TL;DR: Labour has unveiled a tax policy that takes GST off a few food items and gives some extra cash to working families, but is less impressive on closer inspection, largely because it lacks a decent dollop of offsetting extra tax revenue from a wealth tax, that PM Chris Hipkins again ruled out yesterday.
Tax purists are outraged over the GST carve-outs, but they should reserve their outrage for the missing Capital Gains Tax that would have completed the perfect ‘suite’ of simple broad-based/low-rate/few-exceptions taxes originally built around GST, if only it had been introduced in 1989 as proposed.
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Without a wealth tax, the help for the poorest is miserly
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