Utopia, you are standing in it!

Anyone with a basic knowledge of maths understands that people who earn more pay more tax.

To illustrate that, let’s keep it simple and work off a theoretical 10% rate.

Someone who earned $50,000 would pay $5,000; someone who earned $500,000 would pay $5,ooo,000 and someone who earned $5,000,000 would pay $500,000.

Of course the one who earned more would have a lot more left after paying their tax and would be much more likely to have investments that gain in value, at least on paper,  but don’t incur tax.

The government might calls that economic income. Most of that is more commonly known as unrealised capital gains, the taxing of which would be very unfair.

That doesn’t bother the government which set the IRD the task of researching high wealth individuals.

There is no surprise in what the research found:

The Government has wasted $5 million dollars…

Did you know that the Education and Workforce select committee is considering the Education and Training Amendment Act (3)?

And did you know that it includes this requirement for appointments to school boards?

• updating the criteria for co-opting and appointing board members to reflect today’s school communities, by adding the genders, sexualities and sexes of the school’s students and of the school community, and disabled students at the school and the school’s disability community. 

Education Minister Jan Tinetti mentioned this while speaking on the first reading of the Bill:

The bill also expands and modernises the school board member co-option criteria. School boards must have regard for these criteria when deciding to co-opt a board member. The bill updates the criteria to ensure that boards take into account the genders, sexualities, and sexes of students and school community, as well as the disabled students and the school’s disability…

Recent years have been very depressing for supporters of free trade.

Trump pushed protectionist policies.

Now Biden is pushing protectionist policies.

And the European Union is pushing protectionist policies using global warming as an excuse.

More specifically, EU politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels have rammed through a so-called Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which is euro-speak for a new protectionist tax on imports that are not sufficiently green.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial summarizes some of the problems.

The European Parliament this week pulled the trigger on the opening shot in a new climate trade war. …Foreign companies that haven’t paid for carbon emissions at home will have to pay a tariff when exporting goods to Europe. …Climate coercion advocates say a tariff is needed to avoid “carbon leakage,” which is their term for the flight of manufacturing to countries with less onerous emissions restrictions.

Joel Kotkin explains in his Spiked article The inhumanity of the green agenda.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The ‘sustainability’ regime is impoverishing the world.

In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years.

Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies
and live like Renaissance potentates.

In Enemies of Progress, author Austin Williams suggests that ‘the mantra of sustainability’ starts with the assumption that humanity is ‘the biggest problem of the planet’, rather than the ‘creators of a better future’. Indeed, many climate scientists and…

It must be relatively unusual for a political party in office to change tax law, and provide extra budget funding, to enable research to be done towards that party’s next campaign manifesto. But such it appears to be with the High-wealth Individuals research project, the report on which was released yesterday, loudly championed by the Minister of Revenue, David Parker. Not many government department research papers – and that, we are told, is all it is – get a Foreword from a senior Cabinet minister.

Whether or not there was a strong case for doing the research in the first place using the coercive powers of the state, and whether there is – in the broad – anything very surprising in the report (I don’t think I’ve yet seen/heard anything), no doubt there will interesting tables and charts that flesh out our understanding of the selected facts at least a…

Robert Saunders argues that the UK cannot rely on a ceremonial monarchy that seeks to remain apart from politics to protect the constitution from attack in times of crisis. For that, he concludes that other instruments will be needed, without which both monarchy and the constitution will suffer.This post is based on material from the Unit’s new report,The British Monarchy, co-published yesterday by the Unit and the UK in a Changing Europe.

For much of British history, it was hard to imagine a constitutional crisis without the monarch at its core. From the barons at Runnymede imposing Magna Carta on King John to the expulsion of James II in 1688, the English (and, later, British) constitution was forged in the collision between Crown and parliament. As late as the nineteenth century, suspicion of royal power pulsed through progressive politics. Victorians may have revered ‘Her Little Majesty’, but…

Denver Business Journal reports US Supreme Court rejects Boulder’s $100M climate lawsuit against Suncor, Exxon.  That headline is misleading in that SCOTUS declined to rule on the motion to restrict such lawsuits to federal courts.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The United State Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up a lawsuit Boulder and two other local governments filed against oil refiners Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil and deemed similar climate change-related lawsuits matters for state courts.

The nation’s highest court issued orders Monday rejecting oil companies’ request to take up the Boulder case and similar lawsuits filed against other oil industry giants such as BP, Sunoco and Shell by the governments of Baltimore, Maryland; San Mateo County, California; and Honolulu, Hawaii.

Boulder city and county governments and San Miguel County, home to Telluride, joined together in 2018 and sued Calgary-based Suncor Energy and Irving, Texas-based ExxonMobil. The…

There is an op-ed on the Herald website this morning on “The role of corporate profits in inflation”. It is written by Max Harris, a lawyer and political activist. He was campaign manager for Efeso Collins in the Auckland mayoral race last year, which should give you a sense of how far to the left he sits on the political spectrum.

Harris is a smart guy, and it is evident from the article and his tweets that he has read a number of papers that have emerged recently from overseas academics and some central bankers suggesting that corporate profits might have some distinctive role in explaining the recent surge in inflation. I say “distinctive” because in the same way that nominal GDP can be decomposed into price and volumes, it can also be decomposed into returns to labour and returns to capital. In a demand-driven surge in inflation it…

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How far has the government’s Three Waters policy retreated?

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• Brian Easton writes –

There are plenty of anecdotes which illustrate that the current management of fresh water, wastewater and storm water is failing. But they don’t explain the problem.

The Auditor-General observed in 2019/20, that the amount councils (excluding earthquake-recovering Christchurch) spent renewing pipes and other plant was 74 per cent of depreciation for water supply, 64 per cent for waste water and just 39 per cent for storm water. Councils struggling with funding shortages are failing to maintain their invisible piping; the anecdotal failures are a consequence. Shifting responsibility to separate visible agencies is a remedy. This government deserves credit for at last having faced up to the problem. It gets less credit for its solution.

The government’s first proposed solution was so unpopular and, in my judgement, so flawed that it has announced a retreat. How…

Image credit: steelguru.com
No prizes for guessing why those networks are hard-pressed: step forward ‘net zero’ climate obsession. Lack of reliable electricity supply didn’t happen overnight.
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National Grid is quitting its foray into developing carbon capture and storage in the UK, in a blow to the Government’s net zero ambitions, says the Daily Telegraph.

The FTSE 100 company is abandoning its plans to develop new pipelines in the Humber region to take carbon dioxide emissions out to the North Sea.

Its National Grid Ventures arm is in talks to sell the onshore pipeline project to partners, and has already quit another phase of the project.

Carbon capture and storage is considered key to the Government’s plans to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, but is not yet up and running at scale in the UK.

Power plants in the Humber region hoping to start capturing…

In the past, I’ve referred to Switzerland as the world’s most sensible nation.

Does that make it also the world’s best nation?

I actually won’t try to answer that question, but we can say that Switzerland is the world’s most libertarian nation and a role model for others.

At least according to the Human Freedom Index, which ranks nations based on both economic and personal liberty.

Here are the 25 jurisdictions that lead the rankings.

For what it’s worth, Switzerland also was in first place the previous year.

New Zealand, which had been in first place in earlier years, still ranks very high. Estonia is in third place and several other European nations round out the top 10.

The United States, meanwhile, fell to #23, which is disappointing but predictable given the subpar politicians that have governed the nation this century.

But Hong…

Introduction: 

BizNews interviewed veteran climate expert Dr Richard Lindzen, the pioneering atmospheric physicist and former emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT. He recounted events that occurred in the 1980s, which gave birth to the all-consuming climate change narrative that prevails today. Having begun his research on climate change in the mid-70s, motivated by a sincere interest in understanding the Earth’s climate regimes, Lindzen offers a remarkably sensible assessment of the various elements parading as scientific evidence of an impending climate catastrophe. Particularly revealing from his recollection of events is how complicit the media and politicians have been in forcing the disastrous climate change narrative upon an unsuspecting and trusting public from the very beginning.

This recent interview by Richard Lindzen provides a brief and compelling overview sorting out facts and fictions regarding global warming/climate change.  For those who prefer reading, below is a lightly edited transcript from the closed…