It’s hard to imagine who the Labour Party is hoping to please with their latest policy idea: a capital gains tax on investment properties to fund a creepy ‘medicard’, with the crass bribe of three ‘free’ GP visits a year thrown in.
Surely everyone knows that the main obstacle to going to the doctor these days is not the cost but the fact that you will probably either get better or die before you can get an appointment. Many medical practices are not even taking new patients. A plastic card (linked to a digital ID and compromising your medical privacy we can presume) is not going to make more doctors and nurses enter the workforce, or rehabilitate those who are burning out from exhaustion and stress.
There is something strangely anomalous about this whole idea. It makes sense for petrol taxes to pay for the roads and it makes sense for rates to pay for drains. But why have a capital gains paying for doctors’ appointments?
New Zealand already has a capital gains tax. It hides behind the euphemism of the ‘bright-line test’, the period of time an investor has to own a house before profit from the sale will not be considered to be taxable income. For some reason, a capital gains tax is seen as a tax on wealthy people who are evil and selfish and deserve to be punished. But 85 per cent of New Zealand’s rental housing stock is owned by private investors most of whom are ‘mum and dad’ investors who would only be wealthy by third-world standards.
Our country is as desperately short of housing as it is of doctors and tradesmen. We need fewer financial and bureaucratic obstacles to building and investment, not more. Why should anyone be ashamed of making homes available to people who need them? Why should the prime minister have to defend himself against accusations that he is ‘flipping houses’? It’s a good thing to do: a thing that hard-working Kiwis do to benefit their families and their communities.
As so often is, what is touted as a tax on the wealthy will turn out to be a tax on the middle classes and the upwardly mobile working class, entrepreneurs and independent thinkers. And let’s not forget that a capital gains tax can lead to other wealth taxes, including taxes on investments that have increased in value, but that you haven’t sold. In other words, tax on unrealised income. This sort of thing, surely, only pleases people with a personal vendetta against those better off than themselves. Socialism plays on people’s innate sense of fairness but at the same time crushes the ambition to improve one’s lot in life: the driver of progress, achievement and innovation.
So who are they trying to please? Poor people with a friend who is a receptionist at a medical clinic? A fairly small demographic, surely?
