The only reason I pay a NZ Herald subscription – (WHICH JUST WENT UP FOR NO REASON LAST WEEK BTW) is to support Simon Wilson.
Why? Why are you confident? Because you shouldn’t be!
I don’t give a fuck about soccer or rugby and am only here as a mark of solidarity for Simon Wilson because the Mayor’s campaign against him is an odious mark on Auckland Politics and fuck Wayne Brown, but increasing the subscription based on your belief that your journalism is great?
Terrible blunder there.
You are not great. Hooton is funny and I love reading what his latest paying client thinks, but beyond him and Simon, you have tired right wing opinion writers selling shit sandwiches as sugar doughnuts.
Stop increasing your subscription for bullshit reasons you money grubbing price gouging pricks.
That said, I would pay more if you put Shaneel Lal behind a paywall.
Anyway.
Simon Wilson, from behind the paywall at the Herald, asks why aren’t we all talking about the Green Party tax policy…
Simon Wilson: Green Party’s poverty plan for Election 2023 – and the silence of the wolves
Why such a non-response? Could it really be true that none of them has anything of substance to say about a costed plan to end poverty?
Or is their silence merely because there is nothing they can say? Because to talk about it would be to acknowledge that the plan makes sense, and that’s the thing they fear the most?
So there they are, like wolves padding quietly around the edges of the field, waiting to tear the little Green lambs apart because they’re so innocent, they couldn’t possibly understand economics.
…Simon has taken the time to ask why the Green Party Tax policy isn’t being seriously debated and he deserves an answer.
And there are two reasons.
The first reason is because it’s just not enough.
Don’t get me wrong, the Green Party tax policy is a great first step, but it is only PART of the solution to the challenges we face.
They have set very low thresholds for the highest taxes in what is a very simplistic tax swap which does sweet fuck all to raise the money needed for our failing social and physical infrastructure let alone the radical adaption we need to fund for climate change.
Yes those under $125000 will be better off, good, but the reliance on a wealth tax to do ALL the heavy lifting here is simply delusional.
They want to raise $12billion from .7% of the population.
That’s a fuck of lot of cash to get from .7% of the population, and it’s a lot of cash that will simply go into other peoples pockets, which again is great, but doesn’t provide us with the necessary cash to build the new hospitals, the new schools, to employ more teachers, more drs, more police etc etc etc – NOT to mention the cost of climate change adaptation required as well!
A land tax (as proposed by TOP) means the wealthy can’t take their assets and leave.
A financial transaction tax (as proposed by MANA and Māori Party) would tax the speculators and provide the resources to build the broken social infrastructure we have.
A sugar tax can fund free dental.
Legalised Cannabis market would create $1.1billion per year that could be ringfenced for proper drug rehabilitation.
Windfall taxes can mitigate our obscene inequality.
A wealth tax is PART of the solution, but it simply can’t be the only solution because the whole thing will implode when it comes to getting that $12billion out of .7% of the population.
Great first step from the Greens, but we need a giant leap for Green kind.
The second reason no one is talking about it is because no one takes these Greens seriously.
They have some brilliant MPs, Chloe, Julie Anne and Golriz, but it’s not enough.
The Greens have gone down the identity politics rabbit hole and are simply no longer credible. They don’t have the intellectual muscle to pull a stunt like this off because their enemy isn’t free market capitalism, it’s heteronormative white cis males.
Their entire identity politics shtick is flakey as fuck, and you are asking them to reshape the tax system???
Come on.
If it’s a Free the nipple campaign for militant cycling mummy blogger trans ally vegans, the Green Party are fucking excellent!
If it’s leading some online cancel culture Lynch mob for crimes against woke dogma, the Green Party are fucking excellent!
If it’s rebuilding the infrastructure of the neoliberal economic hegemony however, the Greens couldn’t score wearing banana costumes at a monkey brothel.
This is the Greens now…
…this is the Greens now…
..this is the Greens now…
…this is the Greens now…
…this is the Greens now…
…in the words of the great Logan Roy…
That’s why no one is bothering with the Green Party Tax policy.
It doesn’t provide the increased revenue the State needs to build everything and no one believes they could manage even the little they have proposed.
I will continue to pay my Herald subscription, but there’s no fucking way I’m paying for Viva! Why the fuck does anyone at NZME think I will pay to hear where Jessie Mulligan eats dumplings on K Rd before hosting The Project?
Why would anyone pay for that?
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I cancelled my Herald sub about two months ago because it changed into too much about hairstyles of the rich and shameless, and they put most of the business news even deeper behind the paywall of BusinessDesk.
I have access through work tho – so I have to be paid to read it, in a sense.
Martyn, you need to factor in that not only would a legalised cannabis market raise $1.5bn a year in revenue, the counterfactual is that $3.5bn currently spent on enforcing illegal weed would be available for redistribution elsewhere.
I want more cops previsioned for the role of building a fucking awesome nation.
because they wholesale lifted it from TOP.
The Greens are no longer a political party,their antics and the photographs above are proof enough.
The National and Act parties are no longer political parties ,their antics are proof enough.
Imitation greatest form of flattery.
Thanks bert.
Their policy on income tax and the G.S.T. is to the right of Tony Abbott and John Howard! Even if they did modify the brackets and somehow raise a large amount of cash, what would they actually spend it on?
I don’t think anyone believes that the Greens would suddenly announce a plan to build high-speed rail to every town/suburb, reopen the factories to churn out electric automobiles and robotics, expand the decrepit highway network, or reopen the 68 mothballed tramway routes in nine cities.
The money would probably just be wasted.
Like the other parties, they demand everybody lower their political horizons into the dirt. The dizzying heights of the world-beating 1950s economy shall never again be reached — because people like the Greens are quite happy to rule over a nation reduced to being a backward, low-wage agrarian satrapy of Wall Street.
Well it’s not just focusing taxes on untaxed capital gains per say it also has to clear the landscape for more industrious entrepreneurs.
The way to handle that was to claim real-estate early on. Patents is a way of dealing with that. Open source mentalities in development. A lot of developers not just in property don’t understand intellectual property in my opinion. There’s this huge stick that isn’t empathetic to collaboration when the reality is developers can’t inforce only fans or more liquor stores etc without controlling IP.
So if the government has control over IP and patents through out government science departments as an example then spending that increase tax revenue would have a far greater fighting chance of staying in the game as regulators take out over developed capital as regulators try and find room for more walk ins.
Without a spending mechanism it is literally your litigation dollars vs traditional finance aka the big four banks and how’s that been going? Lolz.
Martyn – Simon Wilson against the Mayor…not the other way around.
Simon Wilson’s best work has been on the working group. When his views have been debated. Not a big fan of his opinion piece.
We all have to love soccer for the next few months to support the World Cup.
Social warriors are distinct from social worriers.
I think there are those who choose to ignore social warriors or the so-called woke.
Long list of stuff that you promote. Without listing your priorities this is just a wish-list. Scarcity is a real thing. How one chooses to deal with the challenge of scarcity is what defines one.
Social justice warriors vs social justice worriers.
I find it interesting that Martin cannot find any social justice warrior politicians to come onto his show while so many social justice worriers come to debate issues that worry them.
Hit the nail on the head. No-one takes them seriously because they have become a caricature of who they used to be.
Also I get this overwhelming sense of ennui just now.
I notice people are no longer signing petitions or putting in submissions in big numbers despite some really meaty issues around just now – censorship, new RMA, Local Govt and Electoral Reform. I get the impression the entire electorate is absolutely exhausted by the never ending barrage of political shit day in and day out in NZ combined with the very real struggle to just survive on an existential level.
No one takes the Greens seriously because they are science deniers with their gender ideology bullshit and the failure of the minister of violence and sexual violence prevention to condemn the violence at Albert Park. They have no credibility
Certainly have no credibility.
They deny science to the extent I call them the new Flat Earth Society.
Simon Wilson. That guy whose anti Wayne Brown articles actually helped Wayne win the mayoralty. Jilted Simon, that annoying voice in the wilderness who only writes I hate Wayne Brown articles in the Herald, to get back at him. Car hating freedom of movement opponent Simon, the man who wants us riding bicycles inside our medieval 15 minute villages but no further. Someone has to like him. I know Wayne doesn’t. Nor 99.9% of Herald commenters. But thanks to Wayne, Simon, somehow and I don’t know how, gets paid.
XRAY: “Car hating freedom of movement opponent Simon, the man who wants us riding bicycles inside our medieval 15 minute villages but no further.”
We’ve got people like that here in Wellington, some of them Councillors.
I’m informed by another local Councillor that those who shout loudest against car use, and tell the rest of us to use (non-existent or unreliable) public transport or bikes, or to walk, are the same ones who drive their cars to Council meetings. Hypocrisy rules, ok…
Mayor Brown first Auckland Mayor in an age to do something.
Go Mayor Brown you beauty.
Bob the first: “…first Auckland Mayor in an age to do something.”
We could do with someone like that here in Wellington. Our current mayor is largely invisible, but, in her rare appearances, woke.
Many of us are regretting the non-election of Andy Foster. Or of Ray Chung.
We read with raucous scepticism the Green proposals for a wealth tax.
What they’re proposing bears very strong resemblances to what the Communists did to the Russian bourgeoisie and aristocrats, following the Revolution.
But they don’t want to be compared to the evil Commies, do they!
if you want people to use the alternative you have to provide the alternative first