Wealth Tax vs CPT – why Labour needs both to win!

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
50
975
Comrades - join a Party that loves to Party

This pathetic debate inside Labour over whether we should adopt a Capital Gains Tax vs a Wealth Tax is the reason Labour might lose the 2026 election.

It’s as timid as their GST off Fruit and Vegetables incrementalism that plagued them last election.

The real slap in the face to the voters Labour was relying on with their bullshit limp GST off Fruit and Vegetables fiasco is that it was such a meaningless gesture, it articulated that Labour just didn’t understand the pain felt at the bottom.

This time around the exact same dynamics will come into play with their limp Capital Gains Tax ‘victory’.

The naked fucking reality you clowns is that we need BOTH Taxes, not just one or tother, BOTH!

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AND MORE!

For the love of Christ Labour, are you going to actually do something meaningful or not because making it an either or tax shows you’ve learned nothing John Snow.

The task at hand comrades is to reset the tax yoke from the poorest and reset it on the richest.

  • We need properly funded public health.
  • Properly funded public education.
  • Properly funded public housing.
  • Properly funded infrastructure.
  • Properly funded mental health services.
  • We need free public transport.
  • We need free dental.
  • We need to nationalise Early Childhood Education and make it all free.
  • We need to nationalise retirement villages and build more public housing for the elderly.
  • We need to fund a 3rd state backed Supermarket to break the duopoly.
  • We need properly and fully funded addiction programmes.
  • We need Marae Civil Defence funding.
  • We need a whole new First Responder Mental Health Teams fully funded service.

There is an enormous amount of money required to actually solve the problems we face and that requires a bold new vision for tax.

We need:

  • A Capital Gains tax that doesn’t include the family home.
  • A Wealth Tax at the top 1%
  • A sugar tax to help fund free dental
  • A super tax on Vice profits from smoking, alcohol and gambling.
  • $100million ring fenced for addiction services from a legal cannabis market.
  • 5% Estate Duties
  • First $10000 tax free
  • Lower GST from 15% to 10%
  • Remove GST altogether from basket of essentials (tampons, toilet paper, fresh fruit and vegetables, tooth paste)
  • Financial Transaction Tax
  • Pollution Tax
  • Land Tax

If the Left actually want to rebuild the current public services and fund genuine solutions by growing the society positively, it is going to need more money.

We must lift the tax yoke off the poorest and put it on the richest!

Bring GST down, subsidise cost and make the wealthiest pay.

Arguing over which tepid tax to gingerly embrace is not a solution and will lead to more Labour Party incrementalism.

The other thing the Labour Party strategists are not seeing is that a strong egalitarian tax policy will bring those middle class Labour Party Auckland voters that Labour haemorrhaged to the Greens back.

For a Party that keeps saying it wants to win Labour they don’t seem to understand why they lost

Labour fucked Auckland over the lockdown, and then added insult to injury by not recognising any of that pain with a build back that justified the sacrifice.

Labour lost working class voters because GST off fruit and vegetables and the petrol prices going back up were a slap in the face and they lost the middle classes who looked at their joke economic platform and intellectually gave their vote to the Greens for their wealth tax.

If Labour had a strong tax policy that gave to the poor while taking from the rich, they would gain back the middle class voters who moved to the Greens WHILE winning back the working classes who didn’t bother too vote.

For a Party that keeps saying it wants to win Auckland back, they don’t seem to know where Auckland is.

A strong Labour Party Tax policy would win back middle class Auckland voters, give working class South Auckland voters a reason to vote and it would take the Greens down a peg or two to a manageable 9% because doesn’t that Party List start getting flakey pretty quick?

 

 

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50 COMMENTS

  1. A Capital Gains tax that doesn’t include the family home.
    No, CGT is not efficient or fair. CIT is much fairer and easier to implement. This is what Mr Parker recommended.

    A Wealth Tax at the top 1% No- use a CIT across all wealth, no exceptions. Note most wealth is in property in NZ

    A sugar tax to help fund free dental – Yip. Hard to implement. But fair

    A super tax on Vice profits from smoking, alcohol and gambling. Already in place.

    $100million ring fenced for addiction services from a legal cannabis market. Not sure. Not my area of expertise

    5% Estate Duties – Yeah, you could argue its fair.

    First $10000 tax free. Hmmm- not sure. Fixing the thresholds to the Rate of inflation probably more important.

    Lower GST from 15% to 10%. No, GST is great for capturing the offshore digital market that would otherwise be untaxed.

    Remove GST altogether from basket of essentials (tampons, toilet paper, fresh fruit and vegetables, tooth paste). No- why doesn’t the left get this??? This is inefficient and subjective.
    Financial Transaction Tax. Maybe. Need for information

    Pollution Tax. Yes.

    Land Tax. Not needed if you apply a CIT.

    • A CIT is taxing unrealised gains. Taxing a calculated estimate of earnings.

      Therefore, someone (taxpayers or the Government/IRD) will end up shortchanged.

      Further, taxing unrealised gains is a hard sell.

    • Also, what is CPT as in the title for this post? I looked it up it is …dahdah…
      Cone Penetration Testing (CPT) – WSP wsp.com
      https://www.wsp.com › en-nz › services › cone-penetrat…
      Cone Penetration Testing (CPT) is performed by hydraulically advancing a penetrometer rod into the ground while measuring tip resistance, friction and pore ..

      So it is about geological exploration of rocky places etc – which may not be unconnected with exploring the interiors of the denizens of the Beehave! But am I boring you? But there, we have all learned something, so time not wasted. Can CGT go into the title please which I think was intended?

  3. The country would not advance if the left brought in all these taxes and then spent it on a bloated civil service that just moved paper around and held talkfests .

    • Trevor sit down and have a nice cup of tea, not too much sugar, and don’t drown it in milk. You could put in the time you spend writing here finding the best tea blend for you and trying out all those fruit teas. Start a Tea Party!

    • The alternative is to have a government that does stuff which is profitable. Build state houses that provide revenue for 100 years. Build water infrastructure that provides revenue for 100 years. State Advances house purchases that provide revenue for 30 years. Residential solar that provides revenue for 30 years. Wind farms revenue for 40 years. According to the Bank Of England a government doesnt even need to levy tax to make those things happen.

    • The bloated salaries of the right’s hand picked lackies that cook the books and hold down two jobs Trevor is your problem son. Next time you are in hospital and taking your last breath because you can’t see a nurse or doctor because they are “just moving paper around and held talkfests”.

      You are completely clueless.

  5. If you exempt the ‘family home’ from the CGT or Wealth taxes, you incentivize more capital being poured into ‘homes’ in order to protect that capital from the taxes. So new build houses and apartments get more expensive and bigger, with existing homes renovated into expanded palaces.

    Also, lots of legal arguments and court cases about what counts as a ‘family home’.

    • I felt despair when labor said that for either CGT or wealth tax they would exempt the family home. A $20m mansion is not a basic family home it is a guaranteed tax free way to accumulate more wealth. Sigh

      • Mansions are easily dealt with by setting a tax free cap at the median home value or something similar. If it is to stick, the move need to be widely accepted by NZ’s home owning culture.

        • NZ’s culture is that it’s other peoples’ taxes that should go up to pay for everyone’s increased services from government.

      • Labour must find it easy to get into being MPs, and not only them. How is it that we have a bunch of simple-minded or naive grown-up babies talking about things that Machiavelli knew about in the 1500s? This stuff is not for babies, which we proliferate.
        For many years he served as a senior official in the Florentine Republic with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry. His personal correspondence is also important to historians and scholars of Italian correspondence. He worked as secretary to the second chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power.

        After his death Machiavelli’s name came to evoke unscrupulous acts of the sort he advised most famously in his work, The Prince. He claimed that his experience and reading of history showed him that politics has always involved deception, treachery, and crime. He advised rulers to engage in evil when political necessity requires it, and argued specifically that successful reformers of states should not be blamed for killing other leaders who could block change…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli

      • Selling anything called Capital Gains Tax is nigh on impossible because everyone in NZ knows that for most people the only way to ‘get ahead’ (just a bit) is to own and pay off a house so hard earned wealth is not inflated away. Exempt family home can have a price limit say $2million.

        Property investments – houses, hotels, rentals, holiday homes, sections, commercial buildings subject to a Property Investment Profit tax – PIPT. 20% on the increase in nominal value? FFS don’t go to an election calling it Capital Gains Tax or CGT. Name it for who it targets.

    • Too true Ada I can see that would happen though I want housing to be again a stable base for living quarters for people and within families reach, not treated as tradable and inflating assets. Perhaps CGT on all sales of houses/apartments at a set percentage, then the expensive houses would yield more; it wold be using percentage as a tool for the people
      for once.

    • If the family home was included, it could have a similar effect – re incentivizing more capital to be poured into the family home (additions/extensions, improvements, etc) in order to avoid selling, thus avoid the tax.

      Resulting in less overall sales, thus lowering the expected revenue take

  6. Why make it a capital gains tax? Why not simply a wealth tax?
    One of the criticisms of a capital gains tax is that it is difficult to administer. Fair enough.
    But IRD already collects the data on people’s income and assets( they do for me anyway) so why not just assess people’s tax on the basis of their income and assets?
    If people now tell me that the rich will look for loopholes and dodges my answer is that the bastards do that in any event.
    Because I am so ancient I actually remember when wealthy New Zealanders paid high taxes.
    Did this retard economic growth and stifle progress? Did it fuck.
    The 1950s and 1960s were times of prosperity with high taxation on wealth and(gasp, shock, horror) MANY WEALTHY PEOPLE WILLINGLY PAID IT! Unbelievable as it sounds people brought up in plenty and comfort did not mind sharing it.

  7. The reason why people don’t want to, or would like to, pay tax is because at the end of the long hard day some other cunt with their hand up our politicians sequesters our money then spends it on themselves. Not, on our broader society like had once happened which gave us a first world standard of living, at least up until the early 70’s.
    THAT IS THE PROBLEM. Sorry to shout. The 14 multi-billionaires, 3118 multi-millionaires each with a minimum $50 million each didn’t save prudently. They’re not genius wizards waving money wands about. They don’t have a wee troll in the wardrobe who shits $100 dollar bills every time you squeeze it. They simply figured out how to fuck the defenceless, vulnerable high performing farmers out of their money in a legitimate manner.
    What we do have is an agrarian exports economy generated by about 50 thousand people who wave goodbye to their product and the money that product will generate via every dirty investment scam going that’s not illegal but is patiently immoral, of course but who cares about morality when we all know that greed is good.
    I’m a bloody farmer. I know what I must take for my meat and wool and I know what I must spend to buy it back again as clothing, carpets, roasts, chickens, chops, mince and vegetables. I know why our produce is cheaper to buy in, say, the UK than it is here because those lazy, lying scum between my wool shed and my banks is an open playground for the terminally greedy and so despite my produce being shipped half way around the world it was still able to undercut local produce and not just for price but also for quality. And ultimately of course I must ultimately only got fuck all for it. In NYC the mafia do business in bars and nightclubs. In Nu Zillind the mafia do business in auction houses and in mercantile firm offices and all aided and abetted by dodgy old cockies who now populate the criminal underworld AKA the national party which came to being in 1936. Our government isn’t that. It’s instead business and dodgy as fuck business at that.
    While I was writing the above I was reminded of this article about netanyahu.
    Netanyau’s lies are carefully layered disinformation’s salted with logical fallacies to distract and obfuscate the facts.
    The Guardian.
    ‘The whole foundation is rocking’: inside the explosive film about the investigation of Benjamin Netanyahu
    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/dec/02/benjamin-netanyahu-bibi-files-israeli-corruption
    AO/NZ urgently needs an independent-of-local-influence royal commission of inquiry into our politics and our economy urgently, before anything else.

    • Yes, 40 years ago my music teacher, a Spanish emigree, observed to me that in his country you could identify peasants from their attire but in NZ they all wore suits.

    • A Commission with timely valuable outcomes to hope for. You must be from the country where life goes in ordered sequence! So I will express myself in bucolic terms – a Commission would be like putting a teaser to a mare ready for mating only to have the plan misfire. The progeny when it comes turns out to look more like an ass than you feel, and has cost a fair bit of money so you end up selling the farm when the market has sunk never to arise again. That’s Murphy’s Law!
      The law entered wider public knowledge in the late 1970s with the publication of Arthur Bloch’s 1977 book Murphy’s Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go WRONG, which included other variations and corollaries of the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law

  10. Financial Transaction Tax is the fairest. A whisper thin slice on every bank transfer over a set amount (say) $5,000. So that it doesn’t impact most paypackets but hits the bigger spenders. If its kept small, it won’t be noticed and not worth avoiding.
    Any new tax needs to be ring fenced- otherwise it will be sloshed around and we get more wastage for no gain.
    We should think ahead also to a highway tax on all major roads, with toll cameras (say) every 200kms up and down the country, again quite small and this could help with some of the rail /roading infrastructure or fund a new Ministry of Works.

  12. If the worst happened and the left get in with all their tax grabs then tax accountants will soon be driving flash cars .

  13. If the worst happened and the left get in with all their tax grabs then tax accountants will soon be driving flash cars .

  14. It seems to me that Wealth and Land Taxes will be a threat to Maori and others who own and manage significant areas of land so as to preserve environmental, cultural and social values. In theory such taxes would have the effect of dispossessing “not for profit” owners in favour of capitalists who extract the maximum profit from land and other natural resources. If my fears are misplaced, perhaps someone can explain.

  16. Out of idle curiosity, what do you think would happen if a Labour/Green/Maori Party government were to get hold of all that lovely money?

    • A much better health system and nurses pai better than 1%.

      As it was previously under Labour.

  17. You all forget we live in a MMP system. If Labour gets too ambitious with tax they will scare too many in the middle and not get elected.

    Better to get a simple CGT across the line first and then ramp it up over time. This is the way to get elected.

    It’s very unfortunate that the left made the tremendously poor strategic error to move to MMP that effectively baked in rogernomics. The damage has been done now and incremental change is the only ticket in town.

    Also do want Martyn says stop the wokey tokey stuff or you will drive young men away (the recent US election demonstrates this very clearly).

  18. What happened when you blew spending through the roof in 2017-23? Junior doctors leaving.
    18/19: 55
    19/20: 85
    20/21: 76
    21/22: 121
    22/23: 266

    But your answer is that you didn’t spend enough?

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