Posts by James Butler
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Hard News: A Capital Idea?, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
If you buy a house, you pay a 30-50% premium over rental
That depends on what kind of house you want. When we (very briefly) looked at whether we could buy a house this year, we discovered that there is a pretty good supply of the kind of place which we would be happy with - largeish apartments/units in solid middle-class suburbs - for sale, but we've never been able to find anything like that to rent; meaning an expensive cold decile-10 villa is actually the best we can get right now. We would love to live in somewhere less "nice" and more practical, and (if we could scrape together a deposit) it would actually cost us less per month.
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Hard News: A Capital Idea?, in reply to Jeremy Eade,
Our media are slowly realising the bullshit of the dream that the current private sector model has the smarts to decide matters efficiently and with long term positive implications.
Wishful thinking. One might hope that New Zealanders are slowly realizing that; the best I can say about the media is that they will "realize" whatever they think people will buy, which tends to drag them along in the wake of public opinion. Eventually.
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Hard News: A Capital Idea?, in reply to Nick Kearney,
Why can’t folks just make money, keep it and decide whether to save it (good), pay off debt (good) or buy a TV keeping a Harvey Norman salesman(person) in a job (good)?
Because on the whole they weren't - they were using it as collateral to secure more debt (bad) on more property, thus driving up the prices on property so that fewer people could afford to own their own home (bad).
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Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you, in reply to Steve Barnes,
CGT
/threadmerge
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Hard News: A Capital Idea?, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Alternatively: To tax the home in which you live is to tax something that is not a source of income for you, and that is not fair within the wider taxation context.
Well you could argue it is a net income, because it negates the cost of renting a home from someone else.
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Hard News: A Capital Idea?, in reply to BenWilson,
I’d just like to note, for the record, early in the thread, that the considerable family fortune I will most likely inherit a piece of is all in investment property. I could lose a lot from this tax. But I still think it’s a good idea.
Oh yeah, +1 (for some value of “significant” – it sure seems like a lot to me). Except a fair portion of that is in Australia anyway, so I’m assuming Aus. CGT will be payable.
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Hard News: A Capital Idea?, in reply to recordari,
But isn’t it also just as likely that, unless we can somehow increase supply of the McMansions (or the McMiniMansions) of which you speak, that the Property Prospector, or the money grubbing home owner, will slap 15% on the sale price (or the rent) to claw back the loss in capital gain? They’re in ‘business’ after all. How many of them absorbed the GST increase?
Well no (in the sale case at least - rent is a different matter), because none of the other Property Prospectors they might want to sell to will pay the extra 15%; if anything they'll want to pay less than before, because with CGT the expected ROI is now smaller. QED.
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Any inducement to do housework wore off my kids long ago; they're both cultivating, in their own ways, a really exquisite devil-may-care laziness, where all that matters is books, the Internet, and cats. No idea where they got that from.
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I'm in no position to judge the merits of this paper, but it's one of the most relevant results on CGT in New Zealand that a quick Google turned up. The authors suggest that although home ownership will become more affordable under a CGT, rents might increase; so at first flush this seems like a win for "middle New Zealand" at the expense of the top and bottom.
On a personal note, we rent, and have trouble affording it already (although at least part of that is our chronic addiction to nice suburbs); a CGT might be the final straw that forces us into mortgagehood, for better or worse.
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Also, it's ages since I've heard Coddington say anything about which I could think "OK I don't agree, but that's a reasonable position". Instead she gushes 90-95% utter tosh, while absolutely nailing it for a small minority of the time. What's up with that?