Wednesday, May 19, 2010

a chiz is a swiz or a swindle, as any fule kno

Front-page headline in the paper:
How the wealthy dodge tax
And how the Budget will make them pay

A $3000 million tax dodge -- by which half the country's rich don't pay the top tax rate -- will be cracked by changes tipped for tomorrow's budget.
Prime Minister John Key said yesterday that tax-avoidance loopholes were being targeted.
We discover below the lede that "targeted" is used here in its technical sense of "legitimised", "cracked" means "made unnecessary", and "make them pay" here means "cut the top tax bracket from 38% to 33% to bring it into line with what the tax-avoiders are currently paying in practice."

Rather than think of suitable epithets for editors who write headlines that are the antithesis of the situation described in the text, it is left as an exercise for the reader.

9 comments:

J— said...

Mr Key said the Budget would include "a number of areas" in which tax liability was increased.

Such as? The article surprisingly does not say.

Instead of holding investments directly, it is easy to hold them indirectly by placing them in a company, a trust or a portfolio investment entity (PIE).

If I lived in New Zealand I would put all my money in PIE regardless of its tax rate.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

But... but... if the rich were overly taxed, they'd just leave the country, and then who'd create the jobs... It's just like that Ann Rand wrote in Epimetheus Eructated.

Hamish Mack said...

Well if you can't rely on the Dom-Post to keep on feeding oats to the horse (Galbraith 1980's) who can you rely on

Unknown said...

Antithesis = people care for politicians.
Antinomy = politicians care for people.

ganedi, an Order of mind bending gannets.

Smut Clyde said...

if the rich were overly taxed, they'd just leave the country, and then who'd create the jobs

Our Pry Minister has used exactly that argument, and explained that high-income people have high incomes because they are more productive.
To be fair to our journalists, they would probably balance the Gubblement's Ministry-of-Truth bullshit by including rebuttal-type statements from the Labour opposition if the Labour politicians actually got around to making such statements rather than fluff around.

J-- seems to know an awful lot about NZ politics. It is almost as if we are being used as a Petri dish for experiments in bad economics, while vast cool unsympathetic minds watch us to see how much bullshit an unsceptical public will swallow.

Unknown said...

Oh I swallow.

dinguit, a nocturnal accident in Cambodia.

Smut Clyde said...

Coprophagy seems to be all the rage these days.

J— said...

No, I pretty much no nothing of New Zealand politics. I just found the article on the big inter net.

I imagine those in-country tax shelters the very rich use (family trust at 33%, business at 30%) are for the money they keep in country. That is, they also park an untold chunk of it offshore and pay nothing on it.

M. Bouffant said...

Exercise?

I must lie down for a moment or two.