Blog Bits
- Lindsay Mitchell accuses Roger Douglas of creative accounting
- Throng finds that One News and 3 News description of a flood of calls over Chinese lanterns was in fact 3 – 5 calls a day out of a total of 7,400.
- Clare Curran gives her views on Internet filtering as “a voluntary, opt in system for ISPs to a contained filtering programme focussed solely on child sexual abuse is about as far as you’d want to go”
- College Humour has Facebook updates for Star Wars characters.
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Tags: Blog Bits
January 1st, 2010 at 9:44 am
Lindsay is technically correct.
But it is not uncommon to look at tax paid by an interest group and the revenue they receive.
The petrol tax for example.
So given that individual receive health care (and corporates don’t) it is reasonable to look at what percentage of individual taxes go on the health benefits received by individuals, if only to ask whether people would be better off with that cash in their own bank accounts to spend on insurance or whatever.
This is also done with education costs and benefits.
However, maybe Sir Roger should have spelled out this approach in full – but he might have done; I have not read the full essay.
January 1st, 2010 at 10:31 am
Owen – corporates don’t receive a great deal of the benefit of tax spending. It would be dishonest to claim that health-care was free if we abolished personal income tax in favour of other taxes, and I don’t see that such a claim is qualitatively different.