don’t trust me when I say this. Just try this simple test…

Try to find any time that the ‘Taxpayers Union’ has ever supported changes to taxes that would benefit the bottom 50% of income earners and not benefit more the to 5%. Every time that I have looked at any of their public utterances, they invariably favour regressive taxes like increases to GST over raising wealth taxation like CGT and they favour cutting public services that assist those without means or that provide incentives for public good like R&D.

All of the while they do this with hypocrisy, insisting that the government should be completely transparent while concealing who actually pays for the ‘Taxpayers Union’ – something that no-one seems to know.

Personally I suspect that they are simply a right-wing PR company selling their skills to the highest bidder without any sense of who or what they damage. Exactly like Cameron Slater did with Whaleoil prior to the release of Dirty Politics. 

They will last as long for as long as there are credulous, ignorant or lazy journalists around hunting for cheap copy. Or while the TP don’t get investigated too deeply – because there is certain to be an interesting story about them.