More than half of all New Zealanders are on the mooch.

 

We're getting there ...
[cartoon by Nick Kim]

Great news everyone! We're not just over-lawyered here, turns out we're also now over-endowed with moochers.

I just knew you'd be overjoyed to hear that.

A new Treasury "working paper" just released shows that we're getting ever closer to the situation satirised above.

In 2016 more than 40 per cent of the population here were revealed to be on the mooch — 40 per cent of households paying less tax than they receive in cash benefits, 3 per cent paying around a quarter all the income tax that supported them.

And now, in 2024, that Treasury "working paper" tells us that we've now officially passed an important milestone, which is this: More than half of all New Zealanders are on the mooch. 

More than half. Mooching off the other half.

More than half of this country's population is now receiving more in government largesse than they pay in taxes, while an ever-diminishing percentage of the population if forced to pay for them.

What a welfare state to be in!

Nett tax take/contributions of all NZers, measured across deciles.

(Chart from Treasury working paper 'Fiscal incidence in NZ: The effects of taxes and 

benefits on household incomes in tax year 2018/19 (AN 24/01)'. [Hat tip Eric Crampton])

Specifically, Treasury's figures (summarised in "deciles" above) show that households bringing in the higher forty per cent of household income are nett taxpayers (those on the right, above), while those bringing in lower amounts (on the left, above) are, as a group, nett tax-takers.

This is actually what inequality looks like — the productive being forced to fund the unproductive, unequally.

Measured this way however, it does obviously undeservedly impugn some honest folk on lower incomes, and many moochers and parasites on higher incomes because they're sucking down government cash.

And at the same time it also fails to measure the various bureaucrats, bloodsuckers and parasites who work directly for government, or indirectly as a consultant or the like to help business-folk avoid being done over by government.

Yet it does show us that we're ever closer to the day arriving that the poor bastard in the cartoon above becomes reality.

NB: David Farrar and MT_Tinman also comment, as do several folk on Eric's original tweet ...