Posts by Paul Campbell
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I too was annoyed that I went to the bank (an hour) before Bollard announced - but a 1c change is nothing - I want it down by 20% (the amount my income has gone down in the past few months) am I bitter .... noooo .... well maybe a little bit - my income is down and my mortgage is up (shouldn't life be the other way around) - I've been getting hit twice by the RB's recent actions, about time they took some action on my side ....
(I'm not a farmer - I'm a geek who lives in NZ and consults overseas - I earn the foreign exchange that you spend)
About Vietnam - my take on it was that it has to be about the most capitalist communist country on the planet - a nation of small store owners - any country where the main sign of beauty is a pale skin that shows you don't work in the fields (all those young women in gloves and hats) isn't going to make it as a worker's paradise .... if only the americans had initially sent in socioligists rather than military advisers ...
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I have the opposite problem - we migrated the last kid to Linux a year or so when she demanded she get a computer like Mum's (from a Mac). The kids use open office for reports and don't even know it - it's just a word processor for heavens, konq for web browsing, amarok to talk to their ipods etc etc etc it's just the way of their world ....
Problem I have is when my son doing an NCEA lvl 1 IT course comes home with homework from the teacher like "what key does X" (with an implicit 'in MS word' in there), "what's a virus?", "how do you guard against them?" (switch to linux duh!) - all this contextual stuff that she expects the kids to have a windows computer and doesn't bother teaching for those who don't.
Don't get me wrong, I want my kids to learn how to use Windows, and Linux and Macs - by the time they're in the work force whatever they learn now will be out of date and they need to learn now how to adapt to whatever they need to use when the time comes - exposing kids to as many platforms as you can is a big win!
On the other hand I'm not going to spend all my spare time rooting spyware and viruses out of my family's computers
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Having spent much of the past month stuck in a generic hotel room in the US with little other than a TV and a 'net connection to keep me company (home at last!) - I must say Flight of the Conchords have been getting lots of push - quirky promo clips before all the big shows (final season of the Sopranos, etc etc)
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well just once I'd like to post an image but: http://www.ravensbrew.com/images/kopiluwakmovie.gif
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People do come to NZ for "lifestyle reasons" - we moved back 2 years ago so my kids can grow up here - but I'm also consulting for a US employer and probably getting paid more than I would here in NZ
But your point is valid from a different direction - in the future (well now!) NZ employers will have to compete with overseas employers for not just the people who choose to relocate but also for those of us who choose to live here too
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Don: I mostly agree - whenever he quits Cullen's going to leave things in a decidedly better state than when he arrived - because he mostly didn't hand out candy when it was in his pockets .... better to save it for a rainy day ....
The economy has cycles - ups and downs, largely out of the control of the govt - when things are good like now the govt becomes flush with extra tax, but when things are bad it needs more, both to cover the drop in it's revenues and to cover stuff like higher dole payouts etc etc. Arguably the best time to give tax cuts are when the economy's down and needs some stoking - but that's when you can least afford it. And when things are going well now you maybe even want to raise taxes to slow things down - unlike interest rates though tax changes take years to kick in so you really don't want to make wide swings but instead make gradual changes.
So what Cullen's been doing - the ant vs. grasshopper thing - in good years paying down the govt debt so it has head room when things go bad is probably the next best thing to do - I'm honestly glad he didn't run around sprinkling money everywhere (but we'll see about next year)
As many pundits have been pointing out the economy's still in a strange state and maybe heading for a fall, if we're lucky the govt will engineer a soft landing, I'm not holding my breath though - that means that some politician's going to get left holding the bag - English may not want to win since he'd get blamed when things crap out - and Cullen could snipe from across the house about how he'd kept it all together .....
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(I should add before I'm accused of comparing apples to oranges that US social security tax is only on the first 90k odd of your income and California sales tax is 8-9% compared with GST of 12.5 and is only on the sale of things - last time I tried to do an apples to apples comparison NZ came out ahead by very roughly 6% and that wasn't including the healthcare benefit)
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oh that's silly, but also understandable if you've only ever done business in in one place.
It's kind of like moaning about NZ's high marginal tax rate (in the California I was paying 33% Fed, 10% state and 6% social security - 49% compared with the 39% here, and healthcare not included - those 70 pages and several days of work had to do various tax rebates I could claim to hopefully reduce some of that)
Honestly, people love to winge about taxes, I understand that but "you don't know how lucky you are mate"
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well that's true - one of the things I;m continually amazed by at running a small biz in NZ (comared with the same in the US while I was living there) is how wonderfully easy the paperwork is - maybe 20 minutes a month for me do do gst/paye/payroll - it's because the rules are so simple and a simple spreadsheet anyone can create will do much of the hard work for you - creating lots of new rules etc and special exemptions/exceptions will take this away - it's the bane of the US tax system and why my tax returns used to be 70 pages long (without even trying hard)
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yeah - I was feeling the same way - as the owner of a nominally non-profit corporation (ie I pay myself everything that's left over at the end after expenses and taxes) the idea of the taxes on my non-existant profit going down seems pretty useless - really I think it only affects people who get dividends (which are after all redistributed corporate taxes after profits) .... but if I can move money into kiwisaver instead I probably come out ahead.
On the other hand my income is all derived form overseas and my takehome has gone down 20% this year - anything that helps do something about the exchange rate is good by me
BTW the idea that the 3% reduction in tax (on profits) somehow balances a 4% (less tax = 3%) contribution on employees wages seems like comparing apples and oranges to me and is probably a red herring