Tax the rich, and you get fewer rich

All this fuss about “tax cuts for the rich, paid for by the poor” ignores some basic facts of life. First, tax cuts aren’t handing out money. Homepaddock covered this one nicely. Second, while making a  massive fuss about how the “poor” get hammered by this and that (much of which I have smypathy for…

Compliance Costs

No Right Turn has changed his mind, and now considers anyone who opposes GST on food to be a facist bigot. Ok, maybe not quite in those terms. But I’m sure that’s only a matter of time, now that he’s made his mind up. So, low compliance costs (if we manage the change right), and…

Public Service Announcement #2

Also (and I keep forgetting to say this) tomorrow is the last day of the tax year. Big woop, I know. But, if you were to give your April donation tomorrow, you then get your 1/3 tax rebate back in a couple of weeks, rather than next April. And while I’m at it, I must…

Bruce Sheppard Defends Reynolds’s Salary

Now that’s a bit unexpected. Bruce is usually pretty hard on large companies. Shareholders Association chairman Bruce Sheppard today defended Telecom, referring to the employment of chief executive Paul Reynolds who has more than 20 years with British phone giant BT. He said Gattung was an internal appointment and he applauded the company for that…

Inflation…

DPF’s post on GST and inflation reminded me of this photo I took early 2008. I usually buy the generic brand (they do all come from the same factory after all) and that’s currently around the $9 mark. I do think however that raising GST is absolutely, unequivocally, stupid. It gives the “National Hates The…

Stimulus – not the right choice

“But politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.” Thomas Sowell National’s do nothing, leave the market to sort itself out ideology is squarely to blame for this. Faced with the worst recession in a decade, they responded not with stimulus spending, but accounting tricks, reallocating existing spending…

Obama Stimulous Costing Big Money

Cash for Clunkers was an expensive waste of time. American taxpayers paid a lot of cash for those clunkers: $24,000 for each new car sold, according to a study released Wednesday. That’s a lot of money, especially when the so-called “cash for clunker” stimulus program offered only a maximum $4,500 in cash for each person…

Random Impretenant Question

If goverment spending is the way out of a recession, how come we have recessions?

Tax it and it dies

DRJ posts at Patterico that Maryland has had a massive decrease in millionaires. Now, partly this is the recession. But the fact that they raised taxes on people who can easily afford to move doesn’t appear to have helped. Y’know, isn’t it the left that’s always going on about how poor people get affected by…

OCR

Ok, is is just me, or is there one word that I have not heard in relation to the OCR being cut to a record low? That would be the word “Inflation” which is the only thing that is supposed to be taken into account. Apparently, that can be ignored when Dr Bollard feels like…