Tag Archives: poverty

Reform of tax and money system essential for narrowing gap and bringing jobs

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So we have just seen the Ikaroa Rawhiti by-election win for Labour with Mana coming in second.

The successful candidate Meka Whaitiri has repeatedly said “Our people are hurting. The issues are poor housing, jobs and poverty” Labour has said people are moving from National to Labour because of the rising cost of living.

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With currency reform and tax reform money will flow into activities that maintain and upgrade assets like houses

If the money system widens the gap between the rich and the poor then a party which ignores this or even understand this will do little to reduce wealth disparity. Explaining this: If money is created by banks as interest bearing debt, but the banks don’t also create the interest, then there will never be enough money in the system for everyone to pay back debt. So the losers have to go further into debt. This widens the gap.

If in addition the tax system causes wealth to concentrate with property owners and stops money going into investment in the productive sector then a party which ignores this will surely make little progress in alleviating poverty or bringing jobs for the rangatahi of Ikaroa Rawhiti electorate. Explaining this: If we tax labour, sales and enterprise with income taxes, GST and company tax, then the purchasing power of everyone declines. The cost of living rises relative to income. At the same time investment money goes into housing, because there is no tax on land and everyone is betting on rising land prices. A notable example was of an Auckland house which was recently sold by New Zealand Transport Agency for $220,000 above Rateable Value. The housing bubble in Auckland is a serious threat as the Reserve Bank constantly reminds us.

Because our party has looked to the root of the issues, and have proposed a well designed domestic-only currency linked to a completely new tax and welfare system, (see https://neweconomics.net.nz/index.php/2013/06/how-to-build-a-life-supporting-economic-system/), only our party can offer serious solutions to the growing wealth disparity and bring real jobs to the Ikaroa Rawhiti electorate.

 

Maori Party must be naive to negotiate for a committee on poverty

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Set up a committee on poverty and say that is a way to stop it? Daft as. Hone is right. Koretake! Useless!

The way to stop poverty is to legislate and tax so that it stops the profiting from the passive ownership of land, resources or money. This is the New Economics Party policy and gets to the root of poverty issues. Tax what you use not what you earn, tax what you take not what you make.

Today I found that after the Global Financial Crisis in UK, there was a conference on Economic Justice and a Council of Economic Justice was set up. To the conference were invited many organisations which advocated monetary reform and many who advocated Land Taxation Tax and other resource taxes. This Council will have a great deal in common with our party. Meanwhile the Libdems have a group called ALTER which advocates land value taxes and the Scottish Greens now has a policy on this at local level. We are in touch with Earthsharing Canada and it is very gratifying to know that Frank De Jong is starting to read on the topic of monetary reform.

So oh dear Pita and Tariana. You are more naive than I thought. All you will do is watch the gap between rich and poor widen and widen, but you will at least know that statistics. To have a committee chaired by the very person who introduced a rise in the regressive GST tax regime shows how utterly ineffective it is going to be.

Monetary reform and land value taxes have been around for centuries, but in my lifetime they have never been implemented except for a brief period when we had unimproved value as a basis for  most of our local body rates.