Posts by David Hood
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to giovanni tiso,
"England under the Tories"
Hang on, in England it has been advocated by Labour for years, the Tories were very much pushed into.
Norway also has a sugar tax. And among Finland's somewhat complicated coalition arrangements, as far as I can see can the sugar tax has been removed (multiple times) by more right leaning coalitions and brought back by more left leaning ones.
If you drew Venn diagrams , sugar tax would include most public health people, some right wing politicians, and some left wing politicians (given we can name both right and left wing politicians for it and against it). I think this makes the essential idea empirically apolitical. Equally I think a right wing implementation of it is likely to be more regressive than a left wing implementation.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Sacha,
Contagious?
I'm going to venture "not on the basis of that article"
It is a bit difficult to track back- Though credited to Sarah Knapton at The Telegraph (you might know her from articles such as "Long term vegetarian diet changes human DNA raising risk of cancer and heart disease" see critique http://www.statschat.org.nz/2016/03/30/hold-the-lettuce/ and "Brushing teeth regularly could ward off Alzheimer's disease") it is not on the Telegraph site,
and while Trevor Lawley from the article is published in Nature, it is an article about finding a bacteria in mice that protects against another bacteria (in mice) which seems a bit of stretch to the content in this article (also a couple of letters, but they don't seem to link to the article content either). -
the subeditor Yoda is.
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People do die of diabetes, but the effects of it as a chronic condition are also pretty hard on the living too.
To summarise a bit of the Ministry of Health research I linked to earlier. Back in 1996, when people were first really modelling the likely growth, the 1996 figures were 81491 cases of Diabetes.
The "worst case" of the models published in 1996 was that in 2011 there would be around 145000 cases. I don't have the actual 2011 figures, but there were 257776 cases in 2014, which is about 3 times as bad as the worst case estimate.
In one sentence: Since 1996 the population has gone up by 1.2 times, diabetes has gone up by 3 times.
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Topically, this popped up in my reading list this evening
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/low-tar-cigarettes/481116/ -
Rather than weight, would people rather discuss it in terms of type 2 diabetes, because that is a pretty fine reason for a sugar tax in my book
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Hard News: How the years flew by ..., in reply to Jim Cathcart,
And this is the big grey area.
You could get a quick sense of it by inventing a measure like median house price to electronic card spending (the later is on Infoshare on StatsNZ).
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I just want to go on record I grow increasingly of the opinion it is primarily a financial bubble not a population pressure issue.
While it is true (I assume) that Auckland needs to build 75000 extra homes to have the same kind of people per household as the rest of the country, it is also true that Auckland needs to build about zero extra homes to have the same kind of people per household as Auckland did in 2001 (approximately zero, there are a few small changes in household composition over the period). For decades the provinces have been getting older and emptying out, so comparing the household sizes of the places people are moving from as the reference point does not give the whole picture.
Looking at it as a financial bubble, the issues become things like who has access to what financial resources and how attractive tulip bulbs are as a store of money.
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Hard News: How the years flew by ..., in reply to Glenn Pearce,
But it won’t happen while the Reserve Bank Governor is constrained to keeping Inflation within the 1-3% range and the only tool he has is the OCR
It is not actually the Reserve Banks job- it looks after banking stability (trying to ensure the banks won't crash in the event of a downturn) and given house prices are outside the inflationary measures, it does not form part of the 1-3 range calculation.
The only reason people think the Reserve Bank has anything to do with it is that the government has been so very, very inactive that the Reserve Bank has gone "this could be so destabilising that we will do what we can so long as it does not conflict with our formal objectives".
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Census 2001 - average household size in the Auckland region - 2.9 people.
Census 2013 - average household size in the Auckland region - 2.9 people.People can probably make their own estimates of how much population pressure has been the main causal factor in house price increases in this period.