The tax cut shell game

Idiot / Savant at No Right Turn details how National's tax cuts aren't all they appear to be when you dig into the detail.

The cuts to Kiwisaver have a negative overall impact on the benefit of any tax cuts.

Bait and switch. Take with the left, give with the right......and so on.

As a new contributor to Kiwisaver, National taking money out of my pocket to give it to someone else is nothing new to me.

I was an electricity account holder with the trust that ran all electricity in the Kapiti area when Max Bradford's electricity reforms split lines companies and generators. The producer part went to Contact Energy, then owned by Mission-Edison in the US. The effect on me was higher electricity prices AND a reduced dividend from the power trust in their new form as a lines-only trust. Part of my dividend was being sent to shareholders in the US whose company had done nothing at all for me at any point and whom I had not chosen to deal with.   

National made me give up half my electricity dividend and gave me no choice about it.

Looks like they want to take my money yet again to pay for my tax cut......and someone else's.

Deficits and crony capitalism - Kiwi style

It's fascinating watching our local politicians, especially the National Party, following the path laid down by George W Bush in 2000 / 2001.

Throughout the election campaign in the US in 2000, Bush promised tax cuts that he said would benefit everyone, but actually benefited the top 1% of tax payers the most. The rationale for the cuts was based on the prosperity of the Tech Bubble.....and that rationale disappeared in smoke as the Tech Crash in mid / late 2000 unfolded.

But Bush went ahead and implemented the tax cuts anyway and ended the string of budget surpluses, replacing them instead with an unending string of deficits of at least US$250 billion / year prior to the invasion of Iraq and almost double that since then. His crony capitalist mates filled their pockets from the public trough through ten thousand and one PPPs in the US, Iraq and anywhere else the American Empire had a presence.

It has all ended in tears with higher interest rates to fund that deficit eventually leading to the fall of the US dollar, higher oil prices and the credit crunch not unfolding.

It's a wonder then that the National Party, in particular, with all this waste and wreckage in the global rear-vision mirror, is apparently blindly (or purposefully misleadingly) still promising large tax cuts. It says these cuts will be funded by reducing waste. So far, it has not identified any waste within two orders of magnitude of the amount of money required. National now says it will borrow to fund infrastructure and "growth"......though if there were no tax cuts, they would not need to borrow, or borrow as much, to fund that infrastructure. They are essentially saying they will borrow to fund the tax cuts.

That is exactly what George W Bush did and we know where that lead.

I'm not saying borrowing is bad. It's not.

I am saying that borrowing to fund tax cuts is bad. It is.

The way National propose to "save" money is through shifting many government services to public private partnerships - a.k.a. PPPs. I've seen PPPs operating first hand and they most often cost more than the original service, while providing less service, and they are less transparent and thus less accountable than their public sector equivalent. After all, their books are closed and their operations typically described as "commercially sensitive". The funders they are accountable to have strong political incentives to declare success even when failure is obvious.

It's a recipe for pocket-stuffing by political cronies and clients.

Even better, electoral finance laws making donations more transparent allow a government to see clearly who is donating to whom....and the winning of contracts for PPPs may be dependent on delivering exclusive donations to the incumbents. Florida under former Republican governor, Jeb Bush, is an excellent precedent. If you wanted a PPP, you had to donate to only one party - his - in order to improve your chances of getting the business.

National's entire approach is a proven recipe for more cost, less accountability, lower levels of service....and bigger deficits.

The evidence is there for all to see. The US has been doing for the past 10 years or more what National proposes to do here if they win.

Labour has tried to guess where the line between surplus and deficit may lie...and probably hoped to render any additional tax cuts impossible without cutting into "core" services that would be deeply unpopular with voters.....looking toward the 2011 election.

Large numbers of Kiwi voters, unaware of all this, plan to vote for one or other of them. It's like watching a low-motion train wreck.....

BIS: Risk of global depression

The Telegraph reports the Bank of international Settlements (BIS), "the world's most prestigious financial body", is warning of a global depression caused by the credit bubble of recent years.

Individuals and businesses are borrowing far too much money and taking too much risk. A system already at risk of further major default is thus close to a situation where the last straw, a "tail event", might break the camel's back.

Of particular concern is what has been going on in China. I have to admit that I have not followed financial events there closely. The BIS says:

"The Chinese economy seems to be demonstrating very similar, disquieting symptoms," it said, citing ballooning credit, an asset boom, and "massive investments" in heavy industry.

Some 40pc of China's state-owned enterprises are loss-making, exposing the banking system to likely stress in a downturn.

It said China's growth was "unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable", borrowing a line from Chinese premier Wen Jiabao

That doesn't sound too good at all. Clearly the situation as described is not sustainable should it remain that way.

The US Federal Reserve, (the US central banker), in particular, gets a whack:

In a thinly-veiled rebuke to the US Federal Reserve, the BIS said central banks were starting to doubt the wisdom of letting asset bubbles build up on the assumption that they could safely be "cleaned up" afterwards - which was more or less the strategy pursued by former Fed chief Alan Greenspan after the dotcom bust.

It said this approach had failed in the US in 1930 and in Japan in 1991 because excess debt and investment built up in the boom years had suffocating effects.

While cutting interest rates in such a crisis may help, it has the effect of transferring wealth from creditors to debtors and "sowing the seeds for more serious problems further ahead."

The BIS says the trading position of the United States is also perilous with a huge current account deficit equivalent to 6.5% of GDP

a rise in US external liabilities by over $4 trillion from 2001 to 2005, and an unpredented drop in the savings rate. "The dollar clearly remains vulnerable to a sudden loss of private sector confidence," it said.

Is money hard to get? Apparently not. Bankers have found new ways to get around credit risk by passing it off to third parties who may or may not realise the level of risk involved:

The BIS said last year's record issuance of $470bn in collateralized debt obligations (CDO), and a further $524bn in "synthetic" CDOs had effectively opened the lending taps even further. "Mortgage credit has become more available and on easier terms to borrowers almost everywhere. Only in recent months has the downside become more apparent," it said.

That last comment must mean one of the monkeys removed the hands from their eyes long enough to accidentally see some evil.

With that in mind, where is it all heading? The BIS looks at how sustainable many of the private equity transactions / mergers are given they levels of debt taken on assumed credit would remain cheap.

Mergers and takeovers reached $4.1 trillion worldwide last year.

Leveraged buy-outs touched $753bn, with an average debt/cash flow ratio hitting a record 5:4.

"Sooner or later the credit cycle will turn and default rates will begin to rise," said the bank.

"The levels of leverage employed in private equity transactions have raised questions about their longer-term sustainability. The strategy depends on the availability of cheap funding," it said.

That may not last much longer.

That's the bad news......and there is nothing any political party in New Zealand can do about it, whatever way it goes. Increasingly, this looks like a dumb time for tax cuts.

Dumb time to cut fuel taxes

If we are seeing the effects of peak oil, then it makes NO sense to cut taxes on fuel. Instead, we all should begin adapting to the post-oil world as soon as possible rather than pillaging the community coffers so those who have'em can drive their SUVs and V8s for a few more months or a year or two. The drop in the dollar will make it even more important to reduce fuel consumption.

Market lovers should be over the Moon about the recent glut of price signals to fuel users suggesting they should either reduce fuel consumption or be prepared to pay more for it. A lot more.

The taxes on fuel have been there since forever. They aren't new or recent. The money mostly goes to pay for worthy things most of us would prefer not to do without. Some if it even goes to build and maintain roads. Not we that will be need to do much more large sale road building.

Fuel taxes are also a tax no one has to pay directly if they structure their life right. So do it. The less fuel you use, the less tax you pay.

Makes sense to me.

Whenever oil was due to become scarce, we were always going to hear the howls of pain from the hedgehogs on the highway of life as their household budgets were squashed by forces they have chosen to ignore - in most case - all their lives. They could have pressured their elected representatives years ago to improve public transport. But they didn't.

OK...now maybe it's time to start.

It seems to be the time when demand exceeds supply. If you were paying attention, you knew it was coming, if not when. Did you prepare? It's not too late, though it soon will be if nothing is done.

Lets get those electric trains built as soon as possible. Let's get a good public transit system up and running in our major cities - and between them, with convenient, enclosed interchanges and reasonable fares that allow easy travel across - and between - our cities and towns.

Pay that tax money today and lobby government HARD (whoever it is) to ensure the infrastructure is there soon for the time when the oil isn't there in adequate quantities. The sooner we start, the easier and better it will be for everyone.

Let's not let short-term thinking yet again blight the future, as we have so often done before when the people who don't want to know and don't care impose their short-term ultimately futile thinking on everyone, including those who have been paying attention and trying to warn them what was coming. That would leave everyone down the track with no solutions where an "I told you so" doesn't help anyone.

It was and is possible to find opportunity amid the changes. Thirty years ago, the Danish government funded research into wind power generation. Now, the Danes lead the world in wind power technology. Why wasn't that New Zealand?

If we want to get off the oil teat as soon as possible, it might even make sense to increase fuel taxes so we can get the job of building public transport infrastructure done faster. When the going gets tough, the tough get going....and the whiners get a kick up the arse for having not paid attention (again).

Somehow we have to get past the "last tree" problem. What's that? Well, imagine you're on an island and the population grows to the point where the number of remaining trees for building houses and lighting fires and making canoes for fishing has fallen to the level where - unless consumption is reduced drastically - there will come a day where everyone will be fighting to cut down the LAST tree so they can live as they have always lived for just a few more days......and then it's all over.

"How could they be so stupid as to lets things get to that stage?"

Exactly. How could they.

They did it one day at a time. Just as we all are.

Double your tax cuts

The TV3 "Campbell Live" (June 4th) clip below highlights the decline of the big car as an attractive mode of conveyance for many people. Small cars are selling at a premium while big cars attract less interest or languish unwanted on auction floors. One comment in the piece is that the difference in the fuel bill between a big car and a small car may be $500 to $800 per year, while selling your petrol hog may crystalise a loss of many thousands of dollars. That sounds like a car salesman trying to have a bob each way, but let's use those numbers.

That logic appears to offer the worst of all worlds. By keeping the bog car, you keep your notional thousands that you will never actually realise while paying out between $10 and $16 more each week on fuel per big car. Many families operate more than one vehicle with if there are two adults working.

I'd rather have the cash-in-hand weekly savings now, thanks, than the imaginary dollars on wheels. If your fuel savings were to be in the upper range quoted (and some people may save even more), then you've effectively given yourself a "tax cut" right now in addition to the $16 / week we'll get in October via tax cuts.

If you're a two car family, you could be looking at $30 / week or more in savings to the household budget. That easily pays for your monthly SKY subs and lattes for two a couple of times a week.

Thinking further, I suppose some people may be stuck with the big car if they borrowed money to buy it and would be left with negative equity if they sold it. Not a nice position to be in, locked into paying interest on a rapidly depreciating a set that is costing more every day to run due to higher fuel costs. These are often the folks who would benefit the most from unloading the fuel guzzlers.

Tax cuts now are dumb.....

I’ve been reading “The Great Unraveling” by well-respected economist, Paul Krugman. It came out in 2003. In it, he details how President Bush and the Republican Party promised big tax cuts in the 2000 election campaign. These tax cuts were conceived at the height of the Tech Boom in late 1999. Bush and his party said it was time that people be given some of their own money back instead of the US government piling up ever larger surpluses, as it had been. Paying down the US government's ever-expanding US$8 Trillion debt and building up reserves to fund Social Security and Medicare for aging baby boomers wasn't something he was concerned about.

By the end of 2000, the tech boom had turned to bust and tax revenues were falling significantly. There were not going to be any more big surpluses but there need not be large deficits either. The economy was slowing and there was a serious risk of the US slipping into recession. Alan Greenspan, governor of the US Federal Reserve (central bank) began lowering interest rates.

With no surpluses to pillage, Bush and his party shifted gears and sought to justify the big tax cuts by saying they would give taxpayers more spending power and boost the economy and growth - um….next year. As Krugman points out in detail, these tax cuts were going to create a US$ 2.3 TRILLION deficit over 10 years. This was before 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq…which has resulted in that figure doubling to almost US$5 TRILLION.

Krugman says if you want to boost a slowing economy, it would be far better to lower interest rates and increase spending to help consumers now than to give them a tax cut in 6 months or next year or in two years. By then, the economy may be reviving and the cuts merely add fuel to the inflationary fire. You'd then have to raise interest rates and transfer those tax cuts from people with debt to a bank instead. They still end up without "their" money.

In 2001, after concern from the Democrats about the effect on the deficit, Bush went ahead and implemented those big tax cuts and the deficit duly exploded, leading Krugman to predict - rightly - that we would inevitably see higher interest rates, inflation and ultimately - stagflation. His tax cuts were to kick in a new level each two years, coinciding with the electoral cycle. He also scrapped the inheritance tax.* *

We’re almost there already in NZ, based on the consequences of what Bush did in the US 7 years ago, and now National wants to repeat the same errors with our own government finances. National is promising to implement tax cuts in a bust that were conceived in a boom, shifting rationales just as Bush did from giving people back their money to stimulating the economy.....next year....while it slows down right now.

Incredible.

Finance Minister, Micheal Cullen’s strategy appears to have been the correct one. He has said several times that there would be a downturn and it has now come to pass. I should say I have had the same expectation. Mine own view was driven by the parallels between the likely economic and fiscal consequences of Bush invading Iraq and the consequences on those same things of Vietnam war. In both cases, huge deficits lead to a fading US dollar, higher interest rates and inflation and ultimately to stagflation. I’ve been planning for it for 5 years myself. It was screamingly obvious to any student of history what the effect of Bush invading Iraq was going to be……for the whole world, not just the US.

We must also factor in the impact of climate change and peak oil, two things National is still in denial about.

Cullen appears to have seen the present downturn coming at some point and has been prudently planning for it. His actions and statements make that clear.

It’s equally clear that National hasn’t got a blind clue what is going on or why or they would never have promised big tax cuts to begin with.

Read Krugmans’s book. His concerns of 2000-2003 have turned into the reality of 2008. He called it 5 and more years ago…..bang on.

NZ risks repeating Bush's error of implementing tax cuts without regard for the state of the economy or future risks to tax revenues.

** Concern about affordability of Bush's tax cuts was sufficient that a provision was included in the law that will see it expire at midnight, December 31st, 2010. At that point, tax rates will return to the 2000 levels and the inheritance tax will resume. As Krugman blackly jokes, an American's wealthy granny will be worth a lot more dead on December 31st, 2010 than than she will be if she dies on January 1st, 2011.

National: Tax Cuts for the Top Earners

Idiot Savant over at "No Right Turn" explains how the National Party's tax cuts will be mainly for the top earners.

Mr English made it clear that them priority would be workers earning $60,000-plus - in particular those pushed into the top 39 per cent tax bracket by wage rises.
‘‘We need to keep faith with those people, that's our top priority,'' he told TV1's Agenda yesterday.

Anyone under $60,000 thinking of voting for National to get a tax cut might want to think about that.

I've said the best tax cut would be one that targets the people already having trouble making ends meet. Exempting the first $5000 from tax would benefit all tax payers, but also give the largest proportion of benefit to those on the lowest incomes.

National must still believe in "trickle down" instead of letting the lowest income earners keep more of their own money.

Cullen and Manufacturers

Stuff's Colin Espinor and the Herald are making much of the poor turnout to hear Finance Minister, Michael Cullen's pre-budget address to the Canterbury Manufacturers Association lunch in Christchurch.

Maybe the phone is off the hook with respect to Labour. It's tough times in New Zealand for manufacturers. The low US dollar they insist on pricing everything in has been a real problem for them. The competition from manufacturers in much larger countries with 3rd-world labour laws and better access to markets and capital has been crushing. Maybe there aren't many manufacturers left in Canterbury to attend.

But I honestly can't see how local manufacturers could get any more excited by the prospect of a National-lead government later this year. That party is even more committed to free trade and open markets - especially the China deal - than Labour is.

There can't be any real benefit from that quarter for local manufacturers. Trimming a little "red tape" by exposing the environment to renewed plundering and spoilage won't save much money for manufacturers.

How can National credibly enact policies to force wages down even further when criticising the present government for not doing enough to see wages rise? My eldest daughter's employer is already refusing to pay the legal minimum wage and my daughter begs me not to say anything lest they not give her a good reference if she should decide to leave that job. So they get away with breaking the law and low-balling a teenager who works hard.

As for tax cuts, the banks and the oil companies will soak those up in 15 minutes flat via interest rates and petrol prices and thanks to the lower tax take, services will be reduced, enforcement will be gutted and we'll all have to pay more and higher user fees and larger health care costs out of what's left, reducing our already shrinking disposable incomes. What good is a tax cut if the Reserve Bank of New Zealand can deem it inflationary and confiscate the money right back off you and transfer it to the commercial banks via higher interest rates. If that fails, the RBNZ can cut interest rates, the NZ dollar falls and our buying power for all the imported stuff we used to make here takes another hit. Tax is the least of our worries. It's close to being a red herring.

People can be perverse. Maybe the Canterbury Manufacturers Association should all be NZ First or Green Party supporters. Both have policies more in tune with the needs of local manufacturers than National or Labour, who will (apparently) hold to current policies until the last local manufacturer in NZ turns out the lights and moves to China, Mexico or those special export zones in Thailand where the usual labour laws don't apply.

Those "Buy Kiwi Made" ads should soon be changed to "Find Kiwi Made". It's getting harder to do that.

[UPDATE 2008-05-20: Audrey Young's blog gives a hint as to the most likely reason for the poor turnout for Cullen's recent speech:

His long-serving private secretary Kim McKenzie departed suddenly, apparently after a dispute of some sort - unrelated to the Budget. (He said today that she had not been sacked and was on leave and did not know if she was returning).

His traditional pre-Budget speech to the Canterbury Manufacturers’ Association drew a pitiful audience of 36.

Clark noted on Newstalk ZB this morning that the person organising it should have been shot given the fact that she had given a speech there only two weeks previously to a packed audience - wherein may lie the reason.

Little wonder that Cullen’s office is quick to say that his post-Budget speech on Friday to the Wellington Chamber of Commerce is a sell-out - sorry, is sold out - with 85 acceptances for tickets at $60 a head.

]

What sort of tax cuts?

Tax cuts have been a National Party / APN / Fairfax(or INL) talking point for many years. While most people were doing just fine, the traction gained by this issue was not sufficient to determine the vote of enough people to see the government change. Since before 1999, most people were more concerned with education and health. Besides, previous tax cuts seemed to be eaten up almost immediately by higher interest rates and higher prices.

The past several years, however, have also seen oil prices and interest rates steadily rising thanks to US President Bush's conversion of the Clinton fiscal surpluses into historically large deficits by unnecessarily invading Iraq. If that wasn't inflationary enough, the effects of Bush's gross incompetence have been inflicted on global food prices. The falling US dollar has, in part, caused capital to flee to commodities in an attempt to preserve its value. The effects of President Bush's bio-fuels policy, in displacing food for fuel crops, have made food matters even worse.

Locally, those global pressures are combining with the effects of labour market policy settings here in New Zealand. The unions are now weaker than in the previous downtown in the 1970s and eighties, which was also caused by US wars and consequent deficits combined with rising oil prices. Present laws have undercut the ability of workers to win wage increases to meet rising prices, so they are less able to seek relief from employers. That certainly helps keep domestic inflation lower, which is arguably a very good thing. We don't waste time spiraling into inflation as we pass the buck as to who will pay for the higher prices. Instead, we will go straight to the situation where there isn't enough money to go around and the local economy falters. We aren't there yet, but unless something changes, I can't see how it can be avoided.

Rising prices without rising incomes can only result in falling consumer demand as discretionary incomes shrink. As reported by Bernard Hickey and others, in previous blog posts, many homes are now eating their home equity or slipping ever further out onto credit cards. Immigration stats suggest lower-paid / low-skilled (ie: young) workers have been leaving for Australia where wages for low-skilled people are seen to be higher. Rather than a brain-drain, some portion of NZ's work force could be seen as discretionary economic refugees.

These pressures have been building for some time, just in time for election year. When you're short of cash, you raid the money pot, so public sentiment about tax cuts has been firming up. Labour gave in last year and announced there would be tax cuts. So both major parties, Labour and National are promising tax cuts.

We still don't know how much or in what form. They're keeping that secret lest the other match their policy and negate its vote-winning power at the coming election. The Greens, of course, want to get rid of income tax entirely and move to tax on wastes. People averse to income tax should be all on board for that policy.

Reading the media coverage, it seems those on higher incomes are most in favour of tax cuts. But with rising prices hurting those on lower incomes, does it make any sense to give tax cuts to those who can best afford to meet the demands of rising prices?

How could tax cuts be composed? I see several options, each with a myriad of permutations, but my favourite is to have some portion of income be tax-exempt. Perhaps the first $5,000 or $10,000. This would benefit all taxpayers equally, but deliver most relative benefit to those on lower incomes. That would work out at (roughly) $20 / week (at $5000) or (roughy) $40 / week (at $10,000) for all wage earners who earn at least those levels of income.

Yet the real dollar amount in actual tax cuts would be either $1000 or $2000 per tax payer. Much more significant to someone on $25,000 than someone on $100,000. Marginal tax rates need not be changed.

Whether government accounts can stand such a reduction is another matter. I've hard $2.1 billion bandied about as the possible total for sustainable tax cuts. That would equate to just over $1000 each for 2 million taxpayers. That would suggest the tax exemption for the first $5000 of income was sustainable without endangering public services still recovering from underinvestment during the 1990s.

Don't trust. Verify

This blog isn't called "Truth Seeker" for nothing. In my life I've found that one makes errors in direct proportion to the extent to which one is prepared to accept as true things that are not true. In an effort to avoid inflicting the consequences of my errors of fact or understanding on myself and others, I do try to see any thing from a variety of perspectives. I then weigh that up against my own values (tested for validity every day if the subject is new and / or there is uncertainty) and arrive at something resembling a conclusion. A provisional decision, valid unless new information invalidates it.

Caveats: Knowledge of anything complex usually isn't perfect. In turn, understanding is limited by the usual 5 senses and the brain (large or small) that has the job of making sense of them. Some do better than others. Some make no effort in either case, knowing little and understanding less. (But they vote anyway. Oh well....)

Already, we can see there is an inbuilt tendency to err based on imperfect knowledge and incomplete or inaccurate understanding and underpinned by motivation - or lack of it - to even try.

With that in mind, I read Matthew Hooten's column ("Labour fighting tooth and nail", 6/4/08 Pg A11) in the Sunday Star Times this weekend. I can't find a link for it.

What caught my eye in the column referred to were several assertions that - to me - appear to be insupportable.

The first was the almost throw-away claim that a fourth Labour term would "accelerate our brain-drain". That surprised me as there have been several recent reports that show the so-called brain drain is a myth. Journalist Nick Smith found the same thing when he looked into the claims there was a brain drain.

It's a hollow claim. My daughter is on an employment contract that says she'll work any time, for any number of hours, with no overtime, as required, if required. For the minimum wage, if she can coax them into paying it. Can you say "powerless"? The 40-hour week is stone, cold dead.

Apparently, this isn't "free" enough for some employers. It's hard to see what more they could ask for in terms of being able to dictate terms of employment. Not at all hard to see why Australia might be more attractive. But it would be the young and low-skilled who are being driven out of New Zealand and this appears to be what the statistics actually show to be happening.

Later, Mr. Hooten refers to "our demand for tax cuts". Who wants tax cuts? A recent NZ Herald-Digipoll showed that tax cuts were an issue for 22% of Kiwis. They made much of this, but I would have thought it more significant that 78% of Kiwis weren't fussed about tax cuts. I'd be among them. My impression is that "demand" for tax cuts has been largely media-driven. I've not seen any poll over several years that showed a level of demand for tax cuts warranting the sort of media campaign we have seen for several years now on the subject.

Hooten then goes on to assert that Labour will employ dirty tricks and speculates rumours will be "invented about hidden agendas and malign foreign influences".

I can't dismiss, as Mr. Hooten does, the clear hunger of some in the National Party for even less worker protections than the few that still exist. Nor can I easily forget the business-as-usual co-ordination with the US-lead Exclusive Brethren in the last election.

These aren't rumours. They are genuine concerns raised by National's own past behaviour.

Hooten then asserts the "economically ruinous effect of Labour's policy agenda". I'm sorry, but every economic indicator I know of indicates that since 1999 the present government has done as well as any government ever has economically and better than almost all others of any era. Low unemployment, solid growth, an open economy, a demonstrated capacity to withstand global downturns through sound local macro-economic management. NZ is ranked as one of the easiest countries on Earth to do business in. We even have a growing fiscal surplus that gives some hope the passing of the Baby Boomer generation into the ranks of the elderly will be fundable.

The summary is I found Mr. Hooten's column to be more misleading than it was informative. But I wouldn't know that if I hadn't actively sought to verify the assertions he made. I'm glad I made the effort. I hope the Sunday Star Times has a negative view of any columnist whose column is found to be full of assertions that don't stand up to scrutiny.