Exclusive: New Zealand ranked 136th in world on fair wealth distribution leading to call for new tax
The Government needs to tax wealth and corporates more – that’s the call from Oxfam Aotearoa after its international inequality index found New Zealand ranks 136th out of 161 countries when it comes to fair wealth distribution.
It found our tax policies rank just 91st in the world while our labour rights place us in 74th.
In a recent column, Max Rashbrooke highlighted the horror of NZs under regulated market…
The bad news is that, to investigate 200,000-300,000 terrible rentals, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has employed a frontline inspectorate numbering … 37. Each inspector will have to check somewhere between 5000 and 8000 rentals.
…there is only 37 inspectors of rental properties for 300 000 terrible rentals?
Similar poorly funded regulation is apparent in the 82 labour inspectorates who are supposed to police hundreds of thousands of migrant worker exploitations!
Time and time and time again in New Zealand we see an old boy matrix of vested interests who occupy market dominance and act like a monopoly, duopoly or oligopoly raking in vast wealth while leaving the local small and medium sized operators outside the cosy relationships!
Up and down NZ, small and medium enterprises are unable to compete because of the lack of basic regulation in the market!
We’ve seen it with the Supermarket duopoly, the medicinal cannabis oligopoly, the Gib Board monopoly – each time under regulated and poorly regulated capitalism continues to screw over us the consumers at a time of a cost of living crisis!
We are not an over taxed, over regulated economy!
Our top tax rate is the 39th highest in the world behind all the Scandinavian countries plus Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and South Africa!
Australia’s top tax rate is 47cents!
Our GST rate doesn’t even get us into the top 50 and our corporate tax rate is 40th while Government spending against GDP ranks 56th!
And we are voted easiest to do business by the World Bank!
I’m not looking for socialism here folks, just basic garden variety regulated capitalism!
The current left woke are great at organising free the nipple mummy blogger trans ally cycling protests, not so good at challenging the neoliberal hegemonic structure.
The left’s inability to challenge free market capitalism in favour of the low hanging fruit of cancel culture identity politics matters.
In 2010, the 388 richest individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth
By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals
In 2018, it was 42
In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
And in 2021, 20 people owned more than 50% of the entire planet.
The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.
Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.
Our brittle triggers are beneath the mana of the challenge of our times.
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What about New Zealand’s increase in productivity compared to ten years, twenty years, and thirty years ago?
Abolish GST altogether and then raise the top tax to 45% and also a financial tax on financial services.
GST is just an administration $20b anominally tax.
Let kiwis keep the $20b of GST.
So, let’s have a look at which countries are the best by this measure:
162 Switzerland
163 France
164 Slovenia
165 Sweden
166 Slovakia
167 Norway
168 Iceland
169 Czech Republic
They have several things in common – democratic, low corporate tax & business friendly
Now let’s see who the worst are:
1 South Africa
2 Namibia
3 Zambia
4 Central African Republic
5 Eswatini
6 Botswana
7 Mozambique
8 Oman
9 Qatar
10 Angola
Undemocratic often Marxist or ex-Marxist states. Most of which I’ve worked in.
This should inform us as to which road to travel.
And which continent is about to obliterate itself off the face of the planet? The EU is a neo-fascist nazi state, still.
For at least the last 500 years there has not been a decade of peace.
Amene.
PS. The Dooms Day Clock is at 100 seconds to Midnight.
You forgot one or two details there Andrew. The top countries on that list have strong well-funded public education and health systems – unlike our failing systems.
Indeed they do Pope! They have very high personal taxation to pay for it all, except Norway which is an energy mammoth living off its vast sovereign wealth fund, but they have LOW corporate taxes to stimulate business activity.
Oh I wonder what has changed in NZ in the last 10 years that has caused such inequality???
Could it be the woke and right wingers globalist play where they give away NZ pensions, health care, housing and water to new foreign residents and their dependants, while claiming it is necessary even though the main skills for NZ residency are retail managers, fast food, farm labourers etc on low wages while funding this by selling off NZ assets to billionaires?
Adding more meth, terrorists and crime doesn’t help while ignoring local children whose parents are in gangs, on meth, on benefits or working 3 jobs.
Why doesn’t anyone ask where the skills of the last 1 million new NZ residents went as the neoliberals are still crying out for exactly the same skills as they apparently just filled over the past 10 years? Where is the missing 1 million skills from the 1 million new residents?
Meanwhile the professionals are leaving in droves as looking after more and more high needs people while being told to work harder for the same money as 10 years ago isn’t really cutting it.
The end result is increasing inequality. They hate and squeeze the middle class for taxes and without them, inequality is what you get.
Many would not mind paying more tax but when the government wastes it then there is a backlash against paying more.
I just wish National had not wasted tax during their 9 years. The nurses would have got more money, our hospitals not run down, our teachers would have been paid better and our education system not run down. Apprenticeships not culled and more kiwis employed instead of immigrants flooding NZ giving false value to housing. But go ahead keep blaming Labour for wasting tax, your voice just becomes rhetoric after a while.
What was the tax actually wasted on?
Basically it all went on all the usual things, health, education, welfare, justice, and the rest of government activity. There was 10,000 less bureaucrats in 2017 than at present, so far less was spent on the Wellington policy machine than at present.
I think your complaint is more about the amount of tax collected rather than how it was spent. I assume you want government to spend a lot more than they currently do. Though based on results to date, most would spent on the “machine” not getting more done that actually benefits people.
So if there were less bureaucrats and the tax collected wasn’t spent on health, education, welfare, justice, and the rest of government activity, because it wasn’t, where did it go? Mostly roads.
Without being condescending you need to do more research on policy rather than making generalisations. It’s so easy with google Wayne, go ahead…
Classic example of money being thrown at something with this Labour Govt…1 billion on mental health and the result = 6 extra beds and no discernible improvement.
Remember Little being caught out when someone journalist actually did their job and did some investigating and he didn’t know what to say when confronted, St Jacinda was the same.
Adding more money to something with no measurements on outcome is basically all Labour do, as the extra money gets eaten up with the bloated layers of extra govt staff hired over last 5yrs.
So where was money spent during Nationals 9 years? No one can tell me the specifics, perhaps because the media were such great bedfellows of Key and National, Audrey Young, Mike Hosking cases in point, that unlike questions to Little, questions were never allowed to be asked.
And Barry Soper loved his top story after work drinks with Key.
Hmm, what makes you think that I do not have much knowledge about how government spending works?
When budgets come out, I don’t just read the newspapers, I read all the documents including quite a lot of the departmental estimates. So I know how and where the government spends the money. And I have done this, in various roles, literally going back into last century.
Over time I formed a rough rule of thumb about each type of government. National governments spend between 30 and 33% of GDP on government funded services, Labour tends to spend 33% to about 36%. By large that is reflected in what we get from government. Except with the current Labour government (as opposed to Helen Clark’s) we get less than we would expect from the increased spend. Way too much of the increase has been used to grow the machine, not produce more output.
Which is perhaps why Wellington went opposite to every other city in the local body elections. At least 10,000 new people plus their families in the government machine. On average younger, and passionately woke, to use a simplification. Clearly Tory Whanau would appeal to that group. Aside from the fact that she was by far and away also the most charismatic of the Wellington mayoral contenders.
What machine and your incredible fiscal knowledge failed to take into account a small thing called covid.
I too study budgets into last century including the most damaging of our time, the mother of all budgets, that of Nationals Ruth Richardson, that machine is exactly why we have never broken the cycle of poverty.
Why can’t we be tops at this? If we’re in the running we should be trying harder to stand out!
Utterly disgusting in our country. Regularly come across rich fucks who treat me like an equal. Last remnant of our good country’s heart.
Mainstream media largely determines what people, in this case left-leaning people, focus on. If the Left are primarily focused on the person (certain behaviors) rather than on policy, then this is because of the media. And the media, in turn, takes it cue from government, who in turn takes its cue from the bankers/corporate class.
When are we going to learn….when are going to learn that the powers-that-be are against us, not for us.
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