Shipwrecked by taxes and other Grey Lynn horrors

Diary of the last 22 hours

Later yesterday afternoon

To the archive! Where’s that clipping from an Auckland morning newspaper? Here we go.

The National party’s Auckland Central candidate, last seen here being described as living with her finance, is speaking up for her party’s most cherished stakeholder: money.

What are we looking at here? Something real? Or something that a former comms manager for a bank might whip up for talking points?

Actually, it could be really actually real. You take your political life in your hands standing yourself between Kiwi Mum and Dad voters and their right to untaxed capital gains in this dysfunctional Ponzi scheme of a property market.

Anyway, mythical or real: light touch paper, stand clear and just look at Twitter go absolutely off.

The best is from Francis McRae

Wealth taxes are not on the part of money that's hard earned

I sit it out, I’m too busy spending my hard-earned money on Netflix. Finally I scan the action on Twitter and make a post:

Nice to go to sleep knowing tomorrow’s newsletter is writing itself.

4.05am

Ain't nobody awake but David and the Tui. What kind of maniac are you Tui, it's 4.05am, go back to sleep; I am.

Doze off thinking: that newsletter will be ready to go, assuming there’s no worrying new development in the pandemic.

7.00am

There’s a worrying new development in the pandemic.

7.10am

For more on the worrying development, we’re joined by Minister Hipkins. There’s a new case at St Dominics school and it may be the consequence of people not altogether playing the game, and having some doubts about the science.

I have three reactions and the first one is FFS and the second is FFS, really.

When we first learned about the sisters driving south from the Greenlane roundabout, carting the virus down to Wellington, I typed angrily: Team of 5 million returns to changing rooms to find its gear has been fucking stolen.

Reactions one and two come from that same place.

Reaction three follows in a minute or two, and is: just what are we dealing with, then?

One thread of thought:

If this has happened because you guys think you know better than the scientists, thanks for nothing.

Another:

If this has happened because you knew better and now the whole country will have to go through more difficulty, thanks for nothing.

Another:

If this has happened because some guy with radio reckons gave you the idea to disbelieve the officials and their expert advice, thanks for nothing radio dickhead.

And another: it tends  to pay to wait and see. The clearer the picture, the better the understanding. Maybe I should wait to know more.

This is a position I can only land on after a few more minutes of FFS, and while I’m no longer steaming, I remain prickly: yes, but  can we get everyone to space out, wear the masks, keep records and follow the rules? Is that so much to ask?

And you also think: maybe bluetooth is is what we need to get a proper picture of the movement  of people into proximity of the virus. And then you think: you can still be let down by humans not carrying the bloody thing with them though.

1.00pm 

A briefing from the DG. More information. Turns out the  thing you were angry about is not in fact the reason this has happened. 

This morning there were questions about people not disclosing their contacts to tracers, but by this afternoon the problem appears to be in fact that two people inside the cluster who thought they had no symptoms went off to a bereavement event and infected people. Cheers.

Questions you might ask are: should they have been going out, why were they going out, why were they going to a large gathering?

And: what's up with that, can we not have better containment of the circle?

A further thought you might have might be:  man, gatherings are the most hazardous bit to this, though aren't they?

A further thought you might have might be: remember all the pressure that came on about  funerals and exemptions? And where are we now? And do we maybe see that as agonising as it can be to impede people from coming  together right way to grieve, putting it off until it's safer is surely the better idea.

There's still this, though, on RNZ:

Some members of the Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship cluster had a meeting after the level 3 lockdown had started. The police asked them to disperse, says Ashley Bloomfield.

Dr Bloomfield also said that nurses who were family members within the cluster had been effective in talking the disbelievers around, getting them to grasp the gravity of it all, got on top of things so that the testing and tracing could be done. Thank the Lord they were there eh.

3.00pm

Hey Siri how's the newsletter that was writing itself?

Am both inordinately pleased to see a wealth tax debate, and filled with morbid gloom at how it will most likely go, because please refer to earlier remarks about voters and untaxed capital gains and dysfunctional ponzi scheme of a property market.

There’s a lot we can traverse and if I take a slug of my glass half-full I can persuade myself we might manage to get somewhere by thrashing it all out.

But the moment you start this ‘discussion’ you open the door to a blizzard of  indignant objection, largely founded on the proposition: it’s mine, I worked hard for it, take your hands off you filthy commie and the doing of the hard work trumps all other considerations about achieving a productive functional equitable arrangement for everyone.

Hard earned money is a nice way to describe it, but the former comms manager for the ANZ must surely know that what she's so nobly describing  will oftentimes be inherited wealth or speculative wealth, with not really all that much hard work gone into it, to be honest.

Moreover, no matter how hard you worked, you still got there thanks to the benefits of other work by other people.

And, as Twitter laid out last night, there is this: 

I'll let my ICU nurse neighbour know that she doesn't work 'hard' enough. That is probably why she rents rather than owns her home.

And this:

Hard earned income is what ruined my dad's body at 55 from a lifetime of manual labour. 

What's at heart of the wealth tax proposal is the concept of sharing, and each time we wade back into this kind of brawl it seems to be necessary to relitigate the entire concept of tax, and try to get people to look past their entrenched personal interest. If you asked anyone in their finery at the Court of Versailles what they thought of the policy settings they'd have said just fine.  

Once, in a Sunday column, I quoted Chloe Swarbrick and I understand she observed that Slack wrote down what I said and made a column out of it. At the risk of freeloading  once more, I quote her here, with endorsement, Here she is last night on Twitter, addressing the National party candidate:

Here’s how Wealth Tax would work. If you’re a couple with $2.5mil in assets and *zero debt*, you’re in the wealthiest 6% in the country, congrats! You’d pay an additional $5,000 *a year* in tax. And we can end poverty for all New Zealanders. Cool eh?

And, if you are retired, or have no income, you can defer payment until the assets are sold. Just like many Councils currently allow for rates payments.

But also I offer this, which is something I wrote down myself a few months ago, and I I see it as maybe a more workable way forward.

Finland not so long ago conducted a universal basic income trial and concluded that maybe a better idea would be to go instead for universal basic services, that is to say: making more and more things free. Healthcare and education are obvious examples, but you could also go much further: transport, housing, food, broadband - everyday essentials made available to all.

You would treat all these things as vital infrastructure and fund them accordingly, the way we do today with roads and drainage but extended to other vital needs: an e-bike, an e-car, a place to live. We’ve actually done this before with state housing, we still somewhat do it, but insufficiently, given that year upon year house affordability becomes ever poorer. What if the state were to adequately provide free or subsidised housing, such that market  demand is fully met and the market  levels itself out to some kind of non-maniacial equilibrium?

One by one, these things could become free as part of clean-tech transformation: generating  wind and solar and hydro and storing it in abundance, putting home power generation tools into every household, lighting up vehicle charging networks and car-sharing schemes. 

I'm not standing in this election. But if I were that would totally be my plank.

5.00pm

Time to sign out, but just to add a historical perspective to the debate, here’s our parliament throwing around some revolutionary ideas a century or so ago, about getting stuck in with a death tax; the wealth tax we had for most of the last century. Maybe I’ll write a bit more about it as the debate goes on.

One MP said:

[T]here is an opinion rising up not only in this country, but in Great Britain, and also in America and Germany, that all taxation should aim not only at the raising of revenue, but also at the more equitable distribution of the wealth which the community produces.... After all, what good does money do for those who inherit it? If you want to see a failure in life, give me the case of the son of a wealthy man.

Another wrote:

it is unwise in most cases that any one man should be endowed with wealth to such an amount as to place him entirely beyond the need of earning his own living.... More young men have been made shipwreck by having too much wealth left to them than from any other cause.