Government Handout To Further Impoverish Children

The Poor Are Going to Become Poorer

We are on the cusp of being driven to conclude that lefties are dumber than a sackful of hammers.  We mean really, really stupid.  Not just inchoately naive--but perversely stupid.

All week we have been lambasted by politicians telling us that 88,000 children will be lifted out of poverty in New Zealand by a brand new tax funded lollypop that will be winging its way to their respective households.

It is projected to lift 88,000 children out of poverty through a combination of higher Accommodation Supplement changes, more generous Working for Families scheme, a "Best Start" payment for parents of young babies, and a "Winter Warmer" grant for beneficiaries and superannuitants.  [NZ Herald]

Let's charitably grant that the Gummint is all full of naive genuineness when it makes such claims.  It really believes that its new grant will lift 88,000 children out of poverty.   Gummint politicans will go home for Christmas, stroking themselves in self adulation over the wonderful change it has wrought in thousands upon thousands of Kiwi families and households.  So simple, too.  Just spend an additional $5.3 billion over four years, and it's done and dusted.  The Finance Minister tells us how he and his colleagues are swollen with pride at the accomplishment.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson said it would transform the lives of many and was a far better way to improve the lives of children than across the board tax cuts.  "This is one of the most significant packages to reduce child poverty in recent memory, We are very, very proud of this package." [Emphasis, ours]

This wonderful transformation of human nature that will allegedly lift 88,000 children out of poverty will deliver an extra $75 dollars per week to 384,000 families.
  Yes, you read that right.  You understand what the Gummint is claiming.  An extra $70 odd dollars per week will perform an absolutely magical transformation in human nature and disposition.  It is so miraculous and magical that we suggest the Finance Minister, Grant Robertson be given a new New Year's honour: he ought to be trebly knighted and dubbed The Great Transformer.

But, let's move out of Cloud Cookoo Land, and face reality.  Let's imagine what will actually happen to the $75 per week in many, if not most cases.  It will enable every household to stock up on the essentials.  For many households that will mean an opportunity to buy a bit more weed, or P, or crack.  In countless others it will mean an additional bottle of whisky or a few more dozen beer.  If the additional funds were to be spent on the children resident in the house, it would be likely spent on a couple of buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken.  And let's not forget how the thrice weekly trip to the supermarket will now be festooned with at least three or more large bottles of extra fizzy pop.  Bye bye poverty.

Some households will prudently consider the longer term perspective.  Knowing that savings and building up a nest-egg means self-denial in the present, for longer term benefits, they will increase their weekly investment programme in the national Gummint owned and run lottery in the hope of winning the Big One.

And think how many new consumer goods and items can be bought on tick with an extra $75 per week. Those red trucks circulating through neighbourhoods will be having a special Xmas this year.  Spare a thought for all those folk enticed into buying lots of "must-haves" on tick, ending up spending over three times the original price of the item in interest payments and charges.  The debt counsellors are going to be inundated with new clients and the poor are going to become poorer than ever.

In the random Alice-in-Wonderland world of Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson--along with their brutely ignorant colleagues--these human realities simply do not exist.  They have the pixie dust, the enchantment spell, the One Ring.  A little bit more money makes the world go round.

Eighty eight thousand children lifted out of poverty.  Imagine that!  But Ardern and Robertson, along with their fellow dumb-hammer colleagues, know next to nothing about how the poor actually, really live.  They know nothing about the far more complex, deep seated, and powerfully rooted causes of child poverty in New Zealand.

Perversely ignorant they are. And in their ignorance their chests are swollen and they are "really, really proud" of their "accomplishment".  As we said, dumber than a sackful of hammers.