The whole country is a gigantic house of cards propped up by real estate, with horrible service quality, terrible healthcare, no jobs, ZERO innovation, risk taking and entrepreneurship.
Having lived and travelled extensively, most Canadians want a house somewhere in the woods instead of doing something meaningful with their lives or try and innovate to build something.
All of this is propped up by rampant levels of immigration from China and India. Where US got the best talent from India, Canada got the worst, the ones who scam their way here and take the lowest level jobs.
Now all of this is coming home to roost. The next decade will be Canada's worst and if they do not learn that risk taking and entrepreneurship is the only way out of the mess they find themselves in, they will become a third world country in another decade.
New Zealanders definitely hate entrepreneurship - one political party wanted to introduce a wealth tax if you had more than $1 million equity. Median house price in Auckland is just over $1 million! Auckland has about 30% of the population, and house affordability (price compared to income) is similar as bad as Sydney or San Francisco.
I have done okay for myself founding a software business and I notice the tall poppy syndrome from friends. Plus the relentless attack on my hard earned savings by a grifter government. And shit support for businesses to start-up or function (government incentives are mostly negative, and the positive incentives are incredibly badly run).
Fortunately we are building more houses in New Zealand (low single digit percentage growth) but unfortunately immigration is exceeding supply. We need the immigrants because we aren't breeding enough New Zealanders.
My experience of our government healthcare system is mostly positive.
I don't understand it: we should want people to save for their retirement but all the incentives to save are negative. The main taxation incentive is to gear up and borrow money for property. Then that blows up of course.
Even our right leaning government seems to want to consider a capital-gains-tax. The existing taxes screw any reason to invest in the stock market.
I'm whinging: I think it is a good place to live but I feel a comfortable retirement is becoming an unacheivable dream.
> The wealth tax contemplated by New Zealand Labour would have required couples to pay an annual levy of 1.5% on any assets they held over a $10m threshold. The estimated $3.8bn in revenue would have funded income-tax cuts for the vast majority of Kiwis. Labour’s potential coalition partners, the Greens and the indigenous-led Te Pāti Māori, ran on similar platforms.
> Plus the relentless attack on my hard earned savings by a grifter government.
$150,000 a year if you own $20 million, $0 if they somehow attacked you all the way to a pitiful $10 million, and in return tax cuts for those doing worse than you, and they did not get elected.
I’m not seeing the problem.
The problem is what is the incentive to keep working once you've earned a house and bach? Why bother save for retirement if your savings are to be taken from you at a significant percentage per year? A few percent is a huge penalty (see index funds versus mutual funds), and the wealth tax is on top of taxation of salary and dividends.
assets over $1m - a threshold the party thought would hit the wealthiest 6 per cent of New Zealanders. The higher [$2m] threshold means only the wealthiest 0.7 per cent of households will be targeted. The $2m threshold is a net figure, meaning people with mortgages and other debts would need $2m of equity before they began paying the tax.
And incentive is to borrow money on property which is whacko, and then next thing CGT will also be added.
Houses should be for living in, not financial instruments.
The incentive is it’s still a fuckton more money. You’re not taxed at 100% and in turn you live in a country with better services. The amount of money wasted by the rich is hilarious when combined with this take.
You're repeating bullshit - The majority of spending in New Zealand is not by the wealthy but by the rest of the majority of kiwis[1].
If people earning less than $100k waste 5% of their income, and people earning more than $300k waste 50% of their income, then the people earning less than $100k are wasting more.
We're not in the USA with Jeff Bezos, so your point just makes no sense.
The majority of earners I know blow more than single digit percentages on unnecessary crap and luxury. For example my working class friends that spend more than 10% per week on booze and drugs - plenty of people spending more than $150 with a weekly income <$1500.
Look around you and there are obviously not a lot of superyacht stores. Plenty of booze shops doing a roaring trade and it isn't the $300k+ earners in them.
The wealthy people I know invest. If those investments are bringing foreign income into New Zealand, we already tax that and all New Zealanders win!
The government needs to get rid of the bad property investment incentives - those are where the wealthy are fucking over the non-wealthy. We have enough land and resources in New Zealand for everyone to have their own home.
Don't discourage people from investing in things that make New Zealand better off. Our taxation system discourages founding internationally competitive businesses, and it discourages owning more than $50k in overseas shares. And the majority of New Zealanders don't give a shit because the majority don't begin such businesses and they are ignorant about where their income to buy imports ultimately comes from.
Negative incentives matter, probably more than positive incentives. We all want to slowly tax the well off until they leave or until they are no longer well off.
[1] Data based on: https://www.ird.govt.nz/about-us/tax-statistics/revenue-refu...