Posts by giovanni tiso
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sure, but all these types of assistance are premised on the idea that having children entitles you to increasing state assistance.
Not you: the child.
remove the premise and you have a different line of reasoning, i.e. having children is something you need to be economically rational about.
which is reasonable.
Ah, yes, children only to those who can afford to raise them. Very reasonable. How about children only to those who are willing and able to spend time to raise them? I suspect a few professional couples would fall off that particular ferris wheel.
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having a third child doesn't magically make my salary larger, so it's not entirely unreasonable to assume that the dpb should be assessed in the same way.
That's specious reasoning. Specious, I say! The benefit is a contribution to keep the child out of poverty, not the parent.
Besides, while it is true that having a third child does not increase your salary per se, it lowers your taxes if you're on Working for Families, and it increases the services that your household receives for the same income even if you don't qualify for the tax break.
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Very few people, I'd wager, would subject themselves to that sort of income level unless they had to.
It's not just that: we have structural unemployment in this country. If the unemployment rate dips lower than five per cent, as it has been for quite some time, economists get jittery and our reserve bank governor starts hiking interest rates, lest a workforce with too many options start getting frisky and organise and demand wage increases. So you're always going to get a percentage of unemployed, no matter what, and the number is cyclical - as does the economy so does the job market - whereas if we truly had a class of people who can't be bothered to work, they would stick to the plan so long as a benefit was available to them.
The genius of Reagan was how he marketed the notion that the unemployed are a wilful burden, as opposed to victims of the way things work, the couple o' layers of people at the bottom who are needed for the economic gears to turn smoothly (and whose chief function, as George Carlin once put it, is to scare the shit out of the middle class).
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It was Judith Collins in parliament a few weeks back. She claimed that she had letters from doctors claiming to have been bullied into signing medical certificates,
Even if that were true, it reinforces the idea that any investigation of potential wrongdoing would start by talking to (some of) the doctors, rather than harassing (all of the) patients.
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does it have words?
It does if you sing it.
Duru-duruddudu-duddudu-duddudu-duuu
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And considering your not at all secret agenda, what the hell could National or Labour actually do to satisfy you? Apart from a telephone number-sized cheque?
Say, that's an idea! But then of course leaving the benefits at 1990 levels, shaming the victims of what is essentially structural unemployment, and cutting taxes are the solutions on both side of fence. Hooray.
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we horrified a guy at WINZ by sitting down with him and doing the maths on a piece of paper. At the point where for every dollar we earned, we lost $1.05, he yelled 'that can't be right', and did the maths again himself.
Wait: I thought you said you weren't good with numbers.
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Whoops. Too fast off the block. Welcome Emma!
That's okay, Phil, it happens to everyone.
Best start in the history of comments sections ever.
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I actually don't mind the idea of occasionally referring sickness beneficiaries to designated doctors, as a check on the system.
It seems a disproportionate cost in terms of the benefit it might produce. If there really are crooked doctors out there, the occasional spot check and audit (biased perhaps toward physicians who happen to refer quite a few people) seems a more logical step to take. Asking sickness beneficiaries to be examined by a total stranger to see if their story checks out (wouldn't you find it a little humiliating?) is perfectly consistent with the notion that the world is full of bludgers, but it's not as if we have to buy into that now, do we?
Plus, so long as we're being suspicious, who's not to say that these more trusted, 'special' doctors won't be under veiled or in fact explicit instructions to find people not meeting the criteria?
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The abatement rates are self-defeating, and should be higher than $100 I believe, I'd think more like $200 in today's economy.
So, so hard for Labor to claim the moral high ground here though, it pains me to say. Did they have to wait for National to link the benefit to the freaking rate of inflation?