NZIER

Yes ’tis true, fair call. Getting sent to the mines used the be a punishment! Funny how things change…

However I must confess I don’t know the best solution. The government has to have money to do its job. It has to collect it somewhere. The largest drivers to my objections to how Labour did it are:

1) Wastage. I really think at least part of WFF and interest free student loans is wasted unnecessarily. Don’t even get me started on the rampant rise of employees on the public purse.
2) Skew. The last 10 years saw quite a skew I think. Easy to do politically when the majority will benefit from the skew against the few.
3) Lack of planning. Big ticket items were signed up to with no exit strategy. Cullen Fund had to have contributions stopped because there was no way out of WFF and IFSL once JK painted himself into the corner.

I am not anti wealth, far from it. It ill behooves anyof us to label each other so generally. I’m an ecclective mix of ideas and beliefs.

It MUST exist, and it may be hard to cobble together but we need it. Partisan stuff only polarises. Entrenched psoitions are hard to move (oviously). I am not in the lower paid (although was in a household with a person redundant and unable to find work for ayear recently) and recognise that is important for the weaker to be supported. If people want to be self interested, then it doesnt pay to have weak links wandering about finding theirown desperate way out of their situation (cue helath, crime, education problems etc).

PAYE worker earning $25000 pays $4,370 tax.
PAYE worker earning $100000 pays $29,540. That is nearly 7 times the tax for 4 times the earnings. This is likely to drive behaviours that try and minimise tax paid.

In reality the person earning $100,000 will contribute more tax in more ways than the person earning $25,000. That will be via higher consumption, earnings on investments, that sort of thing.

Unfortunately there is a political tendency or incite negativity toward the higher earner and demand proportionally more (i.e. 7 times instead of 4 times) from the higher earner “because they can afford it”. Believe it or not the natural response to being spat on is not to turn the other cheek.

I’m getting the sense that those saying “fairer to the many not the few” oppose a drop in the top tax rate because they see it as benefiting the few. Trouble is, no-one says anything when tax rates rise for those same people. The inference to draw from that is that it’s OK for negative things to happen to people on higher income bands, but not OK for positive things.

Well, take a close look at what that says about you as a people. Higher skilled people are already leaving in droves to live elsewhere. Keep on being as unpleasant as you can, and before you know it there won’t be anyone in your target group anymore. You’ll be like looters who think someone will restock the supermarket shelves.

Tracey yes I agree -Labour is loosely based on the principles of socialism which obviously has its derivatives from Marxism.

A tax system that is more balanced and therefore genuinely fairer to the “many and not just the few” would be closer to Labour’s ideology.