I once heard Marc Cuban say the best investment an ordinary person can make is to buy things in bulk when they are on sale. Say you normally buy detergent one bottle at a time. If you catch it on sale at 20% off and then stock up for the year you are going to get a 20% return on your investment which you’ll never achieve in the stock market.

Made a lot of sense to me. I stocked up on butter when it was 4 dollars. I filled a couple of shelves in my freezer. I just got done with that batch and saved a ton of money.

Meh. Trucks get weighed so the additional axel of a trailer isn’t going to make that much of a difference. The cab has multiple axels but it could be traveling empty without a trailer.

You can charge more for visas, you can have airport taxes, you can levy a fee on museums, huts, trails and such, you can place taxes on tour operators and guides etc.

There are lots of options.

There are better ways to capture tourist dollars than GST though. Same goes for proceeds of crime (which isn’t that important because it’s such a tiny portion of the economy).

You can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.

Basically you can charge poor people more money. For example a poor person can’t afford a large sack or rice so they buy smaller packets and pay more per kilogram. Same goes for everything from toilet paper to detergent.

I can’t even fathom the amount of hatred religious people have towards gays and trans people. I get that the bible says you have o kill homosexuals and I get that the bible says you have to punish people for wearing clothing of a different gender but the bible also says you have to stone women who don’t bleed on their wedding night.

In any case I don’t worship your god so I don’t have to hate these people like you do so stop shoving your god down my throat by enacting his commandments into law.

Road user charges should be uniform. X dollars per kilogram no matter what the class of the vehicle. Commercial or not should not make any difference, the road doesn’t know. The only modification I would make to this policy is X is divided per passengers but that’s really hard to measure and enforce. If it could be done then it should. For example taxi companies and busses etc can measure and log the number of passengers on any given kilometer traveled.

You could raise the lowest tax rate, that would be a good thing but it would only effect the people who already pay taxes. Better thing would be to eliminate the GST which would benefit everybody who buys anything. You can pay for it by adding some tiers to the tax system on top.

UBI is a cash injection whether you call it that or not. As I said you could achieve similar outcomes by giving people the essentials for free at least up to some threshold. The government could set up a public utility to provide electricity, bandwidth, water, etc and could provide the first X units for free and charge for the rest at market rates or just provide them at cost plus basis. This would force private companies to compete and lower prices for everybody. Similar things can be done for food or rent.

I can even envision a scenario where the government builds facilities like dormitories where you get a room, a bed, a desk and a shared bathroom. You cram these into buildings and offer them as public housing. People living there don’t pay for electricity or water or sewer or anything. Minimal and basic but free. As you build more you lower the eligibility requirements until one day every citizen can live in a tiny dorm room for free if they want.

Honestly everything I have read and researched shows that direct payment of money to citizens doesn’t accomplish much if anything. That money gets sucked up instantly in higher prices and lower wages as the rent seekers vacuum it all up. If you simply provide the citizens the goods and services they would be buying with that money that actually provides a downward pressure on prices and acts to counter market forces. For example if you provide free housing for people that drives down rents, if you give people rent subsidies that drives rent prices up.

Policy of land tax based on rates valuation (exemption for family home and farms it seems)

This isn’t going to collect much then. Also farms are businesses. Just exempt the family home and that’s good enough.

citizen income - replaces benefits with a means tested regular payment where average income earners should expect to be no better or worse off (unclear what happens with permanent residents or those on working holiday, seasonal workers, etc.).

Won’t work. The rent seekers in the economy will instantly suck up any extra income anybody has. Better to actually provide essentials directly to citizens, start with utilities.

Also how fast they work I guess. But how many people the business employs is also a work ethic problem.

As a customer I care. As a person who hires a tradie I care.

It effects the entire economic system from top to bottom.

Really, you pay by the metre?

Here is a fun story.

I once went to bunnings and asked for a specific length of a timber to repair a fence. They told me that their saw was broken and brought me a hand saw and told me to saw it myself. They of course charged me for the whole length of the product.

I get that the company doesn’t want to help their customers but the point is that the employee has no interest in actually doing the job of helping you which is supposedly their job.

The questions I have for the employee in the store are not calculus problems, they are simple things like “does this come in red” or “do you carry such and such” or whatever. Just basic knowledge about what’s in the store.

Can we have an honest discussion about the kiwi work ethic. From what I can see it’s horrible. Have you ever tried to contact customer support from any company? How long did it take you to talk to somebody? Were they really interested in helping you or solving your problem? Did they actually solve your problem? How long did it take.

I don’t even bother to call anymore, I email and talk to live chat and the standard reply is that they will get back to me within four working days. Like WTF man, four working days to answer an email? I am reporting a problem do you you really think it’s appropriate to make me live with that problem for four working days?

How about tradies? I call a tradie, he says he will call me the next day but doesn’t. The next one does the same thing, five tradies later I get one that actually calls back and makes an appointment to show up. They don’t. I call and they give me some lame excuse and make another appointment which they may or may not show up for.

Have you ever walked into a store and tried to find somebody to help you? Have you ever asked a question to a business employee and gotten a blank stare because they have no idea what they are doing and they get paid minimum wage and they just started last week because nobody wants to work for this shitty store for more than a month?

No wonder our economy is a mess and our productivity is so low.

I guess my concern with one tax that covers everything, is that weathly people will just change what they do.

I don’t think they are going to stop moving money around. In any case I don’t thing “they might do such and such” is a good excuse to not do something. If they do something we’ll so something too.

My suspicion would be wealthy people pay accountants lots of money to work out how to collect wealth with fewer transactions, and continue paying minimal tax compared to their wealth.

tax evasion is technically a crime but the tax is based on a percentage so it doesn’t matter if you do ten transactions or one, if it’s the amount of money.

When we are talking about a change in value, I’m going to have to disagree with you. A house doesn’t have more value over time, unless you change the house.

Value has a different meaning economically and it’s pretty vague. Economically the only way to measure value is via the price of things. If you value a thing more you will pay more for it.

I disagree. House values go up over time because we incentivise people to buy rentals but have a lack of supply, leading to people borrowing as much money as they can to be able to get a house at all. House prices are tied to how much people are able to borrow, more than they are tied to anything of value.

It’s a complicated formula but in the end it’s supply and demand curves. What is the supply of housing in a place you want to live in? What’s the supply of money and credit available for you to buy it.

I’m curious about the details of this. Most importantly, is it regressive?

Theoretically yes but in practice no. The fact is most people don’t conduct repeated transactions. They earn money and then spend almost all of it. They don’t shuttle money back and forth, do high frequency trading or anything like that. The bulk of the taxes will be paid by sophisticated actors with excess money to move around.

People hoarding wealth probably don’t make a lot of transactions with that wealth, it’s just shares sitting there being worth a lot.

True but it’s rare when that property is not leveraged. You buy some land and you pay a transaction tax. Then you borrow against that land and you pay a transaction tax, you spend that money and you pay a transaction tax etc.

Where as people without much wealth have to spend all their money so end up paying more tax as a proportion of their wealth.

Wealthy people are constantly moving money around. They are constantly buying and selling shares, businesses, assets etc. They are also constantly borrowing money and paying it back. Also high frequency traders may make thousands of transactions every second.

That seems like the dumbest decision ever. A perfect example of short term thinking. Go to any country in Europe and they will have a hundred different kinds of cheeses representing every nook and cranny of the country. Each cheese has a story about the climate or the cows or grass or the air or the aging or whatnot and as a result they cost a premium. We just sell the milk powder, they make artisan bespoke cheese and sell it back to us.

No because the shares (in theory) have value behind them.

So does property.

If they went up overnight, it was because the value of the company changed not because the purchasing power of money changed.

House prices go up because the value goes up too. The value is the neighbourhood, the schools in the area, proximity to public transport or shopping etc. Shops could be built someplace and the value might go up. A highway could be built nearby and the value would go down.

Here’s another question though. That old lady/man everyone knows of that owns dozens or hundreds of houses, do you think they ever sold any? They can still accumulate wealth without paying tax by simply hoarding it like a dragon.

That would be tackled with a wealth tax not a capital gains tax. I do think an argument could be made for a wealth tax for sure.

But if I had my way I would scrap all those taxes and replace with a financial transaction tax. This would be simply done by adopting a digital currency and taking a tiny cut on every transaction automatically. No muss, no fuss, no IRD, no nothing. Just a premined currency that the government controls the supply of.