Some of us weren’t far off with the gambling levy, being an online service after all.
Actually some solid proposals there, I’m impressed.
Some of us weren’t far off with the gambling levy, being an online service after all.
Actually some solid proposals there, I’m impressed.
I don’t know about anyone else, but they always come off as unprofessional to me. I can agree with most of what they are proposing here, but if I voted on people not policy then I certainly wouldn’t pick them.
I don’t even get what they are talking about. They are saying almost double the spend.
I found this hard to believe (without using some twisted definition) so I tried to find some data, but I don’t seem to be able to. Can anyone help find government expenditure by year? Found one showing expenditure going from 11B to 14B but that’s way too low, tax take is many times higher than that.
Superannuation and other social security make up the largest chunk of government spending (34%), followed by health at 22%, and education at 14%. Together these three things make up 70% of government spending.
Now IRDs tax take was about 81 billion in the year ended June 2018 (covers most of Labour’s first year). I haven’t found 2023 stats (might be too early) but the tax tax for the year to June 2022 was 113 billion. That’s about a 40% increase. Wage inflation (salaries increasing) over that same period was about 23% (to June 23 it’s 32%), so that increased tax take likely is a big part due to tax bracket creep - but they would have also had to pay out higher super, benefits, healthcare staff and teacher wages.
My main problem with the claim that Labour is spending $1 billion more a week in government spending than when they came into power, is that $52 billion is a lot of extra money for our government to spend. It’s almost half what the IRD takes in. This graph (set timeframe to Max) shows that debt fell significantly but then jumped again in 2023. Is this because of the flooding at the start of the year? Are National complaining about the money spent on a national emergency?
They likely have better data than I can search up online, but if Labour have borrowed money this year to handle the flooding and this has caused spending over and above revenue, that’s about the only scenario I can see as causing the 80% jump.
But if the borrowing is for a different reason, then what?
I guess this is just a big ramble/rant to say what is that extra money being spent on? National makes these claims but what if the investment is in flooding recovery or potholes or healthcare or education, maybe we would like the choice to know what it’s spent on before deciding if the government spending money is a bad thing?
I’m also surprised at some decent proposals in here, particularly changing the income tax thresholds which is long overdue. But it pays to keep in mind both major parties are guilty of promising a lot during elections and not keeping their promises once they get in.
I am worried about what their cut to “spending in back office functions in government departments” actually entails and what is considered non-core/frontline agencies. As it stands wait times for a lot of processes now are really long. It’s taken almost a full year for us to hear back from DIA over a mistake that was made on a birth certificate.
Not a fan of returning interest deductibility to rentals and reducing the brightline test again. Also continuing to call the Clean Car Fee a Ute Tax in the policy document is disingenuous.
Edit: Also not happy about scrapping public transport subsidies even though I don’t use it. And “Undoing Labour’s recent extension of 20 hours free early childhood education to two year olds.” I don’t think their FamilyBoost rebate/tax credit thing makes up for it.
The ute tax thing is genuinely disappointing, because I’ve talked to people who genuinely thought it was a tax on utes, and were surprised when I pointed out that other body styles also incurred it. There are also utes clean enough to not incur it.
A lot of this proposal is change for the sake of change, to be honest.
It does seem like it on further thought. I might not be smart enough to understand all the implications, but it does look very targeted to the middle class and up with very little for those on lower incomes.
It’s mostly aimed at full time workers, and will certainly help them a bit.
I’m least surprised by the income tax threshold changes. I’m pretty sure they have talked about it before, and in any case it’s a pretty normal thing for National to do (reduce income tax).
They have said the cuts will come from the core agencies, the ones that most people interact with in a given year. I bet when they get into the detail of things they will have to renege on this promise.
Have you been following up? It doesn’t sound typical. DIA deal with these things on a daily basis. If you’re talking about an overseas one, that’s a lot more difficult because it’s pretty common for people to get a new birth certificate from their home country with a new date of birth on it (in particular, making themselves a bit older so they can get superannuation). Those cases have a higher standard to meet.
I get the point of the interest deductibility thing, but realistically this just makes tax obligations more complicated to fulfill. I’d much prefer addressing the housing cost issue in other ways. Rentals are a business and businesses get to deduct their expenses.
Reducing the brightline test is, in my view, not good. It’s needed to balance out the lack of capital gains tax that would normally apply.
I missed those details. Sometimes I wonder who their target voter base is.
Yep followed up twice. This was for our daughter born Oct last year. We called them as soon as we got the birth certificate. The mistake was definitely my fault as I entered a date wrong. They said it would take a month or so. Followed up again in January as we hadn’t heard anything. They couldn’t find our original reference and said they had to resubmit again and it would take 4 months now. Only just received an email in the last week asking for more information. It’s not really an emergency so we didn’t bother chasing them after the second time.
I think we both know it trends towards the haves rather than the have nots…
It sounds like DIA still haven’t caught up after the COVID massive backlogs. About time for some public service cuts (apparently).
Sure, but a vote for Act is a vote for a National government. And many of that audience would never vote Labour. They need to be targeting the swingvote (say, reasonably well off people early in their careers with young kids).
I guess you’re right. However I think anyone that’s reasonably well off will take the policy at face value and be happy they get more benefits, at the cost of public services that they’re less reliant on.
I’m not really into politics and I’m more concerned with the future society my kids are going to inherit. I’m at a loss this year of who to vote for as they are all not giving me much hope.
We need to spend a lot more. We need to pay teachers and nurses and doctors more money. We need to spend more on infrastructure. We need to spend more on climate disaster mitigation. Labour is not spending enough and National will absolutely gut the public coffers.
We deserve a far better standard of politician in opposition to what we have now. Especially Luxon, the man is completely devoid of political nouse or charisma.
Maybe we’ve got the exact standard of politician that we deserve.
That’s a depressing thought.
I don’t see how you can say that given he is poised to win the election and give you a massive tax cut.