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Ryan Bridge: Cut spending, don't levy · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Labour's getting flack, especially in Auckland, for their capital gains tax,
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: and rightly so. But National's approach, as is usually the
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: case with center right parties, is user pays. It's a
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: way to get revenue without appearing to tax grab your poor,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: old starving constituents. Yesterday it was whacking a new tax
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: on our power bills in order to make them cheaper.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: We hope. Last week they scraped the full driver licensed test.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: But then NZTA comes out and says, oh, we might
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: need to increase fees for the first test and for
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: other bits to make up costs. We all pay tolls
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: to get the roads that we want. We're about to
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: get hit with congestion charging. International tourists pay a tourist tax,
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: of course, Domestic tourists pay to use dock huts. More recently,
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: car parks. At peak places Wellington, you'll probably have to
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: pay some kind of targeted special rate for pumping all
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: your number twos into the cook straight now, so long
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: as this stuff is ring fenced, I prefer things are
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: charged in this way because if if you don't want
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: to use a toll road, user taxed one, you know,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: user pays makes more sense to me, it's fairer to
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: those who use it, more importantly to those who don't
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: use a particular good or service. But at some point
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: your household budget is hit with so many fees and
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: charges that you have to stop and ask how long
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: this can continue? It's death by a thousand cuts, And
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: then you ask, can the government cut wasteful spending elsewhere
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: to cover some of this stuff? Or give me back
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: some tax please that I'm currently paying handover fist. In
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: case you needed examples of that this week, Shane Jones's
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: half billion dollar slush fund would be a good place
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: to start. I would have thought for more. From early
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: edition with Ryan's Bridge. Listen live to news Talks it
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: be from five am weekdays, or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.