Stephen Knight

Andrew, you're going to get three.

I'm going to get three.

And then you guys watching on YouTube and listening to the podcast, you get to vote at the end down in the comments section.

Now, I should say that there are...

different types of capital gains taxes, right?

So there could be one where it's just property getting taxed, or it could be everything getting taxed, like your increases in value of your shares or your businesses.

Today, we are going to talk about that comprehensive capital gains tax.

So that's where everything gets taxed, your property, your shares, your businesses, everything usually except the family home.

Now, Andrew, I'm going to let you kick it off with your first argument.

Why do you think New Zealand should have a capital gains tax?

Well, I did see that the tax working group estimated that taxing more income from capital gains could raise $8 billion over the first five years.

It's huge.

Okay.

Now, the way that I think about tax, though, if I can jump in here with my argument against the capital gains tax.

If we think about taxing cigarettes, why are we doing that?

We tax cigarettes.

We want to make them more expensive so that fewer people smoke.

If we think about alcohol, okay, we tax that because we want less drinking.

Some countries tax sugar because they want people to eat less sugar.

And so I think we're all comfortable with this idea that if you tax something to either increase the price or decrease the return from doing that activity, you get less of it.