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Yes I earn a lot more than that…. There are no reasons why others couldnt do this..

but there are. you are unlikely to have become so rich if you’d had to pay each of your workers that same amount.

I could go to Hong Kong tommorow and only pay10% tax…. It would be more your loss than mine.

& yet it would be your loss too… otherwise you’d be there now, right?

my hard work has succeeded better than most people, but I dont think I’m better than anybody because of it

sure you do. that’s what all that “i’m so happy” stuff was all about. purest one-upmanship. along with all the “i deserve to be better off than you” stuff.

main problem with health is that technology is always increasing the amount of things we can do for suffering people, leading to the moral implication that we should do it, while the cutting edge technology is always more expensive than the level of health care we have provided, & have been able to provide, in the past.
meanwhile the technology also increases the amount of other ways we can enjoy our life. leading to the question of how much of our resources to devote to those things which enhance the quality of life of the healthy people and those which extend the life of the unhealthy, or make the unhealthy healthy.
the problem is likely to never go away… until we can all afford to fill our bloodstreams with nanobots constantly repairing us cell-by-cell so we need never deteriorate & we recover miraculously from wounds & fatigue & drug abuse & inappropriate nutrition etc.
maybe at that point there’ll be no more improvements to be made to healthcare & it will be simply a matter of expanding the economy until we can all afford it.

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How about a mixed tax package- a small tax-free threshold, and adjust all the brackets back to where they were in 1999 relative to incomes?

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Any policy that goes against tax cuts will see the Greens fall well below the 5% threshold.
It seems to me that the Greens are determined to drive away all but their most fervent supporters.

Their can be NO justification for withholding tax cuts, the surplus is in excess of eight BILLION dollars, the usual emotional clap trap about health and education being the reason for continued high taxation does not wash either, this govt (supported by the Greens) has seen more than two billion extra poured into health care yet we see LESS operations as a result.

What the Health sector need is a good clean out and a massive reduction in administrators, Labour’s (and by association the Greens) record in the area of public heath has been nothing short of scandalous.

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Running a fish factory is no less complex than running a hospital. They are both highly seasonal. They are both highly time critical, need exemplary hygiene standards. The main difference it that fish factories that kill their cuctomers or can’t operate within budget don’t stay in business very long.

The problem is that the medical and teaching professions are reluctant to admit when they don’t know best and seek out assistance from those who have the required skills and lack the institutionalised mindset that comes from working only with like minded individuals.

Selective abuse of the statistics on the number of “managers” doesn’t help. There is a certain amount of willful obfuscation by certain groups who imply that manager has the same meaning as administrator. In fact manager means manager, it includes matrons, registrars, and anybody who would be classified as a foreperson or higher in a factory. Essentially anybody who is on an annual salary instead of an hourly wage rate is a manager. All of the senior medical staff in hospitals are “managers”. And that is why most of the extra money pumped into the health system over recent decades has been swallowed up by huge pay increases for “managers”.

My experince of being on the receiving end of the health system is that is appallingly inefficient. That doesn’t mean there is necessarily a place for just in time delivery in the health system but there is certainly a place for bar codes, inventory tracking, production planning, expert systems and all the other proven computer and systems advancements of the last 30 years. All of which are notable by their absence in the health and education systems. Modern systems done properly with the willing participation of those within the health and education establishments needn’t cost a fortune but could deliver huge effectiveness and efficiency gains. Real value for the existing tax dollar. I bet your medical specialist owns a car that costs more than your home.

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Rather than looking at how much tax you pay, why not look at it another way:

How much money are you left with after tax, and how many hours do you work to get that (ie, what is your hourly pay rate, after tax). After you have done that calculation, do you consider yourself hard off in comparison with most other people?

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> I like the way GST works, and it has the advantage of not being a cost to business, other than the administrative costs, which for a taxation system as simple as GST are not excessive.

True, but taxing a few things like fossil fuels and other natural resources instead would be even more efficient. Consider that currently everyone pays fuel taxes (even people without cars pay it indirectly when they pay for products that have a transport component in their cost), but directly only the petrol companies pay it. Than means that there are only 4 taxpayers for that particular tax, which saves a lot in compliance costs.

Taxing natural resources would also create a big incentive to reduce wastage.

I wouldn’t suggest abolishing GST and replacing it with resource taxes over night on the first of April, because that would make lots of profitable businesses suddenly unprofitable before they had time to adapt – I’d suggest a gradual phase-out of GST and phase-in of resource taxes over a period of about 10 years.

> I’m also not against having some items outside the scope of GST. It certainly works for the UK equivalent (VAT) which has a standard rate, a zero rate and exempted (which is also zero percent but is different to zero rated), all of which is handled by tills and accounting systems and even old men with printing tabulators…

I don’t doubt that these accounting systems and men with tabulators cope, but someone must be paying for them. And small businesses probably spend a bigger proportion of their turnover on them than big businesses do.

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> A question though. This year, as an individual, I will pay over $300,000 in Tax. Isnt that enough for one individual to bear?

It’s worth considering how anyone would manage to earn enough money to incur a tax bill that high. You would almost certainly be dependent on your business operating in a country in which the government provides rule of law, infrastructure and an educated population who you or the companies you invest in can employ. and not just enough educated workers to do the job – the cost of hiring workers who have been educated to high school level is driven down by the fact that everyone (except some refugees) has been educated to high-school level. In conclusion, your ability to make that much money rests to a great extent on the environment provided by the government, so it is logical that you should pay a reasonable share of your income for that.

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The 2007 business tax cuts were part of the budget which, as a confidence and supply matter, the Greens were required to abstain on during the vote in parliament as part of their cooperation agreement with the government. Jeanette said this about the tax cuts in her speech in parliament:

A huge opportunity has been lost with the business tax cuts, handed out indiscriminately to polluters and conservers, fossil and renewable energy, organic and highly toxic farming, good employers and bad, innovators and laggards in technology. Those cuts will produce no change in behaviour, serve no public good except lining a few pockets. Instead, we could have had a system of tax incentives that rewarded sustainable investments, especially in technology to save energy and water, reduce toxic materials, replace fossil fuels with renewables. A government that truly cared about sustainability would not have missed this opportunity.

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I’m also not against having some items outside the scope of GST. It certainly works for the UK equivalent (VAT) which has a standard rate, a zero rate and exempted (which is also zero percent but is different to zero rated), all of which is handled by tills and accounting systems and even old men with printing tabulators…

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