Continuing his policy of being all things to all men (and women) John Key said over the weekend he is going to cover the expenses and mortgage payments of New Zealanders who lose their jobs in the current recession -- and when he says "he" is going to cover them, he means you, the few remaining taxpayers are going to pick up the tab for those few remaining New Zealanders who aren't already sucking off the state tit.
You'd have to start wondering after this if it would leave any remaining New Zealanders who aren't already on state welfare, or whether by then we'll all just be thieving from each other.
It's now clear that New Zealanders and their politicians have fallen heavily prey to the delusion that it's possible to vote oneself rich -- or at least for everyone to vote oneself free from care, at the expense of everybody else.
Perhaps it's time to seriously promote the policy that the privilege of voting should be restricted to those not receiving largesse from the voter.
UPDATE 1: Cactus puts the boot in:
Why should those with savings bail out those without?
The working truck driver renting a house in Otahuhu bails out a laid off Bank Manager living beyond his means in Remuera.
Tell me - will there be any New Zealanders left not qualifying for some sort of Government assistance in a years time?
And answers with a big shagging list, the poster on the right, and this request:
Would the last taxpayer left in New Zealand not qualifying for welfare by November 7th please switch off the lights?
UPDATE 2: And The Hive and the Herald's John Armstrong both show (again) that as political reporters they're better at sport than they are at politics -- the braindead saps simply have no conception that policies have real implications for real people, no interest in understanding the consequences of policy promises. They're only interested in "the game.": "National Takes The Initiative," says the Hive. "Insiders say considerable and careful thought has been given to all this," simpers John Boy Junior. "If it is popular, the package could give Key unstoppable momentum."
Oh fuck off, you morons.
5 comments:
Not satisfied with paying for other peoples kids, National wants to pay for other peoples houses.
What a sensible government needs to do is scrap bludging for families.
Only a party vote for ACT will shift the next government in the right direction.
You seem to have skipped a paragraph, OECD.
I'm afraid I don't see the link between your second and third paragraphs.
Were you intending to post one that included the word "therefore" along with an argument to match?
Or do you yourself simply take your last statement on faith?
We already have an unemployment benefit. The whole purpose of that I thought was to temporarily care for people who lost their jobs, until they got a new one. If Key needs a new benefit to care for these people, what is the unemployment benefit for? Is he admitting that it is actually to sustain people who have no desire to work?
No, Mr Dennis, that appears to be what the DPB and the Invalids' Benefit is for.
Here is an interesting comment from the Motion System Design site. This was contributed by John Danforth on 26 April 2006.
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"As productivity goes, so goes our standard of living."
This productivity is measured before the effects of explicit taxation and implicit taxation (inflation as measured by the printing of money and spending it, as well as compliance costs for regulations).
There has been an explosion of productivity in industry brought about by the widespread availability of inexpensive, powerful computers. Home and office computers, CAD software, PLC's, CNC's, and motion controllers alone have drastically lowered the cost of industrial equipment on a huge scale.
So why hasn't our standard of living in the industrial sector improved by a like amount? Start with almost half of everything produced being consumed by someone who doesn't produce. Add in money creation, in which money is created out of thin air, then spent into the economy. This theft is inflation. Throw in some rules and regulations, make this include environmental and workplace regulations with an army of tax-paid enforcers to harrass businesses in every aspect of their operation. Make it necessary to spend upwards of ten percent of payroll on tax law compliance alone. Add in rules that give unions stranglehold power over payroll costs and yet more unproductive work rules. Mandate insurance requirements, handicap requirements, OSHA requirements, various diversity requirements, family leave laws, and retirement plan specifications. Let cities hire full-time code enforcers to cruise the streets just to enforce sign restrictions. Let federal, state, and city entities pile on yet more requirements for any business that sells to them regarding minority hiring quotas and an encyclopedia of other ridiculous requirements. Let all levels of government add in energy taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, communications taxes, pollution taxes, inspection fees, gross receipts taxes, and taxes on anything else they can imagine. Stop the building of nuclear power plants, coal fired power plants, steel mills, mines, oil wells, refineries, and anything else that benefits mankind. While we're at it, allow lawsuits over any and everything to burden the largest industries to the point where substantial fractions of their costs are devoted entirely to paying lawyers to defend from other lawyers.
Wealth is created by the application of human thought and effort to materials taken from the earth and transformed into goods that are desired by other humans. Real taxes, ie the wealth that must be expropriated to pay for government services, can only be paid for out of this real wealth. Taxing a government employee is only paying him less, taxing a farmer is tantamount to taking some of his output away from him.
It has been somewhere around 15 years since the size of the public sector became larger than that of the farming and industrial sectors combined; the trend continues and is accelerating. We have ever fewer producers and ever greater numbers of consumers.
So why doesn't our standard of living rise with improvements in productivity? The answer is because it is more free for a business to do business in a communist country than it is in the United States of America!
What a perversion of justice, that our nation has turned into a welfare state of such proportions that our major industries are abandoning their home base including their suppliers and the very market itself, to invest in a communist country where the government owns half the stock, where they practice active censorship, and publicize that they shoot protestors in the street!
It is not because of labor costs. Our standard of living hasn't improved much, our productivity has improved, so the amount contributed by labor compared to how much the laborer actually gets to enjoy continues to increase. The labor cost of a thing is but a small fraction of the total, if you count what a laborer takes home and spends on himself when you discount the taxes he has to pay on everything he buys. The productivity of an American laborer is many times that of some peasant in a third world country. That was what gave us our standard of living and kept businesses profitable. Labor cost has always been cheaper in poor countries, but our productivity offset it many times over. Now, the total cost of doing business in the USA has to include so much unproductive cost and taxes that all productivity gains made in the last 40 years or so have been erased.
Meanwhile we graduate government high school students with perhaps 30% of them functionally literate (70% unable to fill out an application without laughable errors), and near 100% completely ignorant of mathematics, physics, chemistry, electronics, or mechanical engineering principles. The schools are centers for indoctrination in the principles of social democracy, diversity and environmentalism. More open mouths to demand ever more handouts, more social justice, more wind generators, and less pollution. And fewer and fewer able to pay for it.
Those who erect barriers to investment and production have tipped the scales past the point where our frenzied improvements in productivity can keep even; as our standard of living falls, smokestack businesses are fleeing the country with what capital they have left. Those who remain will be burdened with the unpaid share of those who have gone. The answers given to the problem will be more of the same poison that made us sick -- protectionism, taxes, regulations, legal costs. Unless they uncharacteristically loosen the noose, we are not likely to see improvement until the day comes when headlines are not about plant closings and businesses relocating to other countries, but rather full of sob stories about all of the poor, laid-off, unemployable government workers who have lost their jobs. Unfortunately, those will be the last to lose their jobs.
Here in Michigan, our governor is going around spouting that alternative energy is going to save our post-industrial economy. We have already been written off as unnecessary. Maybe they really don't understand. Can someone point me to the nearest hydrogen well?
Palpable untruths about the physics of energy production are being coded into law. Government grants are given to brazen charlatans who will promote the falsehoods to the gullible and erect plants to produce products that nobody will buy, good for some PR headlines for the governor and the stock-swindle alternative energy companies that will produce products and maybe profits 'sometime'.
All the flim-flammery and noise serves to effectively soothe the public with assurances that their all-powerful nanny government is doing everything possible to protect them, while concealing the fact that that they have destroyed the freedoms that made capitalism possible. And those greedy capitalists are less and less able to pay the way for all those necessary government services, and all those needy people who deserve lifetime jobs with lifetime benefits.
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Wouldn't have been much more interesting if he'd have been the moderator? Reckon so.
LGM
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