The Herald reports that Treasury is considering a flat tax rate to close the income gap between Australia and New Zealand (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10602938)

Finance Minister Bill English had a unique opportunity to reform the tax system, Treasury said.

Two options were a flat tax rate or cuts to taxes on dividends, interest and profit, papers obtained by Radio New Zealand under the Official Information Act showed.

GST, land tax and capital gains tax would be increased to fund the changes.

A flat income tax system just makes sense. The current system does not encourage people to earn more because the more you earn the more you will lose through tax. A flat tax system is fair to all, and is simple, this will cut out a huge amount of compliant costs and IR3 returns and other useless bureaucracy.

Secondly, the sooner a capital gains tax is introduced the better. This system would be simple and just make sense.

Tags: Money, National Party, Tax

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 10:21 am and is filed under Comment and Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.