Entries by Matt Nolan

Was the New Zealand 2023/24 Budget inflationary?

Yesterday the New Zealand Budget was released and described as “surprisingly frilly” for a no-frills Budget. As a result, is it inflationary? My answer is “no idea” – I just wanted to use the same title as the Australian Budget post. You yell inflation at me and I say “monetary policy offset through higher interest […]

Was the Aussie 2023/24 Budget inflationary?

Last night was the Australian 2023/24 Budget. Like all Budgets it existed and was filled with politics – but I was surprised to find my twitter filled this morning with people calling it highly inflationary, and others saying it would reduce inflation. The arguments appear to be: I’m a bit slow, so I wanted to […]

Assessing benefit eligibility and adequacy

Last week we’d been chatting about the unemployment benefit in Australia and the reasons why some unemployed people don’t get it, while some people who aren’t unemployed do. Everything boiled down to eligibility criteria – criteria that are intended to exclude those that aren’t deemed to need it. After realising this, my colleagues and I […]

What is income for tax?

I’ve now read the IRD and Treasury effective tax rate reports, and they’re good. I’ll read them a few more times before writing anything on them in a couple of weeks – but the authors of all these reports were really careful to provide rationale and scenarios to explain what all the different numbers meant. […]