Monday, 3 June 2013

Tax Avoidance by Wealthy New Zealanders

--> "Two-thirds of New Zealand's richest people are not paying the top personal tax rate, with increasingly complex overseas schemes and bank accounts being used to evade the taxman."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10887756 
What the NZ Herald article doesn't mention is the well documented fact that these are the very people who are most likely to be members or supporters of the National and ACT parties, regularly making large donations to these parties, and support further cuts in social spending in order to further reduce the top rates of tax that they are successfully avoiding paying!
The bulk of the media has been highly critical of the Government's pathetically inadequate response to the demand for food in schools for poverty stricken children from a right-wing perspective in which journalists emphasise “parents' responsibility for feeding their kids”. Yet at the same time the media is conspicuously silent about New Zealand's wealthiest individuals doing everything they can to avoid paying the taxes that they are supposed to be paying.
It is a classic case of the greed of the rich prevailing over the needs of the poor hidden behind an ideological smoke screen generated by the corporate media. So while we get an endless stream of articles focusing on welfare beneficiaries ‘ripping off the state’, we hear relatively little about the fiscally much more significant problem of tax evasion and avoidance by the rich.  

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