Taxing High Income Retirees: Here We Go Again. To St Susan.

Redistributors: you have to love their total ignorance of ethics or philosophy.

We all know there’s a baby-boomer retirement problem coming; unfortunately this is providing more excuses for grand larceny by those people who would prescribe for a whole nation of adults, what would be morally abhorrent if I applied to their children. Hear me out, and look at this:

Retirement policy researcher Associate Professor Susan St John says an alternative could be looking at improving the tax system and the way it operates.

"For high income retirees, for example, who could pay a bit more without any undue pain, and help the immediate fiscal position."

Heaven help you if you earn money in this country.

What Susan is saying is who cares how hard retirees have worked through their lives, or the plans and aspirations for themselves in retirement they were planning for. As I said in this earlier post, it would be handy if legislation could deem when such people, let's call them victims, start feeling undue pain, given how many taxpayers are interrogated and broken down in IRD’s room 101 on the strength of it. And casting my eyes up from keyboard, I would note my neighbour here has three cars, but the one next to that just the one, so I’ll drop them a note to the effect Susan says simply take the excess one from next door and even yourselves up a bit. (Don’t mention the war, though: referencing that war fought for the free West based on property rights).

This breath-taking advocacy of theft is something I will always find takes the wind out of me.

My suggestion is leave people to their own decisions and the retirement beds they make with them. It’s the only way for a free society to exist, and it leads to better outcomes. As further example, from the same article:

A higher tax on retirees is one idea being floated in response to calls by Labour for the Government to sort things out ahead of the impending boom in baby boomers.

All I need do is point out, over and over and over, the contradictions leading to the unintended consequences of government interventions in the voluntary decisions of individuals.

Most retirees should have their own mortgage free home: selling this down in size and value, including to a licence-to-occupy in a retirement home, is probably one of the main sources of retirement funding in New Zealand. 

Unfortunately, Labour has a stated policy of wanting to sacrifice retirees to first home buyers by destroying the value in our housing stock, and thus the property market. They have various nefarious ways of achieving this from capital gains taxes through to restrictions on foreign buyers. I’ve written on this only last month, and in that post I stated New Zealand was fortunate to have a solution to the baby-boomers selling their homes into a dwindling market to fund their retirements, in the form of well-off foreigners wanting to bring their life-long savings from their country of origin, to our country, to give to Kiwi retirees for their homes and so fund their retirements. Labour's restrictions on foreign ownership would deny retirees this market.

So Labour are at the same time stating the need to tax retirees to cover retirees in retirement, while advocating policies that will destroy the single source almost all retirees will have to fund their retirement with: their homes.

Politicians – redistributors - just cannot help themselves. They seem to feel they have to be seen doing something, and so we get this hotchpotch of nonsense legislation marching out from the Fortress of Legislation with the iron fist of the state enforcing it saluting in our faces even as it reaches into our pockets. The ethical solution to the ‘problem’ of retirees is given by free markets, not redistribution. And by the by, lets never confuse legislating with law-making.

Finally, St Susan: this blasé attitude you have to my property, stop it please. You wouldn’t instruct your kids to go steal from kids with more toys than they have, because you know what type of adults such instruction would result in: well don’t make a national policy out of precisely the same immorality. In other words, and to all the people who have told me even over this last month by tweet and email, that if I disagree so much with the statism that rules here, why don’t I leave: no, thank you, I’m staying. Instead, why don’t you just grow up?