Polity by Rob Salmond

Here’s a link to my workings

Stop this right now. Accuracy has no place in politics in this day and age. Your reasoning contradicts uncle bills truthiness and at the end if the day I don't think the public really cares whether the minister of finance is good with numbers.

or, putting it another way,
understanding true levels of taxation
is just too ’canard
so it's understandable
if print journalists
duck all responsibility
for correcting
the English errors.

I've always interpreted such surveys as an indicator of middle-class decompression and the weakening of organised labour movements. Even then, the rentier class has successfully convinced society's battlers that those below them are to blame for holding them back. Remember the 12 Cookies joke that circulated not long after the Great Recession?

That 37% of the incoming net tax is paid by a group of people who earn 30% of the income in New Zealand (from English’s table) and hold 60% of the wealth (according to Statistics New Zealand).

This is a sentence opposition parties should want in the headlines or near the top of news stories - it's a digestible, bite sized, counter. I think getting that done is the job of opposition media representatives and spokespeople, yet I don't recall seeing it, or anything like it, even in sources thought friendly to the opposition.

Actually the top earners usually have very good tax accountants who know all about tax minimisation and they often pay a lot less tax than poorer people.

Actually the top earners usually have very good tax accountants who know all about tax minimisation and they often pay a lot less tax than poorer people.

And that my son, is why we have offshore trusts.

Or lots of rental properties.

Keith Ng also posted on this a couple of years ago.

The other thing to realise is that peoples tax and benefits change over time. That the people paying the most tax now and getting the least benefit are most likely 55 year old business managers with independent children. It fails to take into account that 30 years ago they were in a family getting lots of benefits through the education system and the health system for their children and that 10 years earlier they themselves were paying little or no tax but having massive benefits through the education system.

Making the most taxed/least benefited people think they are being hard done by is really an attack of the old on the young.

Rob this needs to be made into a press release. It's too important to have simply as a blog. Most people fail to understand how GST impacts on relative taxation of different income groups, and their misconceptions influence voting patterns and ultimately social policy.

Have you changed your calculations, Rob? I recall you on this blog using the number 45% for the proportion of income tax paid by the top 10% income earners.

I am sick of this bullshit bizarre framing of who has it the worst in N.Z. It's like English wants us to feel sorry for the Poor old rich taxpayers keeping the lazy poor in beer and ciggies. What a turd of a man.

How can someone like English sleep at night with poverty and inequality growing under his watch. He defends that poverty growth by saying that the rich are doing all the hard work because look, they have all the money.

English reduced the tax rates of the rich.They have all the money because he runs an economic con job that rewards the rich at the expense of the poor. It's immoral and pathetically illogical but fuck it , poor voters don't matter to him. What a shocker. To see poverty is heartbreaking, don't ever compare that to a wealthy person paying tax , this is why our politics are warped, this should be called out as utter bullshit.

I've written about it a few times, too. I think it's a contagious and dangerous sound-bite.

StatsChat
the 'shorter and with more swearing' version on my blog
StatsChat again
and StatsChat again, with numbers from Kiwiblog

Can't help but feel there's something more fundamental wrong here. The problem I see is that a portion of the population is a) working, let's say 1x full time ($30k pa on min wage), b) receiving financial assistance from the state, however insufficient that may be, and c) still functionally poor. Arguing over whether GST is included or not is by the by.

If a person in full time employment is not earning enough to live, never mind contribute to the services that the state provides, then we're all doing something wrong.

What am I missing? It seems like this is not a problem that we fix by changing tax structures.

You're right, we have re-elected governments who have created an imbalanced low-wage economy over the last few decades.

This government also has form for claiming black is white, and getting away with that.

It seems like this is not a problem that we fix by changing tax structures.

Disagree strongly.

Taking money from the rich [your opinion on the morality of this may vary from mine] and using it to build better housing and sustain those who are not "high achievers" and putting that money directly into the economy will actually benefit the whole country. As the saying goes " money is like muck, better spread"
For the wealthy once their physical and other needs have been met money turns into a social counter.

Building more housing stock by the state is a good start.

Think about the house price inflation rampant in this country right now which is a sterile use sinking people into debt as long term serfs to the banks who are loving it.
The people who find it difficult to feed ,clothe and live at a reasonable standard are paying through the nose for other peoples inflated investment mortgages further locking them into poverty.

I'm not recommending the wholesale appropriation of peoples assets but would like to see those with little to nothing get a fair slice of the cake.

Wages have been held down artificially by the importation to this country of cheap labour and people wonder why small town NZ is being hollowed out?

We shouldn't need schemes like working for families to top up the pay packets of working people who should be able to advance through their own efforts.

Labour price inflation might be what this country needs.

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” - Warren Buffet.

I think maybe you just agreed with me? :)

I am sick of this bullshit bizarre framing of who has it the worst in N.Z. It's like English wants us to feel sorry for the Poor old rich taxpayers keeping the lazy poor in beer and ciggies. What a turd of a man.

How can someone like English sleep at night with poverty and inequality growing under his watch. He defends that poverty growth by saying that the rich are doing all the hard work because look, they have all the money.

And did Bill English really believe what he said at the time, or was he just spinning it?

It's a legacy of the mistrust older people now have for National... If you decide you've been let down, it's harder to change your mind.... There's a perception that rich people vote National, and it's true. I hate that. It would do us good to drive some of those people away.

The thing is, when English says, “won’t somebody think of the poor rich people” (oxymoron alert!) he’s using that as an excuse not to attempt any kind of social policy aimed at inequality reduction – such as a universal guaranteed income, for example. Calling him out on his lies is not only (or even mostly) about tax restructuring per se.

can someone like English sleep at night

Bet he sleeps like a babe swaddled in warm fluffy bedding not a container for waste cardboard numbed by alcohol to keep the cold at bay.

Of course, a beautiful home seems to numb social responsibility on average.

Of course, a beautiful home seems to numb social responsibility on average.

I sometimes wonder if Bill English's beautiful home is surrounded with hedges decorated with razor wire, Joburg or Lima-style.

surrounded with hedges decorated with razor wire

He always struck me as the mined ha-ha sort.
(at the risk of having 'beamed' eyes over his 'moat')\
;- )