Latest / The Kākā by Bernard Hickey
The very opposite of social investment
TL;DR: The newly sworn-in Cabinet will today consider how to quickly unwind anti-smoking changes legislated at the end of last year in order to save hundreds of millions of dollars a year in tobacco taxes so it can go ahead with its income tax cuts.
But the cost to the taxpayers and citizens in purely financial terms, let alone the estimated loss of 580,000 Health Adjusted Life Years (HALYs), is set to surpass $10 billion. For every dollar in tax cuts delivered to landlords and salary earners by pushing tobacco taxes back up, Treasury has estimated health and lost productivity costs of up to…
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