Justice

Governing for the not so good?

By Ant / 25 August 2008

Maxim Institute have put out a new discussion paper on taxation. It’s entitled Governing for the Good: What does it really mean?“

According to them, one of the things it might mean is lower taxation. No surprises there.

On their website they say:

”There have been vast increases in the spending of taxpayers’ money, with core Crown expenses expected to increase to $69.9 billion by 2012. Expensive new social spending programmes, such as KiwiSaver and Working for Families, have contributed heavily to this growth in spending, a burden that is not expected to ease any time soon.“

No surprises there, either. However, it’s curious use of language – ”vast increases“ and ”a burden“. Some might consider the burden light given the person it helps is my brother and my sister (he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother). And it’s hard to see how spending of tax payers money can vastly increase. The money is always spent, plus more if the government borrows (as National governments have a tendency to do). So there can logically be no ‘vast increase’ – it’s rather dishonest rhetoric.

However, it would seem that most interesting of all is a sentence which reads:

”New Zealand is one of the highest taxing countries in the developed world, with a tax ratio of approximately 36 percent.“

That’s one of those rather interesting, and entirely untrue ‘facts’. The OECD actually rate New Zealand in the middle. So I suppose, grammatically, one could say they are one of the lowest or one of the highest, depending upon the politics one was trying to spin at the time. In reality, they are neither. They’re in the middle third.

You can click on the link for a breakdown.
http://www.oecd.org/document/58/0,3343,en_2649_34533_39498298_1_1_1_1.html

Of course, perhaps of even more interest is the fact that the countries which top the GDP-tax ratio are Scandanavian – countries generally committed to major social programmes, providing good social outcomes. One might say that, according to the datasets and social outcomes, it’s these countries who are most consistently governing for the good of all the people?