This is a good idea; one way to look at taxes are market signals.
By subsidizing healthier foods whilst at the same time taxing unhealthy foods; we signal to the market what we want to happen.
In my opinion; this is far better than either outright bans; or the current free-for-all system.
One could easily paint it as social manipulation; but the government engages in this kind of manipulation all the time anyway.
We also have no true capital gains tax. Without this, GST is practically the only way we get tax from the ultra wealthy, right?
This is a major problem with flat taxes; the ultra wealthy pay a tiny portion of said income/wealth in GST; vs the poor who pay a huge portion of their income in GST.
but that seems to also be making the system more complex by balancing tax collection against subsidies for the same thing
Not true; complicating GST, complicates it for all businesses. It adds compliance overhead to everyone; even though it would be minimal extra for most businesses, it is not zero. Not zero multiplied across all businesses is still millions in compliance dead weight cost.
So do we just hand cash to supermarkets to make certain products cheaper? This seems more complex than just removing GST.
A targeted subsidy; could be applied at the producer end, making the bureaucratic overhead much smaller. Thus giving NZ producers a leg up compared to overseas producers.
This isn't as anti-competitive as it first seems either. Since feeding ourselves is a national security concern. It behooves us to prioritize local production, even in the event we have to subsidize production.
No we shouldn't.
If we want to subsidize a set of foods; well why not just do that. A subsidy also will not limit you to 15%; it will not complicate a very simple tax.
We can get the effect we want in a more targeted and logical manner. We can also target any subsidy at NZ producers and make our locally produced foods more competitive against imported produce.
Flat taxes are regressive and generally bad; but making a bad tax worse by adding carve outs will not give us the outcome we really want.
Seems like something Jack Black would wear.
Carbon credits are secondary.
What we want to do is lower emissions; one way to achieve this is to place a cost on those emissions. Thus giving an incentive to lower the emissions; carbon credits are a bit of a shit way of doing this. But it is better than nothing.
I think this is a valid concern; but you have to look at the challenge of measuring the emissions over the entire country.
There is no other way to capture this data.
This is true, but there are other ways.
Setup a VPN on your home node and use RSync when it is connected.
At some point you have to evaluate your threat model and decide at what point in the security/convenience slider you sit.
RPi at home as third node
Use Syncthing, encrypted device to device sync. No online storage required.
Agreed, and if you go with similar tech; as was in the first one, it should be cheaper...since it is no longer the absolute cutting edge anymore.
It sucks that we lost contact.
But the mission is not a complete failure, a whole lot of data were collected. We will get better for the next one.
That is to help with the seamen sample collection, obviously.