GST ON RATES & MORTGAGES?

This article has been submitted by a GrownUps member. GrownUps accepts no liability for its content and the views and information contained within are not necessarily those of the GrownUps website.

Would that be a 'no brainer' or what?

As if burgeoning local body rates are not hitting the over-fifties hard enough, their effect on property rentals, as landlords try and re-establish their profit margins on rents and leases, hits us with a 'double-whammy.

Imagine the extra hurt if Government attaches GST to rents and leases', and landlords again up the ante, to recover that extra expenditure from their property investments.

BUT IT GETS WORSE!!!!!

While Government is at present coyly saying that it has no intention of lifting the GST rate, some pundits and political commentators are reccomending that the general rate of GST be raised to something like 17%.
How long before Government allows it's arm to be 'twisted' by public comment  (from those who claim to know what is needed to save our economy) and 'reluctantly' raises GST to something like 17%?

Imagine how that would again lift interest rates and rentals. That would be followed by screams from the 'workers' to lift their wages to compensate.

So there we would be, back in that unholy spiral we call inflation!

We have been there before.

I remember that back in the late 1970s, My house in Wairoa sold for twice what I had paid for it, only eighteen months previous.

My inflation-proof investment in inflation-proof savings bonds, netted me something like 22% for that one year of investment, and that is the time that home rentals, and other goods and services lept up to, "Whatever the market will stand.!"

What do we do, if Government does try it on, and suggests that it will raise GST?

I say that we need to tell 'em, NO! NO! NO!

We need to display the upraised digit to Government, or as the Yanks would say, "We flip 'em 'the bird'!"

We keep on telling them "NO!" until the message gets through.

I wish you all good luck on this one!

print