Was the survey worth the cost?
I today received two communications from the Christchurch City Council inviting me to ‘‘Have your say’’ regarding a proposal to load the rates bills of property owners in the Akaroa subdivision of the Banks Peninsula ward with $1,300,000 being the amount to be contributed by the Akaroa Community Health Trust to the construction of the new Health Hub, further to the $1,340,000 it has already raised. It would be interesting to know what the total cost, including the costs of CCC employees, might be in carrying out this exercise in political rectitude.
Would it not have been easier to raise the modest amount required by soliciting donations from the local community and traders benefiting from the windfall from visiting cruise ships? The CCC might reasonably have donated the costs of carrying out the survey. Such surveys can be useful but this seems to be a sledgehammer cracking a very small nut.
Nicholas Sibley, Akaroa
Poor farmers
So the Tax Working Group has apparently targeted the poor, hard-working, food-producing farmers with a raft of onerous taxes, according to Lyn Webster (Feb 23).
No-one else in New Zealand is hard-working, foodproducing, nor have they been targeted with new taxes... Yeah, right.
No mention of the Tax Working Group’s diverse member composition, wide consultative process and the voluminous submissions by Federated Farmers on CGT and better use of taxes to discourage negative environmental impacts by farmers.
Also no mention of the goals of making the New Zealand tax system fairer, lowering personal income tax, encouraging savings and supporting all New Zealand businesses (not just farmers). John White, Queenstown
Property tax
Graham Down (Feb 26) asks if a property tax might be an alternative to a capital gains tax. This is a case of being careful of what you wish for there is nothing new in tax, just tinkering by politicians.
New Zealand has had a property tax in the past. In the
1879 Act, property was defined as including both real and personal property. Land was valued at £99,500,000 and personal property at £18,700,000, providing taxable property of
£118,200,000. After an individual exemption of £300, the government of the day had taxable property of £113,200,000 as its tax base.
In 1891 the land and property tax Acts became the Land and Income Tax Act. Today the current income tax legislation is found in over 3500 pages in the Income Tax Act 2007 and its subsequent amendments – considerably more than the few pages found in our early taxing Acts!
Michael Gousmett, Rangiora
Too much
Denis O’Rourke (Feb 26) repeats the uninformed line that ‘‘people on the lowest incomes … are paying too much tax … The wealthiest …do not pay enough.’’
Inland Revenue’s most recently available statistics (which are for the 2016 year*) show that those earning $50,000 or less comprised just under 70 per cent of all taxpayers but only paid just over 23 per cent of all tax assessed. It works out to an average of $2873 per person. Those earning over $100,000 comprised just under 7 per cent of all taxpayers but paid over 38 per cent of all the tax paid, or an average of $47,215 per person.
The wealthy earn more and so will pay more. When one considers that the wealthy also spend more (so pay more GST) and presumably have the capacity to make use of private rather than public amenities, it is hard to see how it could possibly be argued that they are not already paying more than their fair share.
Geordie Hooft, Somerfield
How CGT works
I have concerns over the way a capital gains tax might work.
I am lucky to have an investment where the dividends are reinvested. These dividends are taxed. Will they be taxed again as a capital gain when I sell my investment?
Martin Ravenhill, Parklands