Posts by sally jones
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Okay, well I'm going to have to break the silence. I won't apologise a second time, Geoff, but I will move on now with regret that I stooped so low (wasn't meant to be smutty).
But let's change the subject.
We're having a couple of friends round for Guy Fawkes tonight. Two solo mums and their four kids, actually. Well, they're married, but their men are temporarily working elsewhere. One is in Saudi, poor man.
M (husband) will be the only bloke. He says he doesn't mind. Says he will be the flame.The firecracker.
Okay.
Whatever works for you my beloved.
I am hoping my daughter, who likes cooking, is presently downstairs preparing the pizza, our guests are due to arrive at 7.30. Better go check.
Happy Guy Fawkes everyone :):) -
Apologies (to Jackie especially) for indulgently long post.
Bart: Please feel free to use my name when you are addressing my argument.
What do people think about married couples who are both unemployed most of the time but continue to add to their family despite the fact they are already in state housing (3 bedrooms for 8 of them - by choice as it's cheaper) and can't afford to replace the broken windows in their vehicle or put child seats in it?
I'm referring to my neighbours who have six kids under the age of nine and are about to add a seventh. They do a good job of looking after and caring for them in a basic sense but there comes a point in time when the hole gets dug too deep.Yamis: I think your concern is at the heart of the matter.
Bart, you are right to mention that the free market won't pay for childcare and that all public funds come from a limited pool and the various causes must compete for these funds.
Political philosophers often test their theories through hypotheticals or extreme, glaring, examples. So for example they ask: Should the state pay for kidney dialysis for people suffering type 2 diabetes, a disease typically brought on by poor eating and exercise habits? Given that this treatment is ongoing, even lifelong (if they don't get better) and very expensive, it seems a reasonable question to ask. In an obesity epidemic with rising stats on T2 diabetes it is perhaps particularly reasonable. The funds used here will be taken from some other worthy cause like child care services, for example.
On the other hand, people will die without it, whereas people denied state funded child care services will probably not die.
Still, these services potentially benefit everybody and provide for the next generation of workers, care givers, etc, and can be defended on the grounds of right. In the 21st century children have rights too, and good thing too.In my opinion there are certain basic needs or demands for public funds that are constitutionally required given that without them people cannot function as democratic citizens. These include police and courts (and parliament), universal basic health care and hospital services, education up to a certain age (16-18), welfare for the unemployed and invalid, superannuation and the pension, and I think you could include early child care services given that in most families now and certainly into the future will need both parents to be employed in the paid workforce for much of their parenting years, though perhaps not full-time.
However...I do think Yamis that your neighbours are (probably) providing an unjustifiable drain on public resources by having a seventh child whilst living in state housing and both parents unemployed. I mean, without knowing them, their ethnicity or anything, I think you could fairly safely make this judgment.
And for this reason, and at risk of pandering to the political right which I', generally disinclined to do, I believe we can make a case for a diminishing family benefit with each child with no additional funding after three (or four) children. Three is not an entirely arbitrary number because it is the generous side of the average number of children that most people in NZ currently choose to have. Unlimited child or family benefits taken out of the society's limited pool of funds is unfair to taxpayers and perhaps especially to those who cannot have children.
Of course there would be nothing to stop people having larger families only the expectation that the state would pay for them in the form of increases to the Unemployment Benefit, the DPB, or Working for Families tax breaks, etc. Basic school and hospital services, etc., would have to remain equally accessible and free to all, the ethics and logistics of restricting access to these public services are too complex.
However the family benefit could be restricted. The benefit would be paid through the mother and would stop when she'd had three or four children, to one or more men (men are bound to cry foul here but I think this would be the fairest possible way to distribute the funds).
The money paid for the first child would include a substantial sum to cover the 'family set up' costs and could be paid to a larger segment of the community with a fairly high income cap. It would be money to encourage as many people as possible to start a family so to ensure maximum diversity of the gene pool (sorry for bringing in genes). We wouldn't even have to consider it 'welfare' in the traditional pejorative sense.
After that, subsequent children will in most cases actually cost relatively less to raise, with clothes and toys and school uniforms, etc., being passed on, so that a partially diminished benefit for the second and third child could also be defended.
You say your neighbours cannot afford to fix broken windows on the existing benefit. But, as tricky as this is to assume, they probably could afford to if they cut something else out for a few weeks, depending on outstanding debts, etc. But we all have those and in an equal and fair society we ought to be equally responsible for avoiding/managing them.
That said, under the present welfare regime those families who have at least one adult member working are advantaged over the unemployed by Labour's WFF tax credit. I would think by placing weight on the family set up subsidy given to the majority of families in the country upon the birth of their first child and through his/her upbringing, the unemployed (mostly a temporary predicament for any particular individual) would be relatively better off than they are now, unless they have a particularly large family. Of course this would not affect existing families as it would be aimed at reducing the incentives around having more children in order to qualify for more welfare - so future based.Although the public paranoia around large welfare-dependant families is seriously exaggerated - research suggests there are relatively few families expanded for this reason - with the rising cost of EVERYTHING, and demands for both parents to work, it makes less and less sense (not just economic) to have large families. Some people make it look easy, even ideal, but many more make it look like the opposite of that.
My close friend, who is the tenth child of a classic 'white trash' American family - as she puts it, tends to agree, even though she did well for herself and went on to get a PhD (in NZ) and has the student loan to prove it (not to suggest for a minute that a PhD is the measure of doing well).
All...IMHO :) -
This is off task somewhat but on the general subject of keeping unusual pets, we once housed a horse in our backyard, which was a regulation suburban size lawn. The horse was also quite regular.
It was my sister's horse. She would have ridden it from the paddock where it normally lived to our house. She was twelve, which seems very young, but Mum has recorded the event in her diary, which I read while she was in hospital with her broken hip. No. She bequeathed all her old diaries to me. I was the only one interested in reading them. My brother and sister have lives.
So as the story goes, Mum tied my sister's horse called Duke to our water pipe - as you do - while we began our bridge game - as you do, with a horse tied to your water pipe out back. I don't know what the cat thought. Most cats don't have to put up with a horse in their yard.
Sure enough when we woke up in the morning, no horse. Classic Jones stuff up. Mum drove madly around the neighbourhood in search of the darn horse that we could only imagine charging down the eight lane motorway near to where we lived. But the police called later on in the morning to ask us if we had lost a horse.Altogether, on balance, I think an otter would be less trouble.
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Jackie: Oh I'm glad. Hopefully this is the first of many posts.
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Bart: As I understand it we have been funding early childhood education and care quite well in this country until recently with the subsidies cut by the present government.
I don't think it's a question of dividing up the same pool of money between those with and those without children, or comparing their value. If a certain number of hours of funding is allocated to early childhood services for each child this doesn't advantage one group of adults over another. It merely advantages children. There is still a considerable shortfall in the funds required to raise children for those adults engaged in the job compared with those not, which is how it should be, as those raising children have in most cases freely chosen to do so.
But the fact that we're stuffed as a society if no-one makes this choice, or if there is a substantial reduction in the number of people who continue to make this choice - likely in part as a response to the growing cost of raising children, including childcare and education - justifies spending public funds in these areas. Moreover, without these funds the state is in some degree functioning in a parasitic and exploitative relationship with parents by taking their care-giving for granted while allocating public funds to pay for all sorts of other, arguably less important, forms of labour. This is wrong, and yet it was the way of the western world until relatively recently. Of course none of this helps in determining how much funding per child. -
Geoff, I've come over all hot and springy...;)You write evocatively of the area. The closest I get to waxing lyrical about Auckland is when I talk about the beach - which is something, to be sure.
a wonderful old country pub...[and] a golf course (if you like that kind of thing)
Country pub, yes, golf, no. Though golf courses are usually lovely places to find tranquillity (when the golfers are absent, of course). We're heading to the South Island by car this Christmas so might check out Okororie. Sounds sublime.
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I've just been reading a book on this - called The Life that Lives on Man - we are real estate for a plethora of beasties from bacterium to bed-bugs...
:- )
Yes, kids are particularly contagious.
But I know what you mean, Kindergartens and Playcentres are great incubators for the patterns and behaviours we will embrace, and repeat, for the rest of our lives...
Well, not to as great a degree as happens once children start school. At Playcentre when I was there (1994-2003) we explicitly encouraged child creativity and discouraged adult modelling of ideas at the collage table or the carpentry bench or wherever. At school the kids all paint fishes, then they all build a shoe-box model of their bedroom with. I think the difference is quite marked.
Jackie: Can I just say, if I offended you (or anyone else) with my strong opinions expressed on domestic violence on Russell's "Policeman" thread recently, I am sorry. If I didn't, I am sorry for presuming.
I love the timber of truth in your writing, especially on this subject so close to your heart. But I'm afraid my heart has been darkened by the reading I've done over the years on domestic violence, primarily on wife abuse (which I've written a PhD thesis on). My thinking on this subject is bound to be full of generalisations because theory generalises, and my thesis is a work in political theory, or tries to be. An academic is trained to be impartial but eventually realises there's no such thing. It's a wonder we don't all go mad at that point. Perhaps we do, some of us. Actually I should say they. I'm not currently employed by any university.
But academic knowledge is not a patch on experience-based knowledge, especially when it comes to social knowledge.
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Hot spring spots you say? Do tell
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We can hang bottles from ceilings at our place, shouldn't be a problem. The fish smell...can always be masked.
I haven't seen Tarka the Otter - it's next on my list of to-dos.I have seen a rather unsettling doco on a woman who kept a 'pet' tiger... Tigers get such great press, Life of Pi, etc. I think otter ownership warrants some serious consideration in this context.
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Metal work? :)
Ouch! Yes, much worse than maths, though once down I feel metal work would stay down. Maths homework would be a regurgitator. All those mistakes.