Majority want a wealth tax – why a Financial Transaction Tax is that solution

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
56
1260

Newshub-Reid Research poll: Kiwis support the Government introducing wealth tax

We asked in our latest Newshub Reid Research poll: Would you support the Government introducing a wealth tax? A clear majority, 53.1 percent, said yes, while just 34.7 percent opposed it.

Nationals 3 biggest donors (Hart, Mowbray and Bolton) have a combined net worth of 15 billion! The Bottom 50% of NZ has 23 billion.

The top 5% of NZers own roughly 50% of NZs wealth, while the bottom 50% of NZers own a miserable 5%!

Are those stats that live up to the egalitarian dream of NZ?

We need to remove the tax yoke from workers and put it on the rich pricks who have rigged NZ Capitalism in their favour.

The Financial Transaction Tax is that solution and would raise so much revenue we could lower GST!

 

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

There are 14 Billionaires in NZ + 3118 ultra-high net worth individuals with over $50million each, why not start start with them, then move onto the Banks, then the Property Speculators, the Climate Change polluters and big industry to pay their fair share before making workers pay more tax!

The Green Party wealth tax will hit too many home owner occupiers who are just hard working kiwis, a Financial Transaction Tax on the other hand hurts the speculators and hardest.

The Maori Party are talking about a Financial Transaction Tax this election, I look forward to their announcement on this.

If we want to rebuild our social infrastructure and physical infrastructure, we need more revenue and that revenue shouldn’t come from workers, it should come from the speculators.

We need to be kinder to individuals and crueller to corporations.

 

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56 COMMENTS

  1. The bigger question is how the teachers union and NZNO continue to be donors to the Labour Party when conditions for their workers has never been worse and the outcomes in their respective fields even more so.

    • Very good question Salacious Crumb but I suspect unfortunately the unions involved when it comes to it will support Labour.

      • Incorrect, the state sector unions (NZNO, NZEI, PPTA, PSA etc.) are not affiliated to NZ Labour and have long proscribed political neutrality in their rules.

        Only a small number of unions are actually affiliated to NZ Labour as far as I am aware and according to online sources. There are currently six unions that are directly affiliated to the party and pay affiliation fees, as well as receiving a percentage of the vote in party leadership elections.These unions are…

        –E tū–created through the merger of the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union and the Service & Food Workers Union in 2015.
        –Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ)
        –New Zealand Dairy Workers Union (DWU)
        –New Zealand Meat & Related Trades Workers Union (MWU)
        –Rail and Maritime Transport Union (RMTU)
        –Central Amalgamated Workers’ Union (CAWU)

    • The CTU continues to have this unhealthy relationship with Labour. They have always promoted Labour although back 2000 – 2006 the Greens Industrial legislation policy was way ahead of Labours!

    • I don’t think NZNO are donors to the Labour Party, but the overall absence of union leadership (apart from UNITE) challenging the neo-liberal straitjacket is disappointing to say the least. Because they don’t want to upset their Labour government mates. Silence from the weak CTU. When Luxon said that the Nats would pay back 20k of nurses student loan debt, the only thing that NZNO said in response was that it didn’t go far enough to fix the problem. They did not offer any ideas or make any actual demand in terms of what would be a good idea to begin to resolve the problem of the nursing shortage crisis like free all tertiary education. Until the union movement overthrows the old guard of current mediocre leaders, don’t expect any radical, creative and obvious demands like a financial transaction tax, just tax the rich, free tertiary education, free public transport, end all privatisation of publicly funded services etc.

    • SCrumb
      Sad truth? With exception of a few good ones, teachers these days a moronic and robotic. Many can’t spell properly, lack grammar skills and are crap at maths and science. Not their fault- teaching degrees are given away these days. Think I’m be in harsh? It’s true. So how do expect these morons to tell the unions to fuck off when they see the union as their golden ticket to nirvana?

      • On behalf of the few good teachers, and the many who wish they were consistently better: Krautet Haus, you’re deluded. No evidence whatsoever. Unless feed by some anecdotal prejudice.

  2. Personally I never used to feel aggrieved about paying taxes. In fact I’ve always been quite happy about it. Proud even to support people in need, libraries, infrastructure etc

    But when some pay none or reduced amounts due to their race or religion and other like the big tech companies (Apple paid $0 tax on sales of $4.2b -with a b – recently) then it can stick in the craw.

    Then there is the obvious and massive waste due to ineptitude coupled with a strong sense that the government doesn’t respect the hard work that goes into generating this money from us the workers. And the lies about ‘no new taxes’ before adding new taxes didn’t help.

    That’s what we’re pissed about.

    Instead they just keep adding new taxes as it’s easier for the politicians to have us squabbling amongst ourselves rather than uniting against their dishonesty and ineptitude and marching with pitchforks.

    • A recent poll asked 1,000 people do you like paying tax?
      1,113 of those polled said no!!
      A follow up question: Do you think you pay too much tax?
      1,500 of the 1,000 polled said yes!!
      Should people wealthier than you pay more tax?
      5M of the 5.1M said YES!!!

    • @ sam. Good grief. What’s worrying is you’ll think your opinion’s worth noting. And yes, you’re right. You did. You got me. Ha.ha. You really need to watch this by the ever fabulous Chris Hedges.
      “It’s obvious, logical, natural, even mathematical that our civilisation is going to collapse, that we have overshot the sustainable carrying capacity of the earth and ecosystem that supports us. But people are fed false hope, false positives and magical faiths which extract your agency and distract you from your presence. Held captive by apathy, afraid of your own shadow. PCD”
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpU5JtZEST8
      Now. See how the above YouTube clip lines up with this post on Boingboing. She committed a crime born of an insanity and now she’s a slave. https://boingboing.net/2023/05/19/heres-what-life-in-federal-prison-will-be-like-for-elizabeth-holmes.html
      Here’s the thing. We’re fucked. I used to think we humans had a fighting chance but we don’t. We’re done. We’re out. The narcissistic sociopaths and the exploitative psychopaths have won. We’re about to become extinct.
      My advice therefore is for good people to go out and find ways of nurturing your soul while you still can. I’m no God botherer but I do suspect that what we are is the culmination of good and/or bad energy. We’re meat, blood and guts but we, like all living things, are also a mysterious and complex energy package too. We could be likened to batteries, just very fruity, complex batteries. ( I hope we’re not made by Tesla.) Neutralise our energy selves, i.e. with a bullet, and what you’ll be left with is a smorgasbord for blow flies, but where did [you] go? We’re two things primarily. We’re physical substances AND we’re a humming battery coupled to an organic hard drive. Together, we make a beautiful person or a clumping dip shit. Either way, we’re human beings. We’re two things. Blood and bone… and an electron field that will only become stronger with each iteration of its creative and eternal journey. We’re here, so we’ve been here before, so we’ll be ‘here’ again. And again, and again, and again.
      It’s a great pity that we’ve yet to understand how to not fuck it up like we do. There’s an old saying. ” Evil prevails where good people fail to act.” That could be read as “Unevolved meat packs with a short circuit have fucked it up for everyone”. Now, to bring it all back to street level; without Unions, the psychopaths and narcissists will keep exploiting the rest of us on the deal.

      • Country boy
        Are you really somewhere in the country, sitting your porch while you dream up all th9s crap.
        Or are you in a one bedroom apartment in Auckland? Either way, whatever you are smoking, share it with us.

      • On that note taxation should now be treated as a National security issue. Infact I look at every issue through a national security lense.

        Y’know every security agency on the planet is engaging in corporate espionage the Elon Twitter files are very clear on that.

        We need a government with some fucken teeth let’s not get it messed up here. We need a New National Security Act.

  5. The left need to read up on the perato distribution model.

    If we stripped everyone off their wealth and gave everyone a million dollars, in six months time we’d be in the same ‘inequitity’ standard we find ourselves in now.

  6. FTT is indeed the solution – it could easily replace a regressive tax like GST.

    A gilet jaunes movement is needed in NZ, to fight for the restoration of all that was stolen from the working class by Rogernomics & Ruthanasia.

  7. How do we do it then. This drum has been beaten to near death. How do we get the corridors of power to listen to us – on this very important initiative – let alone bend to our will?

    Shouldn’t we be calling for rallies, protests, combined efforts of some kind against who and who and who! When are we going to turn words into actions?

    • You can have rallies, meetings, protests etc, Labour MPs will turn up, give supportive speeches but as soon as they get the levers of power in their grubby mitts, they’ll do whatever their masters tell them. Martyn, what exactly did Labour say & then do about the TPPA? I forget.

      • We don’t organize just to give up at the first, very predictable hurdle. And it doesn’t matter who is in government, if they fail to listen we act – protests, civil disobedience, non-compliance…strikes even. And this particular issue is one of the easiest of all issues to win because this about moving the tax burden off all of us and on to them, the big, big moneyed crowd.

        Not that long ago, in the USA, the very wealthiest and their corporate/financial entities, paid close to 40% of the entire US tax pie. Now days, it is barely 10%. And what the US does tends to flow down to the entire Western world. Why have all sorts of indirect taxes become common place today, it is because of the shift in the tax burden from the very, very wealthiest among us to everyone else.

        The equation is simple making the solution equally as simple – we have just got to see it. But information does not flow freely in the Western world anymore.

        • Yep, you’re not wrong AO. The drum has a hollow sound, not the beat of thousands/ millions marching into battle.
          Imv, the ‘working class’ have been out-manouvered. There’s just too many working people who are more or less ok with the status quo, sucked into the promise. And the 10%ers, well, dont expect support from them. And, on top of all this, just too many distractions: climate, identity.

  8. I don’t think NZNO are donors to the Labour Party, but the overall absence of union leadership (apart from UNITE) challenging the neo-liberal straitjacket is disappointing to say the least. Because they don’t want to upset their Labour government mates. Silence from the weak CTU. When Luxon said that the Nats would pay back 20k of nurses student loan debt, the only thing that NZNO said in response was that it didn’t go far enough to fix the problem. They did not offer any ideas or make any actual demand in terms of what would be a good idea to begin to resolve the problem of the nursing shortage crisis like free all tertiary education. Until the union movement overthrows the old guard of current mediocre leaders, don’t expect any radical, creative and obvious demands like a financial transaction tax, just tax the rich, free tertiary education, free public transport, end all privatisation of publicly funded services etc.

  9. A financial services tax sounds so cool.
    We all know that the best way to show that we care about who live in poverty would be to remove GST from healthy food and essential services.

    So obvious. Maybe too cool. Like perpetual movement or turning lead into gold.

    I guess buying a house is a financial transaction….. This list may well escalate and then politicians start arguing fairness……

  12. I voted Labour to fix house prices and stop child poverty, they did the reverse, Nats will make it worse. We need to create a new type of democracy where self enrichment via selfish policies causes imprisonment or torture. These scumbags deserve no less.

  16. People almost never make money through sales or selling something. Profit comes mostly in the form of refinancing. Ie shmuck 2 gets a greater loan than shmuck 1.

    When one dude is hording all the resources everyone else might just kill him for food or just for fun. That’s fundamental why the left promotes progressive taxation.

  17. I did some arithmatic on a transaction tax when the Alliance was pushing it. The main hypothetical source of revenue would have been from the sort of trading that made his fortune from. multitudes of transactions of huge volumes of financial assets in tiny amounts of time for mostly very small percentage profit. So even a transaction tax at a tiny percentage capture would kill most of those transactions. This would be a good thing in itself but it would not produce the anticipated revenue, it would gust stop or greatly reduce the number of transactions.
    Transaction tax is not a bad idea but the numbers, and what transactions would be captured needs explanation.
    Personally I have never seen any justification or equity in anything but income tax. Simple and universal capturing every stream of wealth accumulation. It just needs to be set at equitable levels and high enough to meet the stat’s expenditure. If someone makes their income largely from speculation then that is their income for tax purposes.
    D J S

    • A financial transaction fee ought not be targeted on just the stock markets it should be aimed at the borrowing costs of high net worth individuals seeking an arbitrage with cheaper offshore lenders there by outstripping mom and pop investors ability to compete her in New Zealand but I don’t do the Maori Party or Labours tax policy so we will have to wait see what bright ideas they come up with to win the up coming election.

  18. Thank God TMP are looking into removing GST off essential food items, TMP appear to be the only sensible party going, they could attract some pakeha votes, for the Party Vote.

  19. “while the bottom 50% of NZers own a miserable 5%!”

    Who will be the only ones paying for the wealth tax on their unrealized profit (in form of paper value property increases courtesy of property values set by council/government of course4) of the mortgage they own.

    you want a wealth tax – then you demand that ‘write offs’ on loss carrying businesses can not be applied to reduce taxable income anymore. That may force a few empty houses on the market. Close all the loopholes that allow one to restructure their income as a beneficiary of a business a trust etc in order to not pay taxes. Have businesses pay for the fleet of their cars, rather then use that as an expense to write off, after all the worker can not do so, not for the guzzler not for the e-bike not for the train ticket.

    So many holes to closer before you invent another tax burden that will not be paid by any of the Government stooges, their handmaidens and businesses alike.

  21. FTT should be the only tax. On every transaction. With mechanism to prevent evasion. IRD could then focus on black and grey cash transactions.

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