Posts by Idiot Savant
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Treasury, OTOH, has a rather handy table in every Budget on who pays tax and how much?.
BTW, if David Slack is reading this, a nice quiz on income distribution in NZ akin to your Treaty of Waitangi quiz (with extra bonus questions on how much peopl eon the dole vs MPs get) could be illuminating.
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Unfortunately Stats NZ don't publish income statistics at any greater degree of granularity than a huge band of above (from memory) $1080/week.
Treasury, OTOH, has a rather handy table in every Budget on who pays tax and how much?. Which tells us that even ordinary MPs (base salary $131K + $14K expense allowance, plus travel, accomodation etc) are all in the top 1% of earners. Which goes a long way towards explaining why they talk about tax so much...
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Deputy Prime Minister Bill English has decided to pay back part of his ministerial housing allowance to Ministerial Services, saying that as Finance Minister he had to lead by example.
Only part?
He lives in Wellington. It's his normal place of residence, whatever he tells the voters of Southland (for the purposes of electoral law, you live where you say you do, and factual investigation cannot affect candidacy). As a Minister who lives in Wellington, he should be receiving nothing for accomodation, and repaying everything he rorted - just like Hobbs and Bunkle.
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What ever gave you that idea? State School, like our National Anthem, Courts, NZDF, Parliment etc, are all Anglican with some allowances for difference.
I draw your attention to s77 of the Education Act 1964: in primary schools at least, "the teaching shall be entirely of a secular character."
(Hmmm... tweak that to apply to state secondaries - there's an idea)
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My suggestion is that anyone who thinks that tax cuts are the work of Satan, yet is quite happy to pocket them, is a hypocrite.
In which case, surely the converse applies: anyone who thinks taxation is slavery and gummint is evil should fuck off to Afghanistan or Somalia to live in total freedom (until they are murdered for their shoes by the nearest warlord).
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I think his departure from the scene will be good for the economy. Both in that he won't have his hands anywhere near it, and we can all have a big 'stimulus' party.
But will that party be bigger than the ongoing cost of replacing all those TVs?
That's GDP, you know. How are we ever going to catch Australia if we cripple ourselves by not pointlessly smashing TVs?
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Roger Douglas I think we can justify simply on the basis of the number of televisions that will not have solid objects thrown at them, let alone any wider social benefit.
So you'e saying that Douglas' knighthood is good for the economy then?
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You might well need to assent of the Sovereign before it passes...
So we get rid of her too. She can take her prerogatives back to England where they belong.
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There is a good argument for not granting knighthoods with out requiring a medical check. The man has lost his marbles.
There is a good argument for revoking Douglas's knighthood entirely. The man is a criminal, not a hero.
(I wonder if I can draft a member's bill for that...?)
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The web was also nicer before it filled up with people who consider a web site pointless if it can't be monetised. The unhappy legacy of economic rationalism has been the attitude that all actions are transactions.
Fuck them. Why can't I just be a good citizen?