(18-10-2022, 04:39 PM)Zurdo Wrote: Winston is old school Maori - he was behind the Whina Cooper Land March. He stands by the Treaty, but hates the new interpretation for ''Modern Times.'' He destroyed his career fighting tax evasion (the Winebox saga) and yet he blocked the CGT. You just have to love him and hate him at the same time.
Exactly. I met him once in a work situation and he was the most arrogant a__hole. But, he has done a lot of good just by making people think. And he also let his career go by creating NZ First in opposition to National. He would likely have done a turn as PM if he hadn't gone with what he believed was right at the time. A very complex person, the like of whom we need more of.
BTW, blocking CGT was also right. We don't need it because we have income tax that covers capital gains. All the bright line stuff was just because IRD don't charge the tax they should on the income from trading in capital assets.
(18-10-2022, 05:04 PM)Praktica Wrote:(18-10-2022, 01:07 PM)SueDonim Wrote: We have a cycle where every time Labour is in power everything gets stuffed up, then when National comes back they have to make unpopular decisions and just start to make headway when they get voted out again. At present most of what is seriously wrong is down to Labour's current or past influence. They did a good job at the beginning of the pandemic but that has fallen by the way, and pretty much everything else related to governance is a total mess.
Most people put it the other way round...national, for instance, stuffed up health, education, and the police in their last term through deliberate underfunding, so they could give their mates tax cuts.
No, the first way around is correct. National always has to tackle the mess and does so by starting with a rein-in of spending, ie being fiscally prudent, then because people don't get that it takes more than 5 minutes, they get voted out again. The tax cuts were to get the economy moving - more spending means business survives and the government makes more in GST. Which, BTW is the fairest tax and the one I'd put up, in conjunction with a tax cut at the low end so that the poor aren't disadvantaged. Spending on "wants" is discretionary and the more wealthy people spend more there, and higher GST would mean they pay more because they spend more.
(18-10-2022, 06:14 PM)Lilith7 Wrote:(18-10-2022, 05:04 PM)Praktica Wrote: Most people put it the other way round...national, for instance, stuffed up health, education, and the police in their last term through deliberate underfunding, so they could give their mates tax cuts.
Apparently the Nats are also to blame for the many potholes in various parts of the country, having cut funding for roading repairs according to the news tonight.
Cutting road funding was all part of the need to reduce spending to get us back on track - then. What's happening now is partly that everything is done as cheaply as possible, which ends up costing more. A piece of road near here has been re-done three times and is still as rough as hell. When's the last time we saw graders and rollers perfecting the sub-layers? Without them we end up with all the bumps still there which a) make more potholes wherever there is a bump and b) wear our cars out. Each bump might be a minuscule level of wear as it happens, but over the life of the car, multiplied by the number of cars on the road it is costing society a HEAP.
The other factor that harder to counter is that because of better efficiency in oil refining the bitumen is now a lower quality than it used to be. So we will get degradation of surfaces sooner than we used to, but at least if the roads were built correctly to start with we wouldn't see as much damage as we do now. And the road near here that I mentioned above looks like it's about let go again in the next heavy rain.
The other point that makes be angry about potholes was the article where NZTA was telling people to work through their insurance, with the idea that the insurance companies would claim from NZTA if it was appropriate. The problem with that is that the people who do that still have to pay their excess which is not fair. And in many cases the amount for the repair would be less than the excess anyway. So the road users pay. Again and again.