Busy with other stuff, etc, etc, here’s an easy one for you: another “analyse and criticise a poor argument in Stuff”. I’ll be drawing on Henry Cooke’s recent piece on CGT as a superior alternative. I don’t need to reiterate my dislike of columnist Damien Grant. Yes, this is going to be incredibly petty line by line analysis - sometimes, it’s about doing pointless things with gusto. I’m not even that passionate about supporting a CGT, and, yes, I know the bright-line test exists; I just never see good arguments against, and this is really the bottom of the barrel. Let’s get into what he has to say this week.
Right off the bat, the title is poor framing. Not only is “not great” not exactly the best way to describe an issue - or should I say a weak way to - but the sentence implies consensus that CGT is widely accepted as a good idea. If it was, Labour would’ve passed one by 2020! As Cooke puts it,
“…the forces against it are very strong: the National Party, the huge bloc of New Zealanders who quite like their real estate investment, and the desire within the Labour Party to win elections.”
Tax academics are befuddled by our continued exception from the rules of the developed world vis a vis capital gains. I’d take the social and political reality on the ground any day as a more accurate representation of views on CGT than the experts. I’d expect Grant and co. to feel the same way!
“Like building a waterfront stadium, hosting another Commonwealth Games, or installing Winston Peters as Deputy Prime Minister, this country has a passion for foolish ideas; and eventually we get around to doing them.”
We agree on something.
"One idea that continues to keep returning, like tinea, is a capital gains tax."
You might think you don’t need an editor. You do.
“...the chief of the ANZ bank, Antonia Watson, bravely deflected from the more than two billion profit by advocating for a tax on capital gains.”
Grant’s writing sometimes advocates for a more thoughtful culture of debate and understanding with other New Zealanders, and other times reflexively adopts a contrarian attitude of assuming cynical intent behind every move from those who disagree with him. Turning these guns on a banking boss is an ill-conceived move for a right-winger, given that any statement on his part along the lines of “I am opposed to x move that might threaten my wealth, but I also support y valuable social initiative (e.g private charity)” could be subjected to the exact same criticism in a cynic’s eye: calculated deflection. Do I think his statement is fair in isolation? Sure!
“It isn’t clear what problem we are seeking to solve.”
If you work for your income, you pay tax. If you sell houses for your income, you do not pay tax. You can’t throw a rock in NZ punditry without encountering this massive loophole. To paper that over with vague, non-committal language is either wilfully disingenuous with the readers’ time, or stupefying from an amateur, never mind a paid columnist.
Even if you don’t care about all that equality hogwash, when it comes to his mournful question -
“...why does Wellington need the extra cash?”
…you could hunt for an opinion on what problem we are seeking to solve by reading Nicola Willis isn’t going to balance the books by culling a few tea ladies. Or This Budget does not matter, or We may be avoiding a technical recession, but we are failing to confront reality, or yet more writing from Stuff columnist Damien Grant, in which, again and again, he raises the important issue of debt and the moral culpability of our politicians who sell out our future.
For every dollar of capital gains tax the New Zealand government collects, that is one dollar closer to closing our deficit; one hour closer to paying down debt; and a penny saved a month on debt servicing costs. That sounds to me like a problem worth solving!
Grant would, of course, argue that the tax would be spent badly, so we should not have the tax. A reasonable position for a libertarian, one he should probably get around to actually presenting in this article. But he didn’t, so I’ll do it for him. And then I’ll respond that we moved decades ago past a paradigm where centre-right governments would raise tax to pay down debt rather than afford new services. That no longer happens primarily because right-wing parties, like those running our country today, chose to downplay debt as an issue in favour of making more short-term political capital out of pressing tax cuts, never mind the “Bermuda Triangle” that has arisen in 2020, in 2023, and so many other years.
Just as he could argue a left-wing government will spend a CGT poorly, I could argue a right-wing government will manage the budget poorly, prioritising handouts to their supporters over prudent governance. For instance, National - the most centrist, moderate, and reasonable of these parties, and an affront to Grant’s ideals compared to ACT - chose to present and then pursue irresponsible tax cuts, coming at a tradeoff to our national debt. Compare that to the choice of fronting up with honesty about the debt problem, using your common sense and not pursuing Liz Truss tax cuts amidst high inflation and debt, and putting long-term thinking ahead of short-term gain by passing a CGT. A CGT’s benefits are not immediately apparent and will take their time to manifest. Not everybody sells their second home on day one, after all.
And then you could blame the left-wing government for creating the debt problem in the first place, or you could simply admit that right-wing parties are responsible for delivering on what they believe in, and should be judged on their success or failure in tackling the debt (amongst other issues) instead of receiving a blank check to disregard all tools to solve issues just because Labour will control the tools 40% of the time. If you want the government to bring in more money than it spends, then you have to do more than the right-wing government is currently doing to create those conditions. I know Grant isn’t a diehard cheerleader for them, but he can’t point the finger across the aisle all the time without anything but the shallowest analysis for his fellow travellers.
“The Crown takes in a third of GDP. This is a massive amount…” [He then goes on for a long time about Australia to imply lower taxes across the Tasman create better economic conditions. This includes the gem that Australia has lots of loopholes and needs a higher marginal tax rate to compensate, which is a pretty poor case from a libertarian for leaving a big loophole open here.]
This is essential to the thinking of somebody like Grant - government has gotten too big. But you have to actually…explain the consequences of that, to try to persuade people who don’t agree with you. He doesn’t, and I’m done carrying water for his columns. His argument by correlation about Australia is not persuasive because he never explains the link between tax take and - well, anything!
“...modern tax regimes impose three types of costs. The taxes themselves, obviously.”
Sure, that’s the big tradeoff.
“Then there is the ‘deadweight loss’, a fancy term for the economic output lost by confiscating a percentage of someone’s income. Taxes reduce the incentive to work and invest…”
Work on what, exactly? Sure, houses need maintenance and doing up, but it’s not like people who own a second or third or fifth home spend forty hours a week pouring their guts into that! If you’re so sorted in life you can pour that kind of commitment into a passion project, who cares what economic headwinds come your way? You’re young, fit, committed and rich; you can clearly handle yourself.
And, critically, there is the right-wing argument for a capital gains tax that so many minds from Grant to our political leaders frustratingly never engage with. investing in housing does not improve our economy. At most, you’re paying the do-uppers in the medium term. You’re not creating jobs. You’re not innovating new technologies or methods. And to purchase a house, wait a while, and sell a house at a significantly higher price does not accumulate benefit to anybody but you. It’s the poorer in society, the first-time homeowners and the renters and the homeless, who have to bite the cost when the well-off exploit the tax loophole to invest in comparatively attractive housing, because Economics 101 is higher demand equals higher prices.
Compare that to the alternative: close the loophole, make investing in business and technology and other sources of income more attractive, and get the rich doing their part to solve our low-productivity problem the likes of Grant and the right-wing leaders focus on so much. The left-wing argument is that inequality is bad because capital accumulates when a government could take that capital and use it to help the poorer. But you don’t have to believe in that socialist stuff to believe that rich people investing in productive pursuits for returns is desirable. All you have to believe in is capitalism! Neoliberalism! Trickle-down economics! This is right up Grant’s alley, and I’ve never heard him, or anybody of his like, explain why this is undesirable.
“But finally there is the ‘operating costs of the tax system’; the cost of administering a tax regime, which ranges from IRD staff through to the time accountants spend calculating the amount of tax to remit to the Centre.” [Grant goes on to quote an Australian professor on the significant, if non-quantifiable, psychological costs of having to pay your taxes, which is something that Damien would know about.]
Sure, but a mid-sized new tax far outweighs its cost to administrate, and…you already have to get your property valuated for sale. This is perfectly doable.
What we’re left with is the cost to those who can afford to flip houses - because, in order to be politically palatable, proposals for a CGT typically exclude the family home, leaving only the wealthy as stakeholders. And on this subject, Grant finds his passion for making a point:
“There will be a minority of angry old men like me shouting into the darkness but our efforts will be wasted…the costs of this idiotic policy will fall in the future and on someone else. Explaining why it is a foolish policy comes with no rewards, will earn you no social credit and allows others to call you a foolish, greedy old man driven by self-interest and an outdated desire for good public policy.”
This cringe reads like those “Alas, I have portrayed myself as the sigma” type caricatures but for angry old men. Grant’s take is that we should not pursue public policy that creates additional costs for well-off, angry old men because they are perpetual victims of our left-wing society, and so we should not continue to persecute them by having different opinions from them about public policy. Nobody has ever profited from opposing a capital gains tax, except for
National in 2011
National in 2014
National in 2017
Which you might note is the era of the biggest popular vote gap between National and Labour in our modern history. That is an era that came to an end right as Labour definitively abandoned the policy. Of course Labour didn’t win a landslide simply because they dropped the policy. My point is that the Labour Party eventually conceded that National had won the argument politically. Basically, reality gives the lie to Grant's idea that there are no cynical incentives to oppose a CGT.
And all of this ignores the single most obvious thing to say: wealthy people paranoid about losing their wealth make a lot more wealth off of flipping houses. They oppose a capital gains tax because they will have to work harder for slower gains from investing their wealth productively instead. This isn’t rocket science, but Grant can’t bring himself to even attempt a defence of any substantive critique instead of playing the victim about CGT in the only developed country free from CGT.
“We will get this new tax and it will arrive sooner than you may expect and to understand why, consider the incentives behind those calling for it. Antonia Watson obtained positive media coverage. She also got a Prime Ministerial rebuke, but in the stadium of public opinion this is a win. Academics, commentators and opposition politicians will enhance their standing by calling for a tax on something we all expect other people will pay…”
Grant, this is getting pathetic. The argument that “people can’t be trusted because, if they have an opinion, other people will like them” is braindead coma stuff. Positive media coverage and social standing are unbelievably small potatoes when it comes to the great issues facing our country, and while it’s true these incentives are often underrated on an individual level (see Trump’s reshaping of the world as dictators woo him), they also exist across the board. Put in debating terms, this mechanism is symmetric. Close us out.
“We can, and we will, get a capital gains tax. Nothing will improve. We will then face calls for a wealth tax. Which we will get. Nothing will improve except capital flight. So someone will demand capital controls. The cycle will continue to escalate until the system breaks. There is, as Adam Smith once wrote, a lot of ruin in a nation. It seems we are determined to find out exactly how much.”
“A future government might enact socialism” is some real Minority Report argumentation for why any policy that would grow government is ontologically evil. This carries the same weight as arguing any right-wing policy is a rung on the ladder to fascism. This article is trite and unoriginal, self-absorbed and ideological…but it’s also weirdly insecure, vague and non-committal in its positions and details and quick to shy away from facing up to any substantial critiques. It’s one of the best embodiments I’ve found for the culture I resent, one where talk of debate and good public policy is all virtue signalling about how you’re a cool columnist (or a contrarian to generate negative attention on) because you like those. Walk the walk. Lead by example. Delete these words and write something of substance and specificity.
I don’t have it in me after that to do a full media watch, and that’s fortunate, because I wouldn’t want to spoil a thing about this next movie and I don’t think I could say anything the movie can’t say itself. I’ve been on a Scorcese kick lately (Casino is the definition of a solid movie, GoodFellas is such a blast). If you don’t mind his kind of crime drama - the violence, the coarseness, the way all his films look like they were filmed in the 70s - you should watch The Departed (2006). (It's based on the Hong Kong trilogy Internal Affairs, if you wanted to check that out first before the spoilers start dropping.) I always had the impression it was a movie about two undercover cops in the Mafia, each unaware the other is a cop, an amusing but cliched vision. I got the wrong picture - it’s so much more than that. You’ll see. The script made me feel alive. The performances are to die for.
Okay, that was pretty hackneyed, but at least nobody pays me to write this rubbish.
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