Tax Cuts

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Forums › Finance and wealth management › Tax Cuts

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#1788781 26-May-2017 14:37

Fred99:

One example from that - hospital beds per 1,000 population, NZ = 6.1, US = 3.3.

Anyway, I've got more important things to do than bicker with a hardline right winger pushing a failed agenda.

Goodbye.

As I said, try getting specialist care on our system without medical insurance. Its not about hospital beds.

old3eyes

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#1788793 26-May-2017 14:55

Wiggum:

Fred99:

Yeah - works great - look at the USA.

it actually quiet similar here in NZ. Forget healthcare for a sec, and think about life insurance.

These two should actually go hand in hand. In NZ yes you can survive without life insurance but who would be stupid enough to do that? Especially if you working and paying off a mortgage, and have family who are dependent on your income.

Besides. Our healthcare system in NZ is not really suitable. I have to top it up anyway because we not really covered very well. I would hate to get terminally ill here in NZ without my Southern Cross membership. Sure we covered for injuries/ACC etc.. But personally, I would much rather prefure to arrange my own cover for myself and family instead of relying on an over-utilized state system.

Maybe you're getting mortgage repayment and life insurance mixed here. I had repayment insurance but not life and judging by the way life and funeral insurance companies advertize in NZ not many people do have life insurance I guess.

Regards,

Old3eyes

Wiggum

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#1788796 26-May-2017 15:02

old3eyes:

Maybe you're getting mortgage repayment and life insurance mixed here. I had repayment insurance but not life and judging by the way life and funeral insurance companies advertize in NZ not many people do have life insurance I guess.

I have life cover, income continuous protection insurance, and mortgage protection insurance. They all part of Life insurance IMO, just different types of cover for different things, some more than others.

Handle9

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#1788800 26-May-2017 15:17

Wiggum:
Fred99:

Yeah - works great - look at the USA.

it actually quiet similar here in NZ. Forget healthcare for a sec, and think about life insurance.

These two should actually go hand in hand. In NZ yes you can survive without life insurance but who would be stupid enough to do that? Especially if you working and paying off a mortgage, and have family who are dependent on your income.

Besides. Our healthcare system in NZ is not really suitable. I have to top it up anyway because we not really covered very well. I would hate to get terminally ill here in NZ without my Southern Cross membership. Sure we covered for injuries/ACC etc.. But personally, I would much rather prefure to arrange my own cover for myself and family instead of relying on an over-utilized state system.

If you are terminally ill the private system tells you, sorry nothing we can do for you, go public. Same if you need specialised imaging like a PET CT. The private system doesnt give you any real advantage if you have a condition which is immediately life threatening.

The best specialists work in both systems but predominantly in the public system because the public system invests a great deal in training which is only paid for if the consultant works in the public system.

If you have elective needs, which can be seriously debilitating, it's a different story and that is where private health insurance is great.

frankv

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#1788808 26-May-2017 15:38

Wiggum:

Government needs rich people and their taxes more than it needs the middle class.

This could be true if the rich actually paid taxes.

Socialist policies cannot survive without some form of capitalism.

Sounds like a meaningless soundbite to me.

frankv

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#1788812 26-May-2017 15:46

Wiggum:

old3eyes:

Maybe you're getting mortgage repayment and life insurance mixed here. I had repayment insurance but not life and judging by the way life and funeral insurance companies advertize in NZ not many people do have life insurance I guess.

I have life cover, income continuous protection insurance, and mortgage protection insurance. They all part of Life insurance IMO, just different types of cover for different things, some more than others.

You do realise that insurance is essentially what the Govt does, without siphoning off a bunch of profit, right?

ripdog

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#1788835 26-May-2017 16:47

Sounds like Geektastic and the other libertarian/conservatives in this thread need a dose of reality. Tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts in social services do not make society richer. They do not help the economy, and they do ensure greater preventable suffering across the board.

Need proof? Look at Kansas:

The stakes for Brownback’s fiscal policy were always high, because the governor himself had set them there. The original tax plan, he said, was a “real live experiment” in conservative fiscal policy—the kind small-government Republicans in Washington had dreamed about but had never fully implemented. The goal in Kansas was to phase out the income tax entirely over time in favor of levies on consumption. As revenues shrunk, so, too, would the size of government.

But the revenues dropped immediately, and dramatically—much faster than legislators could, or would want to, cut spending. The income tax had accounted for 50 percent of the state’s revenue, said Haley Pollock of the group Kansas Action for Children, which is part of a coalition pushing to reverse Brownback’s tax cuts. “When his tax plan went into effect, there was an immediate structural revenue imbalance,” she said. What followed were nine rounds of budget cuts over four years, three credit downgrades, missed state payments, and an ongoing atmosphere of fiscal crisis. “It’s really hard to argue that the income tax cuts weren't the source of our problems when most of our problems started at the same time that they took effect,” Pollock said.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/the-republican-blowback-against-sam-brownback-kansas/517641/

Unwilling to scale back the income tax cuts, the state did increase the sales tax. Now Kansas has the second-highest sales tax in the nation, and such reliance on sales taxes has saddled the state with additional problems: Deflation is dropping the prices of goods and the taxes the state collects on them.

Tired of the bleating horn of bad news, in September Brownback silenced a quarterly economic evaluation of the state that counted employment, unemployment, personal income and energy production, and consistently illustrated the state’s plunging revenues. He had done so before, in August 2015, when he ordered a halt to a semiannual economic report.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-kansas-hard-times-snap-20161121-story.html

Conservatism, like Communism, has never worked in the real world. Not in a pure form.

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Sam91

620 posts

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#1788902 26-May-2017 19:31

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

I'm saying it's right, but it definitely makes you think outside the box in relation to the redistribution of wealth in society.

tdgeek

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#1789016 27-May-2017 08:51

Fred99:

Wiggum:

Government needs rich people and their taxes more than it needs the middle class.

Absolute twaddle.

About 85% of total revenue from income tax is paid by people earning less than $150k, only about 15% from people earning over $150k.

(that data a few years ago from a treasury paper, but it won't have changed much)

"Rich people" might contribute more as a % of their income due to tax brackets. There are far fewer "rich people" around than many people seem to believe.

IIRC if you're earning >$150k, you're in the top 5% of wage/salary earners. Could be a distorted view of that in this forum, as many work in IT, which on average is a highly paid industry.

Absolutely right. I'm sure I also recall that small businesses generate more income tax than medium and large

tdgeek

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#1789020 27-May-2017 09:01

Wiggum:

Fred99:

[

Rubbish to most of that.

The Commonwealth Fund would be a good place to start - if you're interested in learning.

Got to laugh at the comment : "I would hate to get terminally ill here in NZ without my Southern Cross membership".

If that's the way you think, then you've been sold a real pup. (Source : have cared for end of life patients with and without private health insurance).

First hand experience. Its not what I think. Try seeing a specialist without it, need an MRI etc etc.

it could be the difference between life, and sitting on the bench waiting for treatment (death)

We both have medical insurance, but you are quite wrong. If there is an urgent need it doesnt matter. The only real benefit is if you need elective surgery and its not life threatening, your in, and not on a a waiting list. Environment is much nicer too, as is the food. There is a life insurance component. But for general and emergency healthcare, whether that be a scrape or a broken leg, it makes no difference. Your surgeon would be at public one day and private the next. If they were full up, you could have your private surgery at public, if there are complications, you might be sent to public, all under your medial insurance. End of the day its the same doctors who care for you, and if you want some non life threatening advantages, and a faster action for other non life threatening issues, private is there as a choice.

Geektastic

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#1789046 27-May-2017 09:55

According to this 3% of tax payers pay 24% of income tax and many tax payers effectively pay none at all.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/81429047/small-number-of-taxpayers-bear-the-brunt-of-new-zealand-tax-bill

PS sorry couldn't do a link as on phone and button missing in this version of the forum.

frankv

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#1789061 27-May-2017 10:32

tdgeek:

The only real benefit is if you need elective surgery and its not life threatening, your in, and not on a a waiting list.

By definition, elective surgery is something you don't need and is not life threatening.

old3eyes

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#1789062 27-May-2017 10:36

frankv:

tdgeek:

The only real benefit is if you need elective surgery and its not life threatening, your in, and not on a a waiting list.

By definition, elective surgery is something you don't need and is not life threatening.

I would disputer the "don't need" piece of your statement. There are plenty of people on waiting list that "Need " these surgeries but as they can't afford health insurance they on the bottom of the heap and waiting lists. I bet there's not a politician out there who doesn't have tax payer funded insurance..

Regards,

Old3eyes

dejadeadnz

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#1789101 27-May-2017 12:19

We combine to earn over 210K each and have zero problem with the tax rate. I see no point in this tax cut for people like us - might as well distribute it to those who need it more or invest more in education and the next generation, rather than endlessly pandering to pathetic right wing causes like law and order and more for elective surgery for oldies. The rate the under-investment in the next generation is going, the silly baby boomers and oldies who keep supporting this direction won't have any meaningful tax base to rip off in 20 years' time.

JimmyH

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#1790328 27-May-2017 17:38

There is always more things that you can spend money on in health and education. But you have to draw a line between how much money you take off people to do this, and how much of their earnings you let them keep.

If you are really arguing that no one should get a tax cut because the health system can use the money better than they can, then why not increase taxes to pay for more health spending? And where would you stop 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%, 50%? Even if you had taxes taking 90% of incomes, there would always be something that health and education could spend "just a little bit more" money on.

It's the job of government to strike a balance. I don't think the budget did a stupid job of this - they had some spare cash, and out of that funded health and education to manage pressure, and gave some back to taxpayers who had been seeing rising effective tax rates because of fiscal drag. Personally, I would rather have seen them spend less, and have bigger tax cuts and faster debt repayment instead. But the balance they settled on wasn't, on the face of it, silly.

I have taken a drop in income over the last few years, and my budget is a bit stretched. So I'm not upset about being able to hold on to a little bit more of the money that I work to earn. I just wish it was a bit more.

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