You didn’t read the yellow menace alarmism in the article?

I am almost certainly panicking and will almost certainly support a war with china and almost certainly support rounding up chinese people and interrogating them in dark chambers

This year I promised not to give anybody gifts and not to accept gifts from anybody. I told everybody about it months before Christmas.

I kept that promise.

The bill is not targeted at social media. It’s targeted at you and me. It’s to control what we are allowed to say and do online.

How dare they do the same things we do!

Let’s be honest enough to admit that this government is hostile to democracy

Basically it’s less planning and less scrutiny and less options if you object and of course less regard for the environment, culture, desires of locals, human beings etc

The role of charter schools of to shuttle taxpayers money into the pockets of donors to the National party

Get a new partner

We need to keep stats on every demographic and figure out whether or not natives or immigrants commit more crimes and more violent crimes. If it turns out that NZ born people commit more crimes and more heinous crimes then we should take severe action against NZ born people and invite more immigrants right away.

We can’t just cut people slack because they were born in NZ instead of being born elsewhere.

Is she? Where did you get this notion from?

I once heard Marc Cuban say the best investment an ordinary person can make is to buy things in bulk when they are on sale. Say you normally buy detergent one bottle at a time. If you catch it on sale at 20% off and then stock up for the year you are going to get a 20% return on your investment which you’ll never achieve in the stock market.

Made a lot of sense to me. I stocked up on butter when it was 4 dollars. I filled a couple of shelves in my freezer. I just got done with that batch and saved a ton of money.

Meh. Trucks get weighed so the additional axel of a trailer isn’t going to make that much of a difference. The cab has multiple axels but it could be traveling empty without a trailer.

You can charge more for visas, you can have airport taxes, you can levy a fee on museums, huts, trails and such, you can place taxes on tour operators and guides etc.

There are lots of options.

There are better ways to capture tourist dollars than GST though. Same goes for proceeds of crime (which isn’t that important because it’s such a tiny portion of the economy).

You can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.

Basically you can charge poor people more money. For example a poor person can’t afford a large sack or rice so they buy smaller packets and pay more per kilogram. Same goes for everything from toilet paper to detergent.

Road user charges should be uniform. X dollars per kilogram no matter what the class of the vehicle. Commercial or not should not make any difference, the road doesn’t know. The only modification I would make to this policy is X is divided per passengers but that’s really hard to measure and enforce. If it could be done then it should. For example taxi companies and busses etc can measure and log the number of passengers on any given kilometer traveled.

You could raise the lowest tax rate, that would be a good thing but it would only effect the people who already pay taxes. Better thing would be to eliminate the GST which would benefit everybody who buys anything. You can pay for it by adding some tiers to the tax system on top.

UBI is a cash injection whether you call it that or not. As I said you could achieve similar outcomes by giving people the essentials for free at least up to some threshold. The government could set up a public utility to provide electricity, bandwidth, water, etc and could provide the first X units for free and charge for the rest at market rates or just provide them at cost plus basis. This would force private companies to compete and lower prices for everybody. Similar things can be done for food or rent.

I can even envision a scenario where the government builds facilities like dormitories where you get a room, a bed, a desk and a shared bathroom. You cram these into buildings and offer them as public housing. People living there don’t pay for electricity or water or sewer or anything. Minimal and basic but free. As you build more you lower the eligibility requirements until one day every citizen can live in a tiny dorm room for free if they want.

Honestly everything I have read and researched shows that direct payment of money to citizens doesn’t accomplish much if anything. That money gets sucked up instantly in higher prices and lower wages as the rent seekers vacuum it all up. If you simply provide the citizens the goods and services they would be buying with that money that actually provides a downward pressure on prices and acts to counter market forces. For example if you provide free housing for people that drives down rents, if you give people rent subsidies that drives rent prices up.

Policy of land tax based on rates valuation (exemption for family home and farms it seems)

This isn’t going to collect much then. Also farms are businesses. Just exempt the family home and that’s good enough.

citizen income - replaces benefits with a means tested regular payment where average income earners should expect to be no better or worse off (unclear what happens with permanent residents or those on working holiday, seasonal workers, etc.).

Won’t work. The rent seekers in the economy will instantly suck up any extra income anybody has. Better to actually provide essentials directly to citizens, start with utilities.