[pima.nius] Budget: more tolerant of inequality?

Did anyone read Tapu's comment on Monday? Strong argument against the budget in terms of the damage of constantly abiding to the whim of potential Aussie seekers.

 

Also see the last line of page one:

[a]n annual Massey University survey has found we've become more tolerant of income inequality, even as we've become more unequal.

 

Also, Matt McCarten gives a good outline on the spin doctoring of John Key pre-budget here:

 

 

 

 

Tapu Misa: Inequality bound to hurt us all in the end

(abridged)

 

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10647045

 

Tapu Misa writes that the growing divide between rich and poor makes solidarity and a sense of community more difficult.

What would last week's Budget have looked like if inequality wasn't just an abstraction that John Key and his Government seem to have trouble getting their heads around?

The Green's alternative budget, Mind the Gap, has a few clues: a comprehensive capital gains tax excluding the family home, for example, and a $10,000 tax-free income band that would have benefited everyone.

What we got instead was a carefully crafted package that continues the red-carpet treatment of our star taxpayers and completely ignores the existence of a problem.

[some paragraphs missing]

............

 

We can't talk about inequality and the rich-poor divide, or dare to suggest the rich should pay more tax, without being accused of playing the politics of envy. Or fomenting class warfare.

As the billionaire Warren Buffett once quipped: "There's class warfare, all right - but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." Indeed.

Mr Buffett made the comment in a 2006 New York Times article after discovering - much as Trade Me founder Sam Morgan did recently - that even with his "immense income" from dividends and capital gains, he "paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks of anyone else in his office ... 'How can this be fair?"'

Buffett would happily have paid more taxes if someone had asked him. So would Morgan. But we don't ask this of Morgan or others like him, just in case they run off to Australia, where the top tax rate is higher.

Inequality, as epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue in their 2009 book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, hurts us all. As well as links to higher crime, ill-health, shorter life expectancy and a range of social pathologies, inequality drives a wedge between people, corroding trust and raising levels of anxiety. Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised then that an annual Massey University survey has found we've become more tolerant of income inequality, even as we've become more unequal.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10647045

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