Rough cuts
You can call it a bunch of things.
It’s a cost of living crisis, if you’re an old white guy with a suit and an eye on the polls. It’s a cluster***, if you can’t afford to fill your shopping trolley or your car. Probably, your choice of words reflects your voting preference or your bank balance. But whatever you choose, the thing you’re describing is real.
I don't want to let the current government off the hook. I just think there's a lot of room on that hook, and a whole lot of players wriggling to get off it.
Aotearoa has weathered inflation before. We've worn horrible prices at the pump. These aren't things to brush off: they hurt. They hurt the worse off far more than the better off. Maybe it’s not much consolation, at the time of the pain, but these things usually pass.
Other stuff hurts, but it hasn't passed.
Our housing crisis has been many years, many governments, in the making: the slowest moving of train crashes. But we patted landlords on the heads with favourable treatment, and blamed millennials for eating avocados on toast.
Since the 90s, we've paid workers wages they can't live on. We told ourselves people on low wages are there by choice; said if they want better pay, they should get more motivation and find ‘real jobs’ - but we still expected them to staff our supermarkets, clean our offices, for cheap.
And we set benefits at a rate to force people into jobs they couldn't live on, telling them that waged poverty is more entrepreneurial - the first rung on a ladder that never had a second.
These things that hurt haven’t passed because they’re deliberate: baked-in features of our society and economy. Poor people are convenient.
Are tax cuts the answer?
I believe in tax, but I’m not especially dogmatic about it. I don’t think all tax is good tax: if it’s badly designed, it can encourage the wrong things, creating problems. Government shouldn’t tax more than it needs to, and it has a responsibility to spend taxes wisely.
What I believe, emphatically, is that tax cuts aren’t the way out of this situation. It’s not about depriving government services of funding - something that could be a problem, but isn’t an automatic consequences of tax cuts.
It’s about maths. If the figures I’ve seen are correct - I can’t find proper costings - then a wealthy person will gain enough in a year that they could buy a car better than my own. I will get less than that, but enough to buy a fancy bottle of wine each week.
And the family down the road, who are on the breadline? Well, they’ll be able to afford a little more bread. They will never own a home. They will struggle even to own a car. Rent increases will swallow the spare change we throw them, before it even sees their pockets.
Because those things that we baked in, they’re still here. That’s what structural inequality means: being offered spare change, not real change. Being told, this is as good as it gets. Being sold a fantasy, because it’s the only thing that’s affordable right now.
It’s not tax we need to cut. It’s our bullsh*t.
