Posts by slarty
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I didn't think there was GST on wages??
Precisely.
An extra dose of hyperbole anyone?
They may be referring to remibursement for expenses. Which may indicate these are being used as wages. Which might be evasion or fraud. So someone should probably discretely suggest they STFU.
Because not all charities are the shining light of probity... even in the interests of doing the right thing...
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The fat exists. It's just that they are, for some reason, choosing to look in the wrong places.
Oh yes.
But even if it were cut out, it's a rounding error in the scheme of things...
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Is it me, or is there the faintest whiff of hyperbole on PA at the moment :) The depth of comment is impressive: I've only just finished reading all the documents... there are some seriously bright people here, able to digest and comment on such a complex beast so quickly...
This budget will increase government borrowing over what it would have been if nothing had changed. That means more is being dished out than collected.
Yes the base has been broadened, but there is a serious effort at compensation.
Yes, the rich get the main benefit, but these are the people with the greatest marginal propensity to save, so they will repay debt (instead of buying silly luxuries like food).
Much as I personally hate GST (because I was dragged up in the day where overly-simplistic statements like "tax on the poor" were used) I have to accept that it is very likely to generate roughly 1% bump in growth over the next few years.
The nation voted Tory. That means I have to put up with that decision, and my take is that this budget is pretty much the least worst we could have hoped for.
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It's a simple mechanism to transfer some of our private sector debt (which is a structural problem for NZ) to the public sector (which, relatively speaking, isn't).
The man behind the tree in this case is the national equity we managed to build up despite the constant clamouring for tax cuts.
Thank you Doctor.
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Under the Proceeds of Crime Act, the police stand to reap quite a sum of money from the nationwide franchise.
My reading of the act is that the proceeds go the the Official Assignee, not the police (but I could be wrong).
And don't forget this is offset by a drop in tax revenue. So the net impact of the POCA [sorry, I can't help using the inherited acronym - so much nicer than the NZ version] is a drop in government income.
Such legislation has more to do with ignorant wooden tops and free trade agreements than any rational policy in my experience.
Yes RB, as you could probably foresee, I am extremely depressed by such a flagrant waste of public resources. But they had to wrap it up to get out of it - in the public service you can never say we will just stop that now because it's turned out to be a waste of time... have to justify the investment somehow.
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FOI/OIA. Those laws don't say you can frustrate requests because you think the people making them are idiots.
I have warbled on in the past about the limitations of OIA legislation - it is easy to fall into the problem of not knowing how to frame the question to get full access to what you really wanted.
Where the UEA fell down was they appear to have simultaneously failed to provide anything meaningful while providing the wrong material...
They should recruit some professionals from Whitehall, experts in the Sir Humphrey method of encraption...
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I have this rant some of you may have been subjected to about the importance of scientific literacy. I know it's no longer a "core competancy"
I have a very similar rant - to the extent it has turned into a policy. I very rarely recruit people now who cannot demonstrate a grasp of the scientific method: ideally through having a completed a formal, peer reviewed research project.
And yes, it means I'm constantly recruiting (due to the high standard) and perpetually fighting off reviews of employment decisions along the lines of:
"But I have years of experience."
"That isn't in dispute: but you couldn't construct an argument in your work sample or interview. And your experience was of turning up, not actually delivering stuff."
"Yes, but I have all this experience..."
I can see why people give in... competency based recruitment mutter mutter...
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And, from there, what had begun as a reasonable discussion unwound to the point where, it seemed, almost no authority could be trusted if it did not conform to the critique of a retired mathematician with a blog. Scepticism, if it was ever present, had been replaced by something else
There's a good TED talk on the loss of trust in science that appears to be permeating our society here.
I experienced it watching some bizarre behaviour by a bunch of people on Waiheke around cellphone towers recently - the conspiracy theorists have all been out!
And I have some sympathy for the ignorant masses (!) when they inflict magnificent journalism such as can be found at the Daily Mail on themselves...
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the owner of the New Zealand Herald
Anybody interested in putting together a consortium to buy Granny and operate it under a trust structure? I hate to admit I'm taken to reading the DomPost now because the Herald has become soooo awful.
I presume this is due to panic over falling revenue manifesting as hysteria in the reporting..?
if we could find a way to get some of that commercial pressure off....
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Just a silly point: the GST collected on rates are more or less rebated to local council - sorry I don't have time to find the reference to how it works in practice...
And as to changing a government by tax revolt?
I was there... a few years later an Aunt said to me "see, you didn't need to go to all that trouble, they got rid of it anyway" <g>
And interestingly, its repeal was funded by a 2.5% increase in GST...!