The context was that Stephen advocates for the wealthy to pay more tax to solve the various issues he sees in our society, but there are other ways to more effectively contribute to additional causes that he believes in.
I don’t begrudge paying tax, and I would hope that the majority of people do not, but the difficult part is always determining the level of taxation and what should be funded from it. Much of this is very subjective and invariably used for political gain during election years.
Stephen advocates for the wealthy to pay more tax to adequately fund various government services, but provides no details as to what he sees are the specific areas that are inadequately funded, nor why spending more money in these areas is the best method of rectifying the problem. Based on this alone we can’t decide whether his initiative is worthy of support.
We personally donated to specific initiatives such as a hospital refurbishment, trees & benches for a park because we saw a worthy cause that wasn’t being adequately fulfilled, in our opinion, based on existing spending from taxes. We are not in the top few percentage points of wealthy people in NZ either.
There also needs to be a much clearer definition of who is wealthy. Our PAYE system decrees that those who earn over $70K are wealthy, which places a proportion of those whom we believe are underpaid into the top (wealthy) bracket. With raging house prices, many people on modest incomes will be dragged into the top 5%, who would not be able to afford additional taxes without some significant compromises to their lifestyles.
IMO the situation and solution is complicated and deserves thorough analysis.
Don’t shy away from to continuing to post. It’s easy to misconstrue intent particularly on a long thread.