Is it a knot? Is it a tangle? The ever-growing tax web

The latest proposals for the tax treatment of residential rentals tips the tax code further into mind-bending complexity

Pattrick Smellie

Mon, 14 Jun 2021

If a low-rate, broad-based tax system falls apart over many years, does anybody notice?In case it’s not obvious, this is a clumsy attempt to liken the gradual erosion of the radical simplification of the New Zealand tax system in the 1980s to the old Philosophy 101 problem of whether a tree that falls in a forest makes a noise if nobody’s there to hear it.I was there when that 1980s transformation was taking place, as a junior press secretary to Roger Douglas, the finance minister at the time.Roger made short work of the question ab...

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