Balance, my post was in response to your "who cares?" brush-off of Luxon's way of base, estimation of cost. That's all.
I am so over politics. Bring on the damned election and lets just get it over with.
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Balance, my post was in response to your "who cares?" brush-off of Luxon's way of base, estimation of cost. That's all.
I am so over politics. Bring on the damned election and lets just get it over with.
People may be ‘over politics’ but unfortunately the problem with have in New Zealand is that we have a plethora of problems and no obvious solutions.
If you look at a model of society that would please both Left and Right, probably the template is the Scandinavian countries where they have high private sector innovation and productivity, high private sector incomes across the board, and high taxation paying for a gold standard social welfare system, health, education etc.
The issue in New Zealand is that we don’t have high levels of innovation and productivity, we don’t have high private sector incomes across the board, we don’t have a taxation system which has captured any significant revenue from the main driver of the ‘wealth effect’ - the property industry. But we do want a gold standard societal structure and of course high living standards. We have high public sector incomes, high ivory tower incomes, a traditional primary produce sector which is under attack, a ‘low wage economy’ built on high immigration. We can’t pay our way so we rely on borrowing to paper over the yawning cracks in our finances.
If you are on the Left you say ‘nobody gets left behind, I want the gold standard so I don’t care about high borrowing - the system will collapse at some stage anyway’.
If you are on the Right you say ‘I know we are in the cactus as a nation but I won’t admit the fundamental economic problems that exist in New Zealand, I’ll maintain the fiction that a change of government can fix unsolvable issues’.
Unfortunately I think New Zealand is going to go through a rude economic realisation by ‘a thousand cuts’. Slowly over a period of years we are going to realise that individually and collectively we are no nearly as wealthy as we thought we are, and the illusion was only fostered and maintained via vast quantities of cheap borrowed money.
The biggest shock will be New Zealand moving into a prolonged economic downturn while the US economy continues to grow necessitating further interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. Thinks will then getting very painful here.
Logen Ninefingers, I typically don't agree with your posts but you are quite right.
Neither party wants to tackle the elephant in the room being the unfair tax system. Although Labour have nipped around the fringes with the brightline test.
However one party wants to offer tax cuts which is not the answer either.
Although Labour have had a litany of failures they have delivered somewhat on building more houses.
It beggars belief that after spending presumably some time researching & launching a key, Law & Order election policy around imprisonment, neither Chris Luxon, Paul Goldsmith, & Mitchell announcing the policy to the media, had absolutely no clue how much it currently costs to keep a person in prison!
It's so amateurish, these guys are not a serious party.
Bill English famously said "prisons are a moral & fiscal failure" .
Goldsmith was the most ineffectual minister, Luxon is out of his depth & Mitchell all bluster.
If you think the crux of my post was that our problems can be fixed by a ‘fair’ tax system, then you haven’t understood it. Of course it would have been good to collect more windfall revenue from the (now imploding) property ponzi scheme, but we missed the opportunity.
But the thrust of my argument was that in the Scandinavian countries the basis of individual and collective prosperity is high private sector innovation and productivity which drives high private sector incomes.
A country like Norway has also plowed a significant portion of enormous oil and gas revenues into a Sovereign Wealth Fund that is worth $1.4 Trillion. This is genuine unencumbered collective wealth, not illusory wealth based on borrowing.
New Zealand is trying to create wealth and a gold standard safety net through borrowing. Our housing ponzi scheme could not have been carried out without huge borrowing. We cannot pay our legions of public servants without huge borrowing. We cannot pay our legions of council workers without huge borrowing. Our legions of real estate agents, mortgage brokers, construction industry workers are all paid via clipping the ticket on huge borrowing from retail banks.
We are not going to borrow our way out of this. If you tax at high levels the people that are only ‘well off’ due to unsustainable levels of borrowing, you cannot square the circle
- as overall levels of borrowing will simply need to increase to sustain the broken system.
Unfortunately people see ‘well off’ people and think we are going to fix all our problems by taxing them more. To be brutally honest, a lot of these ‘well off’ people are only employed due to our current ‘plan’ of trying to borrow our way out of this mess. They shouldn’t really be employed in their current roles. Put simply, we now have too many people keeping seats warm in the public sector, too many people trying to flog unaffordable houses to other people, and too many people in moribund middle management and make-work roles right across the board.
And to illustrate my point, look no further than the below development. Hundreds of jobs effectively on taxpayer funded life support. In the private sector these people would be redeployed into other roles as per normal functioning of the economic system, but increasingly it doesn’t happen in any instance where the state can step in & ‘save jobs’ via borrowing. We can’t borrow our way to prosperity simply by putting people on state (taxpayer) funded life support.
We can fool ourselves, but ultimately the credit ratings agencies will not be fooled.
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‘The Government is stumping up an extra $128 million for cash-strapped tertiary institutions in the hope it can stave off the hundreds of job cuts threatened and programmes being slashed.
The funding will be spent to increase tuition subsidies at degree-level and above by a further 4 per cent in 2024 and 2025.
This comes on top of a 5 per cent increase provided at Budget 2023, which Education Minister Jan Tinetti said was the “most significant funding increase in 20 years”.’
We should note that in an ostensibly capitalist system, left wing ivory tower intellectuals have their cushy roles and livelihoods back-stopped by the very system and people that they spend most of their lives criticising. And today is the latest example.
You mention "we can not pay our legions of Public Servants without huge borrowing".
Just a fact check, proportionally the size of our Public sector is exactly the same as Australia & the UK.
It's a lazy easy target for the opposition to attack exploiting the fact most people don't like paying their taxes.
It was 20% under John Key, 20% under Bill English, 20% under Jacinda Ardern.
Lets dispel this myth once and for all.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/1298...r-isnt-bloated
Perhaps read the comments below that ‘article’ and a truer picture of the publics experience and perception will emerge.
The trade unionist will always have a statistical onslaught ready to back up their arguments, but many other people would argue that for every new person entering New Zealand you don’t automatically need to proportionally increase the number of public servants, because here again we are dealing again with issues of efficiency and productivity.
Of course, if you were someone with an agenda to grow the public service, and you got people to readily accept the view that the public service numbers must always be at a certain percentage of the overall population, then mass immigration would be a cast iron way to achieve your goal.
I wonder how much credence you would give to an article from the NBR complaining about a lack of productivity in our public sector? My feeling is that you would give it short shrift, and I do the same with arguments by trade unionists that cherry pick stats from selected countries.
https://www.nbr.co.nz/guest-opinion/...re-productive/
I also notice you grumbling again that ‘people don’t like paying their taxes’. Unless you can show me evidence of mass tax fraud taking place in New Zealand, your assertions are nothing more than Left wing mythology and scape-goating.
We will never be able to borrow our way to mass prosperity. Many are currently clinging to the delusion we can, and that is unfortunate.