Uh, w- uh, is tax cuts really just a lolly scramble?

Yeah, w- well, that's fair, but the thing is, w- with the kind of tax cuts that they're proposing, they're not really tax cuts.

What they're, what they're doing is avoiding, uh, tax increases by stealth.

So, so a- as economic growth gets going and our income starts to rise, if you leave the tax brackets unadjusted, people's average tax rates start to go up, and it goes up faster than their income grows.

And that, we call that bracket creep or fiscal-

How much wriggle room are National promising, or h- do they have?

They've got very little.

Um, so, so if you think about the 2024 bracket adjustments, that was 2.6 billion.

Uh, w- uh, is tax cuts really just a lolly scramble?

Yeah, w- well, that's fair, but the thing is w- with the kind of tax cuts that they're proposing, they're not really tax cuts.

What they're, what they're doing is avoiding, uh, tax increases by stealth.

So, so a- as economic growth gets going and our income starts to rise, if you leave the tax brackets unadjusted, people's average tax rates start to go up, and it goes up faster than their income grows.

And that, we call that bracket creep or fiscal-

How much wriggle room are National promising, or h- do they have?

They've got very little.

Um, so, so if you think about the 2024 bracket adjustments, that was 2.6 billion.

Uh, w- uh, is tax cuts really just a lolly scramble?

Yeah, w- well, that's fair, but the thing is, w- with the kind of tax cuts that they're proposing, they're not really tax cuts.

What they're, what they're doing is avoiding, uh, tax increases by stealth.

So, so as economic growth gets going and our income starts to rise, if you leave the tax brackets unadjusted, people's average tax rates start to go up, and it goes up faster than their income grows.

And that, we call that bracket creep or fiscal-

How much wriggle room are National promising, or h- do they have?

They've got very little.

Um, so, so if you think about the 2024 bracket adjustments, that was 2.6 billion.

Uh, w- uh, is tax cuts really just a lolly scramble?

Yeah, w- well, that's fair, but the thing is, w- with the kind of tax cuts that they're proposing, they're not really tax cuts.

What they're, what they're doing is avoiding, uh, tax increases by stealth.

So, so a- as economic growth keeps going and our income starts to rise, if you leave the tax brackets unadjusted, people's average tax rates start to go up, and it goes up faster than their income grows.

And that, we call that bracket creep or fiscal drag.

How much wriggle room are National promising, or h- do they have?

have?They've got very little.

Um, so, so if you think about the 2024 bracket adjustments, that was 2.6 billion.

Do you feel, and not to endorse one party's policy or another, but do you feel that as part of having a fair tax system for capital to be taxed?

I do believe we should do that, yes, I think for two reasons.

One is fairness that you raise.

So if I make $100,000 profit selling my batch and I make $100,000 working hard, cutting trees down in the forest, risking my health and safety, At the moment, I'm taxed on the forestry income, but not the batch, and that doesn't seem sensible.

It's the same $100,000, so that's the equity reason.

There's an economic efficiency argument, which is we probably over-invest in New Zealand in land assets because predominantly they're not taxed.

And if we were investing that money instead into financial products, maybe that would be increasing capital intensity and increasing productivity of our economy, which we saw in these.

No, you're going to pay less with us, rather than trying to help the voting public understand what taxes pay for and how they might positively change the world that we live in.

Well, they're not even rules, are they? They're just guidelines and goals, what they've stated, because they've stated them before and we haven't stuck to them.

Yeah, that's right.

So they're basically a restatement.

Each year when the government puts together its budget, it has to, by law, by the Public Finance Act, release a fiscal strategy report.

And these three rules that yesterday they called them budget responsibility rules, they're already in the fiscal strategy report.

Despite that, we haven't run... a surplus since 2019.

So we've been in deficits now for seven years and we're forecast to stay in deficits for another three years.

Why the divergence?