Leaders debate drinking game

I’ll be at the Aro Valley ‘Meet the Candidates’ event tomorrow so I’ll miss the live debate between Clark and Key. But in the spirit of completeness here is the drinking game:

Consume one sip whenever either candidate mentions:
Change
Trust
Kiwi’s
Hardworking
Mainstream

Consume one sip whenever Key says the words:
Sick
Tired
Bloody
Gutsful
Actually
Nanny

Consume one sip whenever Clark says the words
Slippery
Flip-flop
Merchant banker
TransRail
Shares

Consume two sips:
Whenever Clark subjects us to her blood-curdling fake laugh

Finish the bottle:
If either Bill English or Kevin Taylor attempt to disguise themselves as Key and replace him in the debate

Take a shot of Russian vodka whenever Clark refers to Key and the Nats as ‘wreckers’; two shots if she calls them ’saboteurs and wreckers’; three if she calls them ‘counter-revolutionaries’; four if she calls him a ‘Trotskyite’; five if she has her DPS bodyguards haul Key away for a show trial followed by swift execution.

Drink a can of Tui:
If Key attempts to speak Maori

Drink a glass of meths:
If John Key’s childhood in a state home is mentioned

Do a line of blow off a hookers ass:
If Merrill Lynch is mentioned

Spank the person sitting next to you:
If the Bradford Amendment to the Crime Bill is mentioned

Hide all your money in a mattress:
If Clark’s emergency December budget is mentioned

Livin’ in a new world

DPF blogs about Labour’s annoucement that they will produce a mini-budget in December:

Amazing - the biggest secret agenda of them all. We will announce our response to the financial crisis - after the election!

It is easy to conclude tax cuts will be cancelled (they will call it a delay) at a minimum.

The reality is that nobody knows what the global economy will look like in three months time. It’s possible that all the worlds major financial institutions will have been nationalised, nation-states might be throwing up trade barriers to protect their domestic producers - anything could happen. Neither party is going to make pre-election announcements based on a scenario they are unable to predict.

It’s also a fact that whichever party gets elected next month are guaranteed to exploit the current economic crisis to introduce radical ’shock doctrine’ budgets in December and April. If Labour make it back into power then suspended tax-cuts will probably be the least of DPF’s worries.

Qui?

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has been awarded the Nobel Prize for LIterature; I’ve never heard of him, but the nobel laureates are usually pretty solid. You’re much safer with them than the Booker prize winners - although the Nobel committee does occasionally celebrate obscure Swedish authors, to the general derision of the Swedish press. In 1974 they gave joint awards to Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martison, who were not only Swedes but judges on the panel. Who were the other nominees that year? Oh, only Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabakov.

The list of authors who didn’t win nobel prizes reads like a list of the superstars of late 19th and early 20th  century literature; in addition to Nabakov and Greene the academy failed to recognise Auden, Borges, Tolstoy, Rushdie, Woolf, Chekov, Conrad, Proust, Kafka, Yeats, Joyce, Orwell and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The American’s are in a snit because Don Delillo and Cormac McCarthy haven’t won yet - it looks to me like they’re in pretty good company.

le Clezio was praised by the academy for bring an ‘author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.’

I don’t read too much ‘literature’ anymore; I think we’re living in a golden age of non-fiction writing so I read mostly science and history books and if I need something to read on the plane I’ll pick something light (typically a sci-fi or murder mystery genre novel). M. le Clezio’s books are certainly being reprinted (and possibly re-translated) even as we speak but I’m not sure I have the energy to grapple with his vision of humanity ‘beyond and below the reigning civilization’.

When all you have is a hammer . . .

Bill English was on Agenda this morning describing National’s plan to confront the current meltdown in the financial markets; to cope with the crisis English and Key propose to cut high income taxes, encourage consumer consumption and freeze the number of civil servants. This sounds strikingly similar to their pre-crisis policy of cutting taxes, encouraging consumption and freezing government spending. The overwhelming impression was that English didn’t have the slightest idea what he was going to do.

In stark contrast, Helen Clark announced a few hours later that a Labour government would implement a bank deposit guarantee scheme. Clark is an amoral, untrustworthy, decietful demagouge but at least she seems like she has a fucking clue, which is more than can be said for Key and English right now. The idea of casting a vote for Clark after her support of Winston Peters makes me feel physically sick but all of a sudden it’s back on the cards, unless National can drop its deer in the headlights routine and start talking about what they’re actually going to do about the awesomly grim economic outlook.

Horse Races

Two stories yesterday about the US presidential election tell us everything we need to know about the state of the race: the Obama campaign is talking about potential cabinet members and the McCain campaign are complaining about voter fraud. Game over. Short of a major catastrophe Obama will be president.

The conventional wisdom is that this is down to factors like Palin and the economy but its worth pointing out that Obama is outspending his opponent by a factor of 3:1. Obama has spent more than forty million dollars in Florida alone; that’s half McCains budget for the entire union.

Obama has also purchased 30 minutes of prime time television on election eve; this will give him the definitive last word in the campaign. Nobody has ever done this before, simply because the cost is prohibitive.

Back in New Zealand the election suddenly looks a lot more interesting; the Roy Morgan poll can be a little erratic but I rate the TV3 poll very highly; they were the most accurate predictors of the 2005 election. (Colmar Brunton had National winning by a landslide.)

My totally unsubstantiated post hoc explanation for Labours reversal of fortune is the meltdown in the finance markets. One of Key’s selling points has always been his successful career in investment banking - the fact that the entire investment banking industry has just been wiped off the face of the earth, taking the global economy and 8 trillion dollars of wealth down with it does not fill voters with confidence.

This is probably a bit unfair - my impression is that Key’s strengths would be in management, operations and strategy and that he doesn’t really known much about economics and finance; these matters will largely be left to his deputy leader Bill English. Up until last week I had a very favourable opinion of English but his tax ‘policy’ has really dented my confidence.

I’ll be interested to see what the polls look like 2-3 weeks from now; that’ll give the public the time to digest the tax cut regime - I predict a massive swing towards Labour in response.

New National Tax Package

The National Party has released its long awaited tax policy package. How will their proposals impact you?

• $50 per week tax cut for every worker in New Zealand - will be accompanied by $50 per week ‘negative salary rebate’ for all workers, adding to a total transfer of wealth of over $5000 per year!
• ‘KiwiSlaver’, a new employers rights package aimed to stimulate the economy by protecting business owners from nuisance law-suits over trivial charges such as kidnapping and aggrivated assault.
• Flat tax of 18% to the really hot little red-head who participated in Crosby/Textor market research focus group #5.
• 5% GST rebate on Playstation 3 consoles; cost to be offset by privitisation of Stewart Island, population of which become legal property of Dow Industrial Chemicals.
• Free small soda at the movies for all working mothers on middle incomes aged between 25 and 45 living in the Otaki and Hamilton West electorates.
• Low income earners will be allowed to look behind the couch cushions of John Key’s sofa and keep whatever they find.

Last thoughts on the National Tax Cuts debacle

1. Like I always say, I think these things take a couple of weeks to impact in the polls - and the Key-English tax-package is rather complex so it may take even longer. Labour might be able to speed things up here - an online tax calculator that let people compare the two competing packages would be nice. (Labour need to resist their natural inclination to mislead the public about how it all breaks down and just provide people with the straight truth - that’s bad enough.)

2. I think the Nats big mistake was to fail to prepare the ground regarding KiwiSaver; if they’d warned people that the country couldn’t afford both tax-cuts and KiwiSaver and that the savings scheme was essentially being subsidised by non-KiwiSaver members (and there are valid arguments to be made here) then public reaction to the package would be somewhat less appalled.

3. Although grim I don’t think this is the Hail Mary the Labour Party were hoping for; it won’t cost National the election but it will cost them their chances of a simple National-ACT coalition government. Purely because of their own poor judgement the Nats will now be in the nightmare territory of a National-ACT-United Future coalition with Maori and possibly Greens abstaining in exchange for policies. Bleak.

The Middle of Nowhere

A complicated package

As was widely predicted, the Nats are paying for their tax cuts by tinkering with Kiwisaver. They were probably better off cancelling their cuts altogether and blaming the Labour party. A large proportion of Kiwisaver customers (and there are around 800,000 of them) will either lose out on Nationals deal or break even.

The biggest winners of the package are middle income earners who don’t have Kiwisaver accounts or children - they get an additional $10 - $15 dollar per week tax credit. Why? Well, because they are swing voters and the National parties market research found that would be a strategic place to spend some cash. What are the ideological and economic justifications? There aren’t any.

This is the worst kind of discrimination. The kind that effects me

- Bender Bending Rodriguez, Futurama

Because I have a high income and no kids I pay a huge amount of tax - roughly three times the national average. I don’t really have a problem with this; if the state is spending the money on things like education, healthcare, benefits for the sick, the elderly, solo-mums ect then that’s all good. Even though I pay a lot more tax than most people I still have more than most people and that seems like a pretty sweet deal.

I do have a problem with the state simply taking my money and giving it to someone else who doesn’t particularly need it (ie, childless people earning $50,000 a year) because they’re a key swing voter demographic. I didn’t like Working for Families for that very reason but at least Labour made an articulate case as to why it was a good idea, and the principles of income distribution are roughly in line with its ethos. National - who have spent three years attacking Working for Families as ‘creeping socialism’ - just extended the franchise to every middle income earner in the country.

Both ‘Working for Families’ and Nationals new ‘Money for Swing Votes’ packages violate the contract the state has with the taxpayer that they will be wise custodians of our taxed wealth; Nationals is more appalling because it runs totally contrary to the parties supposed ideology.

Like I said in an earlier post, I suspect the $15 dollar rebate is in there purely because plenty of single middle income earners have Kiwisaver and would have been worse off under the new 2% system. I still haven’t done the numbers though - hard work and rigourous analysis are the antithesis of this blog. Where is Keith Ng when we need him?

I haven’t done the numbers . . .

But I suspect that the National parties $10/week to middle income earners is there because when they did the numbers one last time at 3 AM this morning someone figured out that there’s a big ol’ demographic of voters that lose more on the Kiwisaver state and employee credit reductions than they make on the tax cuts.

Funny because its true

One of the few people I’m still in touch with from my bad old merchant banking days emailed me this - it’s an indication of the current brand of funeral humour running around the trading floors:

New Stockmarket Terms

CEO –Chief Embezzlement Officer.

CFO– Corporate Fraud Officer.

BULL MARKET — A random market movement causing an investor to mistake himself for a financial genius.

BEAR MARKET — A 6 to 18 month period when the kids get no allowance, the wife gets no jewelry, and the husband gets no sex.

VALUE INVESTING — The art of buying low and selling lower.

P/E RATIO — The percentage of investors wetting their pants as the market keeps crashing.

BROKER — What my broker has made me.

STANDARD & POOR – Your life in a nutshell.

STOCK ANALYST — Idiot who just downgraded your stock.

STOCK SPLIT — When your ex-wife and her lawyer split your assets equally between themselves.

FINANCIAL PLANNER — A guy whose phone has been disconnected.

MARKET CORRECTION — The day after you buy stocks.

CASH FLOW — The movement your money makes as it disappears down the toilet.

YAHOO — What you yell after selling it to some poor sucker for $240 per share.

WINDOWS — What you jump out of when you’re the sucker who bought Yahoo @ $240 per share.

INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR — Past year investor who’s now locked up in a nuthouse.

PROFIT — An archaic word no longer in use.