G News - Around the Traps

Craig Renney appeared on Big Hairy News last night ( check them out on Youtube ) and said a few excellent things about net core crown debt, land lords and interest deductibility and the need we have for a Capital Gains Tax that excludes the family home.

Craig talked about how net core crown debt is just debt and what makes it a good or bad thing is what you have to show for it.

As you know - if you lump in Super - then the way we measure net core crown debt becomes comparable to other countries and NZ is still way lower than Australia, the UK the USA and Japan etc.

But of course your average National Voter has no idea and has been brain washed on a diet of selected hard numbers at selected times that miss out these global relativities and what we have to show for our debt these days.

The point was made that borrowing during covid gained us about 20,000 lives - people who are still alive today who would not have been alive today - and I imagined Nicola Willis standing beside Christopher Luxon at Eden Park - filled with 20,000 living people - mostly elderly and saying "You are all a waste of hard earned tax payers money".

We also have thousands of small companies that would have gone under and tens of thousands of jobs would have been lost - so the debt bought us job security and continuity through that period. At the time National wanted us to spend more...but today they conceal that fact like treacherous deceitful bastards.

These are the better outcomes that Luxon relies upon Claire Trevett to never mention over at the NZ Herald. How else could the destructive Neoliberals still be getting 36% in the polls?

When it came to interest deductibility, Craig said Interest is a cost against Profit - and basically landlords were on a turbo charged pathway to save money as a result of this exception - which results in house prices going up.

Of course the news today is rents are up under Luxon ...after all he said about downward pressure on rents as he accused Labour of allowing rents to go up...Rental prices have hit an all time high, online marketplace Trade Me says this morning on RNZ.

Craig said Bernard Hickey once said we have a Property Market with an economy attached to it - which was a good way of saying we spend all our time investing in non productive assets like houses and not plant and machinery or new business ventures ...and we wonder why we are not as productive as we might be?

Thank Willis and Luxon for steering us backwards.

In other news - did you guys see that interview by Steve Braunias with Act's spokesman for the Arts? Crickey !!!

Steve discovers the Act guy is an utter vacuum about art - and I must admit - his readers thought it was satire when Steve was hammering this guy for having no interest in the Arts at all. You can read it on NewsRoom - plus I understand Nick's Kōrero ( coming up on G News ) has something to say about this too.

I spent some time listening to Oliver Sean Plunket badgering and bullying and talking over a student leader from a University about the usual Free Speech vs Hate Speech stuff and - ultimately when it became clear that the real issues were centred around the format of the speaking - Plunket realised he had spent 10 minutes ranting at a guest for examples - forcing her to produce one before he would let her finish a sentence. The student leader did produce a good example - but oh no Plunket was busy shouting her down and cutting her off - you know the Platform right?

There's a lot of excuse making about tough times being used by Luxon and Seymour right now - but in reality inflation is lower now than it was during the election thanks to the Reserve Bank monetary policy settings and Interest Rates are about the same as they were months ago ...as the OCR stays the same...

We also know that we do not need to spend on $14.9 Billion in tax cuts at the low point in the economic cycle...at the expense of jobs and services.

So it's a crock of excuses being served up by Luxon and Seymour about "tough times and what they have inherited and tough decisions" - which were all deliberate choices involving not listening to economists and experts ...and increasingly Kiwis see through that.

The government is out of government already - according to that poll, no excuses that do not add up.

Finally it was good to see Chippy smash Luxon over that "fiscal cliff" nonsense by pointing at National's child immunisation policy that was only funded for a year and half - with time limited spending.

Classic catching the Luxon with his hand in the cookie jar.

G News - Around the Traps

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