Individuals carrying the tax burden
Rebecca Stevenson writes at Stuff:
In my working lifetime there is one thing that’s also become a certain – the personal tax rate and take is never lowered.
Yep, you’ve slogged your guts out, managed to move on from the 50s and eked your way up through the 60s only to hit $70,000 and boom.
New Zealand’s top tax rate kicks-in at a measly $70,000.
This is how the Government gets to spend so much money – the stealth tax increase where your tax increases as your pay increases, even if the pay rise is just keeping pace with inflation.
In 2008, only 335,000 people paid the top tax rate. By the 2016-2017 tax year it had almost doubled to 665,000 people.
And it will keep increasing.
And now, people earning over $70,000 pay 63 per cent of all income tax.
Rich pricks!
And if you push the numbers out further, from 2018 to 2023, revenue from personal taxation is projected to grow from $36 billion to $48 billion (an increase of 35 per cent) representing 43 percent of all total sovereign revenue.
We should be reducing the tax burden on individuals.