Letters To Editor: Capital gains tax won't work

Capital gains tax won't work
An economist is someone who can tell you why what they said was going to happen didn't.
Have you noticed that the proponents of a capital gains tax are economists, financial commentators and politicians of the left?
Not many coalface operators!
I make a few points about CG tax:
I assume it will be inflation-adjusted, as inflation creates a capital loss.
Losses of capital from bankrupt finance companies, under-insured loss of property, and losses on shares and many other situations will all be tax-deductible.
Cullen's savings fund is created from New Zealanders' taxes on income and consumption, fair enough. We add capital, i.e. savings, to the pot so we tax savings to create savings to then hand out as pensions? Mind boggles at the convolutions.
Most small businesses are started using capital from residential property. Tax that restricts start-up capital and consequentially the business and therefore jobs.
The value of farms and businesses are based on production and profit. Invest in efficiency and productivity to give it away in tax would make you think.
When we had death duties, people used a huge amount of effort avoiding it or paying it at the expense of productive effort.
CG tax will create the same situation. A lot more trusts or companies.
Half-a-dozen complications to a CG tax, not to mention the effect on confidence and motivation.
As a means of controlling house prices, it hasn't worked in Aussie. People are looking for a place for their savings. Let them take a share in NZ's infrastructure. Put the wealth of this country in the hands of lots of ordinary New Zealanders, not a few erratic vote-buying politicians Capital or property is many things to many people.
Taxing it with one-rule-fits-all will not work or be fair.
Ralph Harrison, Te Awanga
No common sense
What is this world coming to - all use of common sense and decency seems to have been lost.
Compare the recent reported treatment of our World War II vets with that of the convicted criminal awarded $3500 compensation - for his hurt feelings!
Perhaps fighting and dying for freedom just doesn't rate these days.
Another news report gave a statement from one ex-con that he was better off back in jail.
It's no wonder criminals think that honest people are stupid - the law makers so often do their best to confirm it!John AkersTaradaleTurning pointI applaud the article "Growth cannot be sustainable", written by David Trubridge (July 12).
I fear we have reached a turning point - and time to address it is desperately short.
I believe the evidence that the world is 4500 million years old and that primitive life started 2200 million years ago is overwhelming.
During that period, countless millions of species have evolved with particular sexual arrangements and a drive to multiply endlessly - and have failed.
Some two to five million years ago, a new group of species began to walk upright, thus freeing the hands to make things. One of these homo sapiens appears to have an advanced imagination - but it still had the overwhelming drive to populate the world ... and eliminate others. How sadly we have succeeded.
Our present dilemma is not just an oil crisis, it is not just an agricultural crisis, it is not just a population crisis, etc. It is much, much deeper.
The word "development" has become deeply soiled.
Yes, we assuredly have reached an end point.
What we need is a new way of thinking.
A. H. Buckland, Havelock North
Parking difficulties
Re Rhod Murray's letter (July 13). We have been patients of his for 28 years and have had no trouble parking in the past in Gascoigne St.
We now find it is extremely difficult to park within a reasonable distance in such a limited narrow space.
There is no parking at all on the southern side of the road. How are people with disabilities to get on?
How come cyclists who pay no road levies are getting so much preferential treatment?
Is it because our mayor is the president of Local Government New Zealand and has put Hastings forward to the Transport Agency as an experiment in such a diabolical scheme?
On many occasions either one of us has sat in the car waiting for the other when keeping appointments and rarely have we seen bicycles on the road. Most of our visits span schools-out time.
Frustration will be the cause of accidents on these roads in the future, as visitors to residents have nowhere to park and anger will play its part.
Harry and Francis Barr Havelock North