RNZ remains on-form

There are a few basic bits of reality that I'd hope we could agree on.

Minister Costello has set a lower excise rate for heated tobacco products as a bit of a trial to see whether it proves successful in encouraging remaining smokers to flip to something less harmful.

Even without any change in tobacco excise, a smoker shifting to an HTP will result in a drop in tobacco excise. Or at least I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure that a heated tobacco stick contains less tobacco than a cigarette does. And I'm pretty sure that heated tobacco draws the lower excise rate that applies to cigarillos and the like. The combination of the two means less excise in a heated tobacco stick than in a cigarette.

If the trial proves successful and a lot of smokers shift from cigarettes to heated tobacco, tobacco excise revenue will drop. The more successful the trial is in encouraging shifts from smoked tobacco to heated tobacco, the bigger the drop in excise revenue. If a lot of current vapers or non-smokers take up heated tobacco, excise revenue will increase on that margin.

While Philip Morris is a dominant supplier of heated tobacco products, heated tobacco competes with smoked tobacco and with vaping. So PMI does not face a vertical demand curve for its product. And even if you model them as a monopolist in the market for heated tobacco, a monopolist will pass through at least some of an excise reduction. 

This is basic Econ 1 stuff. The monopolist sets marginal revenue equal to marginal cost looking across the quantity axis, then traces up to the demand curve to find price. That's the price that maximizes profit. If costs drop, the profit-maximizing price drops too. It's just math. 

I hope that all of this is completely uncontroversial. 

Some mornings I am more annoyed than usual about being forced to pay for Radio New Zealand. This morning was one of those mornings.

Guyon Espiner had his latest update on Minister Costello's reduction in heated tobacco excise.

Let's have a look here.

Govt set aside $216m to pay for heated tobacco product tax cuts

Ok, so RNZ's main focus is going to be on the potential excise losses. 

Now we know, from basic facts of the world, that there can only be substantial reductions in tobacco excise if the policy is incredibly successful in reducing smoking rates.

Let's continue.

The government has agreed to set aside $216 million it may need to pay for tax cuts for heated tobacco products (HTPs).

RNZ reported earlier this month that Associate Health Minister Casey Costello - who is also Customs Minister - had implemented a 50 percent cut to the excise tax on HTPs, where the tobacco is heated to a vapour rather than burned.

Costello's office had not publicly disclosed how much that would cost the government but a Cabinet paper, released without fanfare on the Health Ministry's website, shows Cabinet agreed in May to set aside $216 million as a contingency fund to cover the estimated lost revenue.

The excise tax cut is something tobacco giant Philip Morris has lobbied for in the past. Its IQOS product is a dominant player in the New Zealand HTP market.

The Cabinet paper, signed off by New Zealand First MP Costello, showed it was not even clear whether the tax break would be passed on to consumers.

"Because this product currently has a monopoly market in New Zealand, the extent to which a reduction in excise duty on HTPs would be passed on to consumers via lower retail prices is unclear," the paper noted.

I've highlighted a relevant bit here. Let's look at this section of the Cabinet Paper.

The Cabinet Paper isn't saying that there might be no pass-through. It's saying that they don't know whether there will be one-third pass-through or 100% pass-through. 

Officials could perhaps have been clearer that even a complete monopolist facing a downward-sloping demand curve is going to pass through at least some of a tax reduction, but they could be forgiven for thinking that it was awfully clear in context. They note one study finding a 31% pass-through rate, and that officials have advised to assume 100% pass-through. So the extent of pass-through is likely going to be somewhere between those. 

But RNZ put this as a question of whether there would be pass-through. Not the extent of it. 

If there is zero pass-through, and again this is just math, and it won't happen because even a monopolist will respond to a cost decrease by reducing price, there cannot be more than negligible effect on excise revenue. Why? The price of heated tobacco will not have dropped relative to smoked tobacco. It will not have driven any flipping from smoked tobacco to heated tobacco. Philip Morris would get a transfer equivalent to half of what they currently pay in excise. Excise from heated tobacco was just under $6 million in 2023, so the policy would transfer $3m to Philip Morris. $216 million is right out. 

But RNZ sets the framing to have people expect a $216 million tax cut benefitting PMI that might have no pass-through to consumers. 

Let's continue, again.

Costello declined an interview with RNZ and her office did not address questions about whether that monopoly position referred to Philip Morris.

In a statement the minister did say that she expected the industry to reduce the cost of its products.

"That means I'm expecting the excise reduction to pass to consumers, this is what we were advised would happen by officials and it is something we will also be monitoring," she said.

She also said she did not expect the cost to the government to be "anywhere close to what was modelled", as the tax collected on HTPs was only $3.62 million in 2022 and $5.97 million in 2023.

"Officials noted there is a lot of uncertainty around the modelling and fiscal impact because it was based on the very rapid increase in HTP use that happened in Japan, where vapes were unavailable."

Philip Morris did not respond to RNZ's questions.

Good context from the Minister here, and good that RNZ reported it. 

Unfortunate that they didn't think through what those numbers mean. If current excise from heated tobacco is only on the order of $6m, what would have to happen in the real world for a drop in excise on heated tobacco to result in a $216m excise loss? It would have to mean that there was substantial pass-through of the excise reduction and consequently substantial switching to heated tobacco, which means substantial reductions in exposure to the bad things that come out of combusted cigarettes. 

Another fun bit from the Cabinet paper. Guess which line of this paragraph RNZ chooses to emphasize? Hint: it's not the one saying that even the FDA recognizes that heated tobacco means less exposure to harmful chemicals. 

As always, RNZ's reporting on tobacco needs health warnings. 

Another pitch by the pharmacy guild

Recall that Chemist Warehouse found a structure that let them operate in New Zealand despite pharmacy guild regulations that had seemed aimed to block such entry. 

The pharmacists are having another tilt at it.

In Australia, a pharmacy that wanted to fill prescriptions could not set up within 200m, 1.5km or 10km of an existing pharmacy depending on whether it was in a shopping centre, suburb, or town.

Community pharmacists were calling for similar regulations here, warning if nothing changes, the community bond that came from knowing every customer by name could be a thing of the past.

Right.

"Hello, I am the owner of the local pub, where everybody knows your name. I worry about the potential entry of a new pub in a 10km radius, not because of its effect on my profitability!, but because it would erode the community bond that comes of having a single pub where everyone goes and where everyone knows your name. Please ban any such entry. Thank you."

And repeat for the local dentist. Or the local greengrocer. Heck, even the local bank. Could roll this one out for all kinds of things.  

Interchange fees

A few years ago, MBIE ran an inquiry into credit card interchange fees.

Most of the analysis seemed predicated on an assumption that retailers could neither impose surcharges for card transactions nor avoid accepting cards.

So I started taking pictures of EFTPOS terminals with tape over the credit card button or with obvious signs noting credit card surcharges to accompany my submission on it. The MBIE paper seemed to take "Well, anything's possible in two-sided markets so we should regulate" approach. 

Now it's ComCom that's proposing to regulate credit card interchange fees. 

But they did commission a couple papers. 

And this seems a key bit:

Moreover, it is theoretically argued that if the no-surcharge rule is lifted, interchange fee regulation is harmful for total welfare. Regulatory attention should in this case shift to merchants, rather than focusing on card networks. If surcharging is to be allowed, the optimal cap is equal to the merchant fee minus the merchant’s convenience benefit from card payments. In other words, the merchant should not surcharge more than his own incurred “transaction” cost of a card payment. This result is perfectly in line with the proposed “merchant indifference test” or “tourist test” to optimally cap merchants fees keeping the merchant indifferent between a cash payment vis-à-vis a card payment. Yet, recent cost-based surcharge regulations seem too lenient, as they allow surcharges up to the merchant fee – or even higher (Gomes and Tirole, 2018).

And remember that NZ retailers can set surcharges if they want. All of us see them all the time. Maybe John Small doesn't. 

It then goes on to note evidence from other countries about smallish proportions of transactions attracting surcharges.

But think about it for a minute. 

High volume retailers have some power in those relationships. You might expect that surcharges imposed on transactions at the grocery stores would be lower than the surcharges in other places. And it wouldn't just be about the supermarkets being big enough to have some heft. It would also be about the cost of providing the ancillary services that credit cards provide. You're going to be a lot less likely to see chargebacks for undelivered or unsatisfactory goods on a weekly grocery shop than you might for a mail order shipment that's gone wrong or, say, payment for your kid's trip out to space camp. Credit cards provide insurance; EFTPOS doesn't. That insurance is valuable, but more valuable in some cases than others. Those differences matter and I'd expect affect the charging structure that the card companies set. Nobody's doing a credit card chargeback if there's a broken egg in the darned carton when you get home. 

Another key bit, if you remember that NZ retailers very regularly set surcharges for credit cards.

Moreover, many payment networks have frequently imposed restrictive – and potentially “regressive” rules – on the merchant side, such as no-surcharge rules or honor-all-cards rules.31 Effectively, this implies that payment cards that are more expensive for merchants to accept, such as credit cards, will be cross-subsidized by cheaper means of payments such as debit and cash. As high-income consumers are the ones most likely to hold and use cards with higher reward schemes that are more expensive for merchants to accept, the cross-subsidies between the payment methods are regressive transfers from low-income consumers to high-income consumers (Felt et al., 2021; Wang, 2023).

I remember MBIE relying on this kind of argument in making its case, seemingly unaware that NZ retailers can and do set those surcharges. Hence my photography while out grabbing lunch. 

If ComCom tightly restricts credit card fees, expect a whole pile of services currently bundled with card transactions to disappear.  

It's annoying when there's a world of real problems that need to be dealt with and agencies like ComCom go off on these kinds of tilts. 

Fun antitrust application

David Harvey reports that AI scraping could wind up being part of the revised NZ Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. 

Having defined what an AI system and an AI service is the Bill goes on goes on to link an AI system to news content for the purpose of training the AI system.

The focus is upon the way in which news content may be used to train a digital platform or AI system.

The first element is that an AI system must be trained using news content. This links to the definition of news content in the Bill. The training must generate outputs which happens if the AI system enables or facilitates the generation of outputs.

He continues through with technical elements on whether the definitions work and whatnot.

The better underlying question seemed to be why anyone thinks there's a problem here to be solved.

It's simple for a website to restrict against scraping. It would similarly be simple for a news site to licence its content for AI training, if anyone wanted to pay them enough to allow it. There is no obvious reason government needs to be involved in any of this. 

But there's a fun potential antitrust angle, and then conflicting priorities. It looks like Google has licensed Reddit content for AI training, and that part of the deal might mean that Google is now the only search engine that works on Reddit.

Reddit wouldn't have set an exclusivity deal unless the exclusivity deal gave it more money than licensing its content to multiple agents. 

Government-types have claimed to be deeply worried about news sites not being able to adequately monetise content, with consequences then for the public good aspects of journalism. And they've tried to punt the bill over to tech platforms rather than just fund a public good out of public funds.

Here we have a news content site that has made a voluntary deal with a platform for content access for AI scraping - the very thing that NZ's Parliament seems to want to legislate to force - and folks are worried that the exclusivity arrangements that mean more money for the news sites also give the platform too much power. 

Today in Antitrust: when we force (or even allow!) AI companies to sign deals w/ content producers for old content or API access, there is obvious way to "raise rivals' costs" and lock in market power, dynamically making things worse for content producers. https://t.co/5wvRIoE0mU

— Kevin A. Bryan (@Afinetheorem) July 24, 2024

I'm not saying there aren't potential competition issues here. But there are trade-offs. Ban exclusivity arrangements and you'll reduce the amount of money going to news content providers, and then you'll have other parts of government looking for convoluted ways to force additional payments. 

Afternoon roundup

The closing of the browser tabs:

• The Commerce Commission blocks NZ DJ software company Serato from selling out to Japanese DJ product company AlphaTheta. One lesson: don't do tech startups in NZ if your exist strategy is selling out to a larger company.


• New Zealand's bureaucrats have apparently been considering a harmonised set of plain packaging rules on infant formula with Australia, which would force an important part of dairy processing overseas. Hopefully the government stops this one while issuing a pretty hard "please explain" to the officials involved. 


• Aaron Smale's reporting on the Inquiry into Abuse in Care has been superb throughout, and is great again this morning at Newsroom. He asks the right questions about state accountability. I expect that those who helped cover up the state's abuses are more likely to earn knighthoods than to face charges. 


• Gas shortages have Huntly importing more coal. 


• The Department of Conservation has more opportunity than any other part of govt I can think of to realistically improve its own finances through user charges and concession auction. Newsroom reports this morning that they're facing "huge financial pressure". There is an obvious solution here.

Right to Repair

The Green Party has a Member's Bill up arguing for a consumer right of repair; Auckland University's Alex Sims has written a few columns in support of such a thing. 

I'd had an email asking about that legislation; figured I'd share my response here - tidied up a bit.

If it’s more expensive to produce a product that can be easily disassembled for repair, there will be trade-offs. Consumers could choose an offering with lower up-front costs, but hard to repair, or one with higher up-front costs, but easier to repair. There’s no reason for legislation to privilege one choice over another. 

If one car company makes vehicles that can only really be repaired by dealers, and another uses a more open standard, the latter could easily advertise that ease of repairability. I remember back on our farm we had a very strong preference for tractors made by Versatile, because field-repair was dead simple and you didn’t have to wait for a couple days for some tech to come out with a diagnostic kit in the middle of harvest. Folks who could afford fleets of John Deere tractors to cover twenty square miles of fields could have a couple in reserve; we couldn’t on 1000 acres. Trade-offs and consumer choice. The John Deere machines were great for folks in situations different from ours.

But even leaving that aside, New Zealand has to be a regulation-taker in this space. We import all this stuff. A bespoke rule could require separate production lines for products destined for the NZ market. That has to increase costs while sharply limiting the range of products here available. And if Europe or some other crazy kind of place sets rules requiring more repairable versions, nothing stops anyone from bringing the Euro-standard products into New Zealand. 

Also important to remember that avoiding putting things in landfill can itself be wasteful. Landfills charge people for dumping things. Important to make sure that user charges there are set to fully cover the cost of disposing of stuff in landfill. If the landfill charges are set properly, and it's cheaper to buy something new and dispose of the old one than it is to repair the old one, repairing the thing would be wasteful. It would take more real resources to effect the repair. 

And if there are competition issues around vertical integration in repair, that’s for ComCom right?

I hope the legislation does not progress. It could easily see a sharp reduction in the range of products offered onto the NZ market.

The current Consumer Guarantees Act amounts to an information requirement on this stuff. 

If a manufacturer does not undertake to provide parts or repair services, they inform the consumer. That's the exception provided at Section 42 and signaled in Section 12. It arguably increases consumer information and enables better-informed choices. I'd still argue that manufacturers of easily-repaired goods already have plenty of incentive to advertise that fact to customers, but it's harder to see that the Act does harm where that exception is provided.

Deleting that exception while extending the requirements placed on manufacturers willing to sell into the NZ market really wouldn't be good. 

Shakedown finances

There are a lot of problems with the Paul Goldsmith / Willie Jackson media bargaining bill. 

I hit on some of those over in the Stuff papers this week.

A snippet:

If the bill goes ahead with only that change, some things are predictable.

Meta will exit news in New Zealand, as it is set to do in Australia. Australia’s government has been mulling over whether it ought to compel Meta to continue providing news in Australia – which is a bit odd. This all started from a notion that Meta was stealing news. One normally doesn’t encourage thieves to keep at it because of the benefits of the fines assessed against them.

When Meta leaves, outlets where Meta provides a lot of free distribution and links will take a substantial hit. They will appear at the minister’s door asking why he has done this to them. They will be right to do so. He will have to come up with an answer despite the fiscal situation and explain to his Cabinet colleagues why he needs to boost media subsidies.

Moreover, New Zealand’s reputation among tech investors will decline. What should they think about places that shake down the tech sector to subsidise other industries?

There is a completely defensible case for public support for journalism. This bill fails to help and causes substantial additional problems.

I wish Minister Goldsmith luck.

The more I think about it though, the more the tax policy aspect of it really bothers me.

NZ has had a decent tax policy process overall. Some bits are incoherent - depreciation settings on commercial buildings and interest deductibility for rental property businesses seem to flip on political whims rather than on any sound basis. But overall, the generic tax policy process is good.

What Minister Goldsmith and National are setting up here is an end-run both around the generic tax policy process and the vote allocation process. 

The legislation that Minister Goldsmith wishes to progress would set the Minister as decider on whether to designate a platform for compulsory bargaining. A Minister could tell Meta/Google/Twitter/Microsoft that if they give some specified amounts to whichever media companies, that would be enough to avoid designation. 

Whatever the resulting de facto tax is, it will not have gone through any kind of IRD tax policy process. Nobody will have checked whether it makes sense, how it interacts with other taxes, what it does to BBLR norms. It won't have to be voted on by Parliament, except in the legislation enabling the Minister to act as extortionist. 

Normal drill in spending measures is that different Ministries put budget bids up to cabinet. Those bids fight against each other for scarce public funding. There's an implicit evaluation of all of them against each other - ideally via cost-benefit assessment, but often also against political considerations. 

None of the money handed over to media companies through Goldsmith's extortion bill will go through that process. Nothing will adjudicate whether the money is appropriately allocated across media outlets/objectives, or whether spending in that area is more important than in other areas that normal vote bids have to compete with.

It is an end-run against both IRD and against the normal vote allocation process. We wind up with tin pot funds for different things, contributed to 'voluntarily' by sectors heavied to make the contributions. 

It is terrible precedent. 

If Government learns that it can avoid all manner of fiscal and procedural constraints by heavying a disfavoured industry to fund a favoured sector through regulatory impost or through promise of regulatory forbearance if the heavied sector does 'enough' to pay off the favoured sector, do not expect it to stop with tech platforms and news media.

Other applications are obvious.

The Grocery Regulator could be instructed to go hard against supermarkets in areas that are of little public benefit but massive cost to the sector, unless the grocers 'voluntarily' agree to do enough to supply food banks free of charge. Who could object? Anyone who does would be painted as either being in the pockets of Big Supermarkets, or as hating the poor, or both - good policy be damned. 

It isn't hard to come up with more of these. 

It's a terrible path. 

I hope Paul Goldsmith comes to his senses.