Morning roundup

The morning's worthies:

• Robert MacCulloch brings the prosecution's case against the RBNZ. A future better government will have some work to do in restoring Bank credibility. Firing the Board and Governor; resetting the Remit so it only cares about an inflation target; appointing a hawkish Governor who recognises that inflation is his job and climate change, as important as it is, is somebody else's job; and requiring that those on the Monetary Policy Committee have expertise in monetary policy rather than treating it as a conflict might be a start. 


• This has got to be the stupidest argument in favour of recycling. It begins with a grudging recognition that most recycling is pointless, before saying it might be a gateway drug to caring more about climate. The more plausible explanation for the survey results: people who get warm fuzzy feelings about environmental things in general are more likely both to recycle and to buy an EV. 


• The Government proposes a tax principles bill. I like that Minister Parker agrees that horizontal equity, vertical equity, administrative efficiency, and minimisation of tax-induced distortions are core tax principles. But he points to high EMTRs for some lower/middle income earners as evidence that the tax system isn't progressive. Progressivity is defined as the marginal tax rate being higher than the average. Those EMTRs will hit in over short ranges for some folks, and are bad, but they aren't really evidence against the tax system being progressive. And remember that some of our progressivity is delivered by transfers like Working for Families. 


• The Niskanen Centre explains how EV subsidies are generally a bad idea - you wind up providing a lot of cheap EVs to rich people who don't drive them very much. But if you could get the people who put on the most kilometres into an EV, that could be good. Now what would set that kind of incentive? Carbon charges in fuel. Cost adds up fastest for high-users. 


• A reader sent this through after my Newsroom piece on carbon forestry: the biodiversity within a pine forest.


• NZ has a lot of old people, but aged care facilities are shutting down. Why? Government banned immigration, so there are no nurses. 


• Good piece from Dileepa Fonseca. Everybody complains about costs in the construction sector, so why don't we let the folks who put up excellent cheap apartments in South Korea, Singapore and Japan build some here? I suspect we'd also want to have Japan's zoning and consenting system. And abolish the Overseas Investment Act.


• Season 6 of Kids in the Hall starts in May. Get your Amazon Prime subscription ready. 


• The unserious people oppose waste-to-energy plants, because the plants make it harder for them to push zero-consumption lifestyles. FFS any carbon dioxide coming out of them is in the ETS. 


• Craig Renney makes the case for a Parliamentary Costings Office. I like the idea in principle; would be a fair few difficulties to work out in practice. To begin with, which Parties get access, and how much of the Office's time? If it's just Parliamentary parties, you introduce a barrier to entry. If it's everybody, you get every nutjob setting up a Party and demanding a costing on their pet thing. If it's allocated by vote share in prior election, that also puts in a bias toward the status quo. I still like the idea of a costings unit that runs rolling reviews of existing spend between elections. 


• I'd missed this 2019 AEJ- Ec Policy piece. Sweden put in a high carbon tax; petrol use dropped a lot. NZ is part of the counterfactual synthetic Sweden used for comparison. The Swedish carbon tax is a lot higher than current ETS prices, but NZ ETS prices will rise. The regulators here seem to believe that prices won't ever affect transport emissions here. Sweden suggests otherwise.


• An urgent appeal that masking in classrooms be the default for winter.


• I really need to read this whole book. "Questioning the Entrepreneurial State", reviewed here.  There has been far too much naive enthusiasm for the Entrepreneurial State approach in the dumber parts of the Ministries.