The first part that is wrong with that is I thought we had decided many a decade ago, rightly or wrongly, that Super is an entitlement.
Its trigger, rightly or wrongly, is age, therefore the other criteria you might like to add to the equation like height, weight, job, brain power or savings, are null and void because age is what does it.
So are we changing that, are we? Because that is the inference in the question.
The inference is also this sneering socialist bend some people have around success.
"Don’t be too successful" is the message, and that’s what savings generally are. You had a plan, you worked hard, and you put a few dollars aside.
Interestingly the numbers are depressing. This is where the question came from.
There are 33,000 over the age of 65 who earn between $100-200k a year. There are 9,000 who earn more than $200k.
That’s not a lot of people. It shows you how poorly paid we are, how bad at saving we are and how expensive life is to stop you saving. A whole bunch of stuff leads us to not being a very well-off sort of country.
I have said this many times – I'm not fussed. I didn’t join KiwiSaver and I'm not relying on a pension.
Why? Because when I started work in 1982 it was very well established that the pension may or may not be around at all, so why take the risk? And in 1982, on the minimum wage as I was, I had 45 years to get my act together and do something about it.
The problem with keeping on asking these questions is it messes with people and their intentions.
Governments have been bad enough already with their constant changing of the rules and their contributions, the last thing we need is thought bubbles on what should be a long term, leave it alone, get out of the way, understanding among us all that the pension is our society's recognition of a life's work.
Change the age if you want. But penalising success is the opposite of what we want to promote.
Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.
So are we changing that, are we? Because that is the inference in the question.
The inference is also this sneering socialist bend some people have around success.
"Don’t be too successful" is the message, and that’s what savings generally are. You had a plan, you worked hard, and you put a few dollars aside.
Interestingly the numbers are depressing. This is where the question came from.
There are 33,000 over the age of 65 who earn between $100-200k a year. There are 9,000 who earn more than $200k.
That’s not a lot of people. It shows you how poorly paid we are, how bad at saving we are and how expensive life is to stop you saving. A whole bunch of stuff leads us to not being a very well-off sort of country.
I have said this many times – I'm not fussed. I didn’t join KiwiSaver and I'm not relying on a pension.
Why? Because when I started work in 1982 it was very well established that the pension may or may not be around at all, so why take the risk? And in 1982, on the minimum wage as I was, I had 45 years to get my act together and do something about it.
The problem with keeping on asking these questions is it messes with people and their intentions.
Governments have been bad enough already with their constant changing of the rules and their contributions, the last thing we need is thought bubbles on what should be a long term, leave it alone, get out of the way, understanding among us all that the pension is our society's recognition of a life's work.
Change the age if you want. But penalising success is the opposite of what we want to promote.
Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.
3 comments:
If the govt want to fiddle with the pension they have to give people time to adjust. Just whacking up the age to 67 doesn’t help if you’re 62 or 63 and about to retire.
Whatever happens, taxing the gains on KiwiSaver is just plain stupid. You want peoples KS to be as big as possible, not so you can tax it and call people “ rich pricks”
If they have significant savings then the portion requiring the pension reduces accordingly. Just like they do in Aussie.
It’s not a difficult problem to solve.
The government want to push the pension age out. The answer is stop taxing peoples savings.
Anon 11.20 says stop taxing people's savings. S/he is clearly unaware that New Zealand currently operates what's known as a taxed/taxed/exempt regime for all types of savings. That means all savings are made out of taxed income, the ongoing income derived from those savings is taxed, but withdrawals of accumulated savings are tax free. When a comprehensive Capital Gains Tax is introduced nothing will change, since the actual amounts saved will still be withdrawn tax free. Only the gains realised on the disposal of any underlying investments, including the units in a KiwiSaver Scheme, will attract taxation.
TTE, the NZ system of taxation is simple but less tax efficient compared to EET. Your tax is deferred, letting your savings amount compound quicker to a larger retirement sum.
It’s the reason most countries use EET regime for retirement savings, NZ is the outlier using TTE.
Charging A CGT on pensions doesn’t solve anything, in fact it makes things worse.
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