{"id":7053,"date":"2015-08-02T15:01:37","date_gmt":"2015-08-02T02:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/?p=7053"},"modified":"2015-08-02T15:01:37","modified_gmt":"2015-08-02T02:01:37","slug":"rich-list-bludging-bastards-with-their-protective-layers-of-bought-politicians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/?p=7053","title":{"rendered":"Rich list: Bludging bastards with their protective layers of bought politicians."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Minto\"<\/a>\u00a0Mana Vice president John Minto<\/p>\n

\"oliver\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Our Inland Revenue Department has a \u201cHigh Wealth Individuals Unit\u201d (HWI Unit) which collects information on the wealth of \u201cpeople who have, or are in control of wealth over $50 million\u201d<\/p>\n

For the 2014 year, the HWI Unit has identified over 212 people who meet this criteria and furthermore these 212 HWI\u2019s control, or are closely associated with, 7,009 \u201centities\u201d \u2013 mainly companies and tax-haven trusts \u2013 with control in some cases shared with other HWI\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The most appalling \u2013 but not surprising \u2013 fact is that 87 of these HWI\u2019s declare a personal income of less than $70,000 \u2013 the income above which the top tax rate kicks in.<\/p>\n

This information is missing from the NBR\u2019s rich list published last week which focuses solely on celebrating the \u201csuccess\u201d of the wealthiest but failing to reveal that the average wage or salary earner pays much more personal tax than these money-sucking parasites.<\/p>\n

How do these HWI\u2019s get away with paying less tax than the rest of us? Why is it that the vast majority of us pay tax on every dollar we earn and every dollar we spend while for the wealthy tax is essentially voluntary? Why is income from shares, investments, dividends and capital gains exempt from the same tax levels paid by wage and salary earners?<\/p>\n

These same rich listers enjoy all the benefits of living here: driving on our roads; visiting our museums and art galleries; subsidised doctor\u2019s visits; ACC entitlements, national superannuation etc but pay pocket money to maintain them. They use our community facilities and enjoy the benefits of everything we pay for through taxes but won\u2019t cough up themselves.<\/p>\n

They are the ultimate bludgers, protected from taxation by successive Labour and National governments who need their donations to run election campaigns.<\/p>\n

When GST was introduced by Labour\u2019s Phil Goff in the 1980s one argument Labour gave in its favour was that the rich would no longer be able to avoid tax \u2013 they would pay the same as the rest of us. The reality is the opposite. The rich pay less than 5% of their incomes in GST but our lowest-income families pay 14% of their income on this vicious tax-on-the-poor.<\/p>\n

Typical descriptions of the parasitic rich-list elite is that given to the first, Graeme Hart, described as a \u201cself-made billionaire\u201d. Yeah right! Like the others Hart has simply learnt cunning ways to exploit the wealth created by the workers in the businesses he owns. His companies pay their workers as little as they can get away with rather than the most they can afford \u2013 all for the purpose of enriching Hart.<\/p>\n

New Zealanders on the list were on average 7.4 per cent wealthier than they were in 2014 while back in the real world the minimum wage increased by 3.4% this year. One media story reported Hart\u2019s wealth went up by $63 every second<\/em> last year \u2013 even when he was sleeping \u2013 while the minimum wage went up by a miserly 50 cents an hour to $14.75.<\/p>\n

Minimum wage workers pay about 26% of their incomes in tax (income tax and GST) while the rich listers wouldn\u2019t even get close to double figures.<\/p>\n

Bludging bastards with their protective layers of bought politicians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Mana Vice president John Minto Our Inland Revenue Department has a \u201cHigh Wealth Individuals Unit\u201d (HWI Unit) which collects information on the wealth of \u201cpeople who have, or are in control of wealth over $50 million\u201d For the 2014 year, the HWI Unit has identified over 212 people who meet this criteria and furthermore these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":7050,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-news","last_archivepost"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7053"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7053"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7054,"href":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7053\/revisions\/7054"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mananews.co.nz\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}