Well, for example, a choice that we would not make is $300 million for a tobacco excise tax cut. Okay. That means there is $300 million more that is a choice. So only $12.7 billion more to find?
This is a lie. The actual cost of a 50% reduction in excise tax on heated tobacco products has been $2.25 million, not $300 million. That is actual hard data. So Labour’s Finance Spokesperson is out by a factor of 100, in her finances.
This is beyond dishonest.
Their fiscal plan shows $365 million of revenue from removing the 50% discount on heated tobacco products. The actual revenue it will bring in is $2.25 million a year.
On top of that whopper, Nicola Willis has also found $16 billion of other spending they have forgotten to include.
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders
This is beyond dishonest.
Their fiscal plan shows $365 million of revenue from removing the 50% discount on heated tobacco products. The actual revenue it will bring in is $2.25 million a year.
On top of that whopper, Nicola Willis has also found $16 billion of other spending they have forgotten to include.
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders
3 comments:
Wot, Labour wannabe finance ministers making mistakes? Surely not. They have Grant Robertson as a role model.
If David Farrar is right and Labour’s fiscal plan is a fraud, what are we to make of Chloe Swarbrick’s?
The Greens have produced something that makes Labour’s accounting look almost reassuringly conventional.
Chloe’s tax package is supposed to raise $21.8 billion over four years.
The Taxpayers’ Union has costed the Greens’ promises at $236.7 billion.
So there is a small matter of $214.9 billion between what Chloe proposes to collect and what she proposes to spend.
That is not a fiscal plan. It is a shopping spree conducted by someone who has mistaken the credit limit for the bank balance.
And the individual promises are almost breathtaking.
Universal ACC: $96 billion.
Higher benefits: $27.6 billion.
Rapid rail: $17.2 billion.
Student-loan write-offs: $16.2 billion.
Public-service pay rises: $15.5 billion.
Universal student allowances: $14.4 billion.
Then there is KiwiMart, because naturally the state should have a go at running supermarkets as well.
The Greens have an answer to the question of what government should provide. They have considerably less to say about the tedious question of what it will cost.
The answer, apparently, is to tax the wealthy.
Wonderful.
But “tax the wealthy” is not a number. It is something you put on a campaign placard when you haven’t finished the spreadsheet.
There is a qualification to the $236.7 billion figure: it is the Taxpayers’ Union’s costing, and some items have had to be estimated because the Greens haven’t supplied detailed numbers.
Fine.
Then Chloe can publish her numbers.
Show the workings. Show the assumptions. Show the offsets. Show the revenue. Show voters how the grand promises are going to be paid for.
That should be child’s play for someone who wants to be Finance Minister.
And there lies the joke.
Chloe doesn’t merely want to sit around Cabinet demanding free things. She wants the job whose occupant is supposed to tell everyone else that they can’t have them.
The Finance Minister is meant to be the person who looks at a ministerial shopping list and says: No. We haven’t got the money.
Chloe’s approach appears to be: Yes. Put it on the tab.
There is something almost touching about the confidence.
Give her the Treasury and perhaps the first Budget could contain a new line item:
MONEY REQUIRED: $214.9 billion
FUNDING SOURCE: Trust me.
At some point, this stops being a debate about left-wing economics.
It becomes a question of whether the person seeking control of the nation’s finances has grasped the difference between a wish list and a budget.
Most children work it out eventually. You look at how much money you’ve got, decide what you can afford and leave the rest in the shop.
Chloe has apparently decided that the appropriate response to discovering she cannot afford the shopping is to demand the till be nationalised.
If Labour’s fiscal plan is as crooked as Farrar claims, Labour has questions to answer.
But Chloe has an even simpler problem.
She wants to be Finance Minister.
And before New Zealand hands a fabulist the Treasury keys, perhaps somebody should ask her to perform the one piece of financial wizardry the job requires.
Make the numbers add up.
A national party member calling the other guys “fraud” doesn’t make it fraud. As they say in Mean Girls: stop trying to make fraud happen. It isn’t going to happen, David.
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