Posts by Moz
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Access: Walking Is Overrated, in reply to Chelle Hope,
I'm looking at getting a wheelchair cycle myself
If you can afford it for the love of all that's sane, get a tadpole recumbent trike with arm-power, rather than the usual crappy delta (like Sean had). Those are unstable at any speed, but unfortunately the muppets who make them are "mobility aid makers" rather than people who understand anything about vehicle design. Greenspeed and Trisled in Oz will do them IIRC (contact me if you're having trouble and I can prod TriSled at least), the problem being that usually everyone has a sob story and wants more than their budget will get them, so they end up with a craptastic thing that puts them right off handcycles forever. It might sound odd if you're used to wheelchairs, but a handcycle that's not stable at 50kph is a dangerous joke. The point is they're supposed to be faster than a wheelchair, right? Not "just as unstable, just as slow, but use different muscles". Ahem. {/rant}
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Access: Walking Is Overrated, in reply to Chelle Hope,
Fun means different things to different people, too.
Oh, very much so. I'm quite aware that I'm excluding a lot of potential friends by saying "no ride bike, no Moz for you". I'm also trying to be clear that this is all about me, and I'm not denying that other people have fun in other ways.
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I still don't have a good way to describe people who are basically healthy and robust, but in a wheelchair. Because those are the people who seem to go out and have fun, and are fun to do stuff with. But fun I mean the stupid stuff that teenagers do, like dragging a guy in a wheelchair up Mt Arthur (because it was there, obviously). I still think he could have gone waterskiing, but the adults involved disagreed.
And then there's Sean, who likes to go cycle touring with a wheelchair Cycle touring is the arachnid's elbows.
I've hung out with other people in wheelchairs who are much sicker, and basically can't do vigorous exercise at all. Which is less fun, for me anyway, because a lot of what I do revolves around exercise. They don't do that so much. Except sex, apparently, because that never gets old.
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Speaker: Why we can’t just fix secondary…, in reply to Australopithecus,
What is The PAS readership's opinion on Universal Guaranteed Income plus flat tax?
I'm a big fan. As part of a radical simplification of the benefits system it would be great.
But most people don't think of the tax system as part of the benefits system, so I think it would take some smooth talking to get people to accept it. Incremental approaches will probably involve a lot of added complexity before the final reveal "simple!", and while I would love to skip them I fear running a scare campaign would be irresistible to some elements.
The simple version would be so nice but I'm not sure a flat tax would work. I suspect we'd still want a three level "none/some/punitive" setup, but of course you can elide the bottom level by saying the UBI isn't taxed while pretending that is different from not taxing income (a zero rate on the first $X). It makes no sense to me, but I see people do it all the time. So yeah, 0% up to the poverty line (or wherever the UBI is), 20% tax up to, say, the top 10% of incomes, then 50%. The compromise on the top level being between higher rates cutting in higher and pushing people out of the country/making wages unaffordable (because a chunk of the top earners will just say "pay after tax to be $X". I think that group is vanishingly tiny, but they're the ones who get the media coverage)
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to Jeremy Andrew,
So, this post is sponsored by the NZTA. Does this mean our speeding tickets are indirectly feeding Russell and his clan?
I hope so. It would be nice to think that voluntary taxation was going to a good home. ... but let's not get too political.
One day I hope to get a speeding ticket, but every year I get a little bit slower, so unless I take up speeding on the (rare) 10kph signposted shared paths it's not likely. And the cops are normally uncooperative even when a bike does manage to trigger their radar.
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Hard News: A law gone awry, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
the Prime Minister tweeted this image last night
Wholly sheet. I guess that confirms his stance on the issue. "set up to fail" springs to mind.
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Speaker: Why we can’t just fix secondary…, in reply to Lilith __,
I realise tax breaks benefit high-income folks more.
BUT. A little extra can make a huge difference for those who are struggling.I think that's an argument for better tax breaks for low-income folk, rather than an argument for "give huge benefits to the rich, and hope the poor also get something". At the very least it would be a very badly targeted form of assistance. I suppose if you buy the "deserving rich" myth it makes sense but I don't.
Income splitting would help us a bit now, and would have helped a lot when I was working and my partner was studying (or vice versa), but it's just a bad way to get that outcome.
But really, we would benefit a lot more from a vigorous attack on tax minimisation and tax cheats than by any tinkering at the margins. Given the current government budget, putting an extra few hundred dollars in my pocket every year will be at the expense of someone else. I'd rather than be tax cheats than poor people. Especially because if we ripped $80 million out of the pockets of poor people they'd be screwed, but that's roughly how much the tax cheats steal every year...
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Speaker: Why we can’t just fix secondary…, in reply to izogi,
I hugely prefer the NZ returns I've done.. and appreciated that I don't have to do them
Very true. Trying to explain the NZ system to Australians or merkins is hard because they really struggle to understand how a tax system could be designed to raise money, rather than be burdened with a huge range of tiny political carbuncles.
Admittedly my problem could easily have happened in NZ AFAIK. Any provisional tax system is going to require intervention when someone's situation changes.
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Speaker: Why we can’t just fix secondary…, in reply to B Jones,
Nope, but you don't get charged interest on the period of time (up to nearly two years) that you might owe tax before it's first due.
Not everyone understands that idea. Fortunately, perhaps.
The worst was in Oz when I transitioned from being self-employed (IT contracting) to cycle touring. The tax department came after me to make quarterly payments on my "assessed income" and it took a bit of work to convnice them that I was not actually earning anything. The idea that I wouldn't be happy to give them money and get it back a year later was apparently unusual, and again, took some work to convince them that if I gave them all my savings as "tax", I would have to go back to work in order to have money to live on, and that quite defeated the whole point of saving up to go on holiday.
Even the most sensible ideas, like "chase self-employed people to make quartly payments of the tax they will have to pay" needs to allow for individual circumstances. Some of it was bewildering "get a letter from your former employer saying you've stopped working"... "this letter is from you"... "do you understand what 'self-employed' means?" It was funny, but also stressful - they can, and do, assess quite hefty penalties for non-payment. Those penalties can be even harder to recover after they decide the original payment was demanded in error (and a big shout-out to my friends at Student Loans New Zealand)
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Speaker: Why we can’t just fix secondary…, in reply to Tim Croft,
Is there any provision for a payment of interest on the money taken in excess?
Not for things like this, no. It's just part of the cost of paying tax. OTOH, if they did pay inetrest it would probably be at the rate government normally pays when they borrow money... a few percent less than the banks and often less than the CPI.
For most people it's worth running the numbers: $1200 a year is $100/month. Assume you do your tax on time and get your refund within a month, so there's no extra period when you're losing on the full amount. $100/month at (say) 2% per annum you'd earn $11 over the year.
But if they did have to, they'd have to hike taxes somewhere to make up the shortfall. It really is a zero sum game in that regard. So it's probably better to leave it alone.