Posts by Idiot Savant
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That's a trick question, under Labour's scheme John Key doesn't get to be Prime Minister.
Point. And yet because Labour has focused on changing thresholds rather than rates, he'd get exactly the same amount. And the difference between the two schemes is money that helps people further down the income pyramid, who really need it (because, lets be honest, John Key doesn't need a helping hand anymore), as well as money that pays for our retirement savings, and of course money we don't have to borrow.
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Paul: an excellent question indeed. I wonder if any journalists will ask it?
Evan:
The trick to doing this is to hoodwink the masses into THINKING that they are being looked after.
Hence the constant talk about "average" kiwis, which simply ignores the reality of income distribution in this country. Fortunately, people can do maths (or at least use the internet to access a site which will do it for them) and can discover the truth quite readily.
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Kyle: Charles E Wilson may very well have believed that what was good for General Motors was good for the country (or, to be strictly accurate, "What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa"). That doesn't make it any more excusable.
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The Icelandic government is refusing to guarantee British deposits and in response Gordon Brown is threatening to use anti-**terrorism** legislation to freeze Icelandic assets in Britain. It does make things here seem quite sedate.
I don't think that word means what they think it means.
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Passing character judgements on real people on the basis of what you think they earn is extremely hazardous, whether you're talking about beneficiaries or highly-paid knowledge-workers.
Indeed it is. But that's not what I'm doing. Meanwhile your (and others) preciousness is obscuring rather than aiding the discussion.
BTW, for the curious, based on the current PM's salary of $375,000, John Key's tax cut would be $7,660. Under Labour's scheme, he would get only $1,410.
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Eddie: I'm not dismissing you as a right-winger. I'm not talking about you at all. I'm talking about demographics, not individuals. And without saying anything at all about what any particular individual thinks, we can quite validly say that there are demographic correlations in voting patterns. Looking at income, National draws its support disproportionately from the rich, Labour from the poor. The parties know this, and target their policies accordingly (they also have ideological positions about what society should look like which drive this as well).
You run counter to the demographic trend. Whoopee for you. But its neither important nor relevant to my point.
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We all love and respect I/S and we strive to forgive him his "eat the rich" moments.
There is a serious point here: politics, particularly around tax and employment relations policy, is fundamentally about distribution, about who gets what. And when a party proposes policies with the primary aim of enriching its supporters at the expense of the majority of New Zealanders or of future generations, that's not something we should politiely look the other way on.
"Class" is a dirty word in new Zealand, and rightly so. But that shouldn't blind us to the fact that we have a wannabe upper class in this country who want to use the state to enrich themselves and entrench their position - in the process undermining the kiwi dream of an egalitarian, classless society, where people who didn't go to high school can become Prime Minister, and people who grew up in a state house can become high-flying executives in global corporations.
Dismiss this as "eat the rich" if you want - but its being willfully blind to a serious threat to our way of life, and one of our most powerful long-term political dynamics. Chris Trotter is an ass, but one of the things he is right about is that this struggle between an egalitarian dream and an aristocratic one has been the driving force in our politics for over a century. And it is as strong as ever in this campaign.
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Steve: I agree entirely
And it would be interesting to know how today's children feel about John Key saddling them with debt so he can give a great stonking tax cut to his rich mates.
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So many arguments for a quick intelligence/current affairs test before you are allowed to vote.
Yeah. Because that has worked so well in the US before (for the ignorant, it was used to stop black people from voting).
But seriously: stupid people have interests to, and they are just as deserving of representation. And to get all Hobbesian for a moment, they're just as capable of killing you if you try and systematically exclude them from any sniff of power.
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Maybe she'd had a heads-up on the new Roy Morgan poll.
Caveats: two week polling period, systematic overstatement of the Greens blah blah blah.
But: run it through the MMP calculator and see the results: Nat 52, Lab 48, Greens 11, Maori 4-7, ACT 4, Progs and UF 1 each. Its a three-way coalition either way, with the Maori Party as kingmakers (and ACT as the other partner in their menage a trois).
If other polls are heading the same way, then this is a real fight, and not just a cakewalk for the right.