Stop stealing from the poor

NZ HERALD:

"Children have been left behind in the economic prosperity enjoyed by New Zealand over recent years, child health advocates say... Despite some bright spots,[a new] report describes a clear emerging trend, with those living in poverty significantly more likely to suffer... They are urging politicians to reconsider the use of money for initiatives such as tax cuts, and what it could do to improve the health of children - those suffering most where poverty exists... The overall picture painted by this work is not a pretty one," said Paediatric Society president Nick Baker... Public Health Association director Dr Gay Keating said the report showed that there was still an "underclass" of children and young people with poorer health. GP Nikki Turner said the overwhelming message from the reports was that the strongest risk factor for getting sick was being poor."

Sobering reading, huh. Here's a simple suggestion to help the poor: stop stealing from them.

• You could remove GST in its entirety and still leave the government's accounts in the black, and at a stroke you will leave money in the pockets of the poor to pay for food and housing and heath care. But it won't happen.
  
  It won't happen because the poor are such good lobby fodder for a certain kind of politician. They put politics before people.
  

• You could relax restrictions on land use so that people can build wherever and whatever they wish on their own land, at a stroke promoting choice and reducing housing and rental costs, allowing the poor a crucial foot up on the housing ladder. But it won't happen.
  
  It won't happen because environmentalists put the environment before people -- and politicians let them.

"The poor are always with us" say the politicians -- the very same politicians who really need the poor. They need them as lobby fodder. It's the poor who provide their power base. Who else would see the poorest of the poor and still want to take the money out of their pockets they could have used for food, but a politician? Who else could watch the poorest of the poor struggling to afford the places in which they have to live and still want to severely restrict the supply of new housing -- who else but politicians?

It's time to put people before politics. Stop stealing. Get the hell out of their way.

Seventy years of welfare in New Zealand has made things not better, but worse. In the last ten years alone around $150 billion has been taken from taxpayers and spent in a war on poverty, that's one-hundred and fifty billion dollars on a war that no one is winning; not the government, not the taxpayer, and as recent studies all show, not the 200-300,000 or so who've been the targets of this war over the last ten years: we're all worse off except for the politicians, for whom this massive sum amounts to very cheap and efficient vote-buying.

That's $150,000,000,000 -- enough to have given every beneficiary in the country a massive $500,000 each to start their own war on poverty, and it still hasn't worked. And it won't. It never will. To paraphrase PJ O'Rourke,

the spending of this truly vast amount of money -- an amount more than half again the nation's entire gross national product in 1995 -- has left everybody just sitting around slack-jawed and dumbstruck, staring into the maw of that most extraordinary paradox: You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.

When do we realise that government welfare doesn't work -- not for anyone -- and least of all for those who it is supposed to help. Let's try something else. Let's try to stop stealing. let's give people back their future and the money stolen from them, and let them get on with fighting their own goddamn war on poverty.

If these reports tell us anything at all, they tell us it's becoming urgent.