Whatever happened to cohearent thinking?

It feels masochistic, but I keep reading columns on how tax needs to change, and it doesn't feel transparent, cohesive or broad enough.

What is most disconcerting is that the discourse on tax has no accompanying discussion of building national prosperity by improving productivity, adding value, creating employment, making it easier to get things done rather than harder, and all that other active, nation-building stuff that's been ignored for far too long in favour of a kludgeocratic expediency that's painted us in to an economic corner.

It's apparently too hard: is what we've got, and the narrow policy niches being discussed, seriously the best policy we can create?

The discussion is stuck in an adversarial, ideological rut that the state is to be the agency to use tax to redistribute wealth, rather than creating policy that is far broader and more cohesive than isolated tax measures, to support intelligent, collaborative choices to more equitably grow the pie for everyone.

We do need to change the way tax is levied as the property market (among other behaviours) has distorted the way the country runs and has crippled investment in productive business (among other activities). But is applying fair return, rather than on realisation, the best way to do it? It assuredly does not reflect risk.

Will the quest for policy purity, around things like exempting a family home, to capture small parts of the tax base, create perceptions of unfairness that cripple both public acceptability and practical implementation? Perfection is looking a lot like the enemy of the good.

As always, there are damn-all numbers and evidence being used in the debate. There are simple examples. How much land is being banked and driving up prices? How many houses are sitting vacant to hoover up the capital gains? How many owners own how many houses? What are periods of ownership looking like? The list of omitted data that would aid decision making is seemingly endless - or least not widely used in the public domain.