Dairy prices drop further in weak China demand; US factory expansion slows; China shrinks; India expands; rumours light-up Hong Kong shares; UST 10yr 4.05%; gold and oil up; NZ$1 = 58.4 USc; TWI-5 = 69.1

It's not about resources it's about freedom.

You could put a bomb under Wellington civil servants and public services could well improve.

Taking 75% of those jobs out of there would really help New Zealand. 

If they are looking at indexing they should also look at changing the brackets and rates altogether. The big issue with bracket creep is you end up with an almost flat tax system where the poor pay almost the same percentage as the rich, and NZ is certainly getting that way. We really should have a poor bracket (say < $30k), middle bracket (say < $140k) and a top bracket (>$140k). National are getting rid of the top bracket and indexing the current problem. 

$350 is generous. Nothing stopping minimum wage earners becoming CEOs of mega corporations or members of parliament. Poor people are just too lazy to pay all the tax like rich people do. Everyone knows rich people pay all the taxes. Come on people give those boots straps a pull for once in your life!

But they'll have you know, that those earning the Prime Minister's salary carry such a burden because they're in the minority of net taxpayers in this country.  Oh, what a burden indeed.  

I'm pretty sure there's families out there both working full time jobs on close to minimum wage would love to be net tax contributors if their incomes allowed it, but unfortunately Working for Families ensures there's food on the table after the rent is paid.  

Swings and roundabouts of a progressive system; people who pay most of the tax benefit the most when rates are cut. I can't see any comment from the CTU about the extreme reliance on a small group of income tax taxpayers that creates this kind of outcome. Why is that, I wonder?  

Doesn't health insurance absorb all your money as you get older? All the old people I know have been very well cared for by the public health system. Operations, pacemakers, etc, everything more than adequately looked after. If it is something relatively minor like a cataract or hernia that has a long waiting list then one can simply pay for it as well.

Your highly pressured health system is a direct result of a western world diet, that is loaded with refined sugar, refined flour, chuck in some trans fats, then processed to where it does not even resemble 'food'.  Now our country is full of obese diabetics, with heart troubles and cancers, addicted to pharmaceuticals.  The health system is not 'unreliable', its customers are.  Throw in the adverse effects from the ongoing gene therapy experiment and no health insurance program should ever take on such a high risk.

Do not blame 'health care', your 'health' is your own responsibility, not a doctors.

There's a long way to go on healthcare, yeah. Might just be that investment (and wages within cooey of housing costs) are what's needed, more than counterproductive metrics on doctors.

Not opposed to changing how much and what we tax either, just not a fan of making working folk pay the bulk of taxes so property speculation can go largely untaxed. That's gross.

The people doing it tough will get bugger all out of bracket indexation. But they will get reduced government spending, worse healthcare, etc. 

Delaying the truth until the election doesn't seem like a great idea though. Almost better to get it out the way now, people and media tend to forget.

The challenge of tax cuts is to give everyone a big cut costs a massive amount of money.

To give a few people a big cut costs very little.

So if your goal is to give rich people a big cut you need to tell everyone they are getting a tax cut but keep their attention away from the difference in what different people are getting - ie don’t let the average person know they are getting stuff all while big earners get a huge gain.

National is working this process hard. Their trick is to promise to remove labours taxes. Because labour targeted their taxes at the rich, national can make a simple promise to remove those taxes and tada their cuts disproportionately benefit the wealthy. It’s an amazing sleight of hand and while I’ve seen some in the media try and interrogate it, more light needs to be shone on what they are doing. 

I’m not against tax cuts. The govt is taking in too much right now. But the national policy is rubbish. They could use the same spend and share it more broadly by targeting the lowest bracket.

Did they? I seem to recall teachers unions pushing this argument but it was reasonably like-for-like once the set-up costs of the new charter schools were excluded. And even so, in a lot of cases they were dealing with kids that the state school system didn't particularly seem to care about whether they could read, write or even show up.

Aged care nurses do not work under the same relentless pressure & stress that nurses in public hospitals do ... hence the difference in pay scales ...

Aged care - like early childhood education - is a great property investment scheme too, and of course keeping taxpayer subsidies coming in and personnel costs low is an important part of it.

Those corporates/large donors choose the people that you can vote for though.

Thoroughly inappropriate username, given the post.

For disclosure, I am not a particularly big fan of National and have never voted for them. And in a previous professional life I knew many dyed-in-the-wool Labourites, and have plenty of choice words to say about them too.

So do others:  How the Left Became Cheerleaders for US Imperialism 

The difference between national and labour, right wing and left wing, isn’t more/less redistribution so much as investment/disinvestment in public services.

Most right wing voters don’t recognise their reliance and the reliance of the people close to them on those services. They also think the cuts will magically hit people in Wellington working in an office whereas underinvestment goes straight to hospitals, police, schools etc. Over nine years of national you realise it isn’t just the poor and the bureaucrats getting hit, it’s the middle class suffering.

The cycle of our politics is national deflating public services and labour trying to build them back up again. Now, labour doesn’t always do that well and there are some serious execution issues at the moment. But part of the issue is that national creates these legacy issues through underinvestment - like the hospital buildings, like the health workforce, like the school buildings, like the police numbers - that labour is always playing catch-up. The homeless motel situation didn’t happen overnight, national sowed those seeds. Labour at least tries to fix these problems.

In the culture wars about Labours management of COVID (which I think has blemishes but was in the top 10% of efforts around the world), we miss the positives:

• Record house building and a surplus over two years compared to population growth.

• Rapidly growing EV numbers.

• Falling house prices.

• Massive investment in health

• A more balanced tax system.

• And you’ll laugh, fiscal discipline via continued contributions to the superfund (don’t forget what the last government cost us there).

It is time for tax cuts. I’d love to see Grant Robinson pass tax cuts in his next budget. Use all the money up that National is eyeing to programme tax cuts for the everyone who pays on the lowest bracket. Then dare Luxon to cancel them and redirect it to his rich mates. 

There are a number of studies about that mindset "a subgenre of economic, sociological, and psychological research on cognitive dissonance that can be summarised fairly simply: “If I succeed, it is because of my talent; if I fail, it is due to circumstances.” "- https://thecorrespondent.com/651/successful-people-rarely-admit-how-luc…. Quite interesting and makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

The Dental Council has a long history of corrupt unaccountability going back to Freiberg's early days.