Tax Avoidance
...is not a measure of success in life.
A Prime Minister who cannot see a problem with pocketing $460,000 of tax- free money from two property sales, is like the alcoholic who cannot see a problem with drinking.
A drinker’s booze obsession can tear a family apart, decimate its income and make children’s lives miserable.
A government sanctioned greed obsession can tear a nation apart and drive families into poverty.
Both addictions – to unlimited unearned wealth creation and unlimited consumption of alcohol - require intervention. The question is, who is willing to do it?
In a recent radio interview Luxon said;
“If we’re going to criticise people for being successful, let’s be clear - I’m wealthy.”
Well, let me be equally clear.
A successful life is not, in my view, to be measured in how much tax you can avoid.
And again, to be clear Prime Minister, making sure you completely avoid paying Capital Gains Tax by having your government lower the brightline test to two years instead of five in order to maximize your untax wealth return, while at the same time imposing such austere economic measures that schools and hospitals go underfunded and social housing projects are shut down, isn’t something , in my opinion, to crow about.
As the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr once put it “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society.”
To publicly celebrate your ability to create untaxed wealth for yourself at the expense of the community you were elected to serve is, in my view Prime Minister, not a measure of success but of uncivilised behaviour.
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Totally agree. Luxon is arrogant and completely lacking in empathy, displaying no concern at all for the majority of the people he was supposedly elected to serve. Politics favours the psychopath, and probably always has, but such individuals are now being granted excessive power in very dangerous circumstances. Our government, along with those of the US and the UK, provides a ghastly illustration of the failures of neoliberalism and the chaos it creates.
Meanwhile more public service staff were quietly made redundant last Friday. Even those who worked with them have not been told, so no idea who is still there or gone until you try to contact them.
What a total failure this govt is, no interest in bettering the Country, only themselves and their sponsors.