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.

Not Worth a Dime

Con Artists Facilitated by Lazy, Credulous Reporters

Media credibility is sinking like a stone.  When national media operated as the Fourth Estate (of government) reporters and editors prided themselves in acidic scepticism.  This involved never believing what you first hear; the expectation was that everyone was talking up their own books.  Therefore, everything had to be verified by more than one independent corroborative source.  

Those days are long gone.  Now, given the demise of media businesses, the folk who are reporting stories and those editing them for publication are lower down on the totem pole when it comes to experience, training, smarts, and competence.  Nowadays the overwhelming focus is upon sensation--breathless, uncorroborated "stories" that garner superficial attention--otherwise known as click-bait.  Couple this with an overweening sense of crusading self-importance and behold you have the standard profile of the modern media muckraker.

If we were to believe the present media the entire world is about to break into smithereens.  There are injustices on every side.  Government is evil, cruel.  People are suffering, suffering.  One would think that we are all back in the Middle Ages, with absolute monarchies, the Black Death, and starving subjects.  Every social service, it seems, is in crisis.  All are short of funds.  The poor are being forced to live in wretched conditions.

Most of it is fatuous cant.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

A Biblical Case Against the Minimum Wage

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

As if we needed more evidence, we now have additional evidence that the progressive uplifters of our society are impervious to the claims of evidence. In support of this claim, I would simply point to the fact that California is now poised to join other economic illiterates in adopting a $15 an hour minimum wage.

Those advocating this are either ignorant or cruel. Since this is being done in the name of the poor, I would like to begin by noting that ignorant people can’t help the poor, and the cruel people won’t. The ignorant uplifters actually think that such measures will actually result in extra cash for low-wage works, and such advocates simply need to be escorted to a back room where they can lie down for a bit. The cruel know very well that this won’t help the poor, but rather will hurt them. But that is a small price to pay for the additional power they will acquire in harassing, controlling, and destroying the small business owners who actually supply jobs to the poor.

So I don’t keep you in suspense, here is the biblical case against the minimum wage. “Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him” (Prov. 14:31).

The principal engine of oppression against the poor is fraud.

Deserving Poor

The Salvation Army Has Got It Right

Christians talk about helping the deserving poor.  It is true that such a qualification as "deserving" can cover up an awful lot of unkindness, coldness and uncharitable hardness of heart.  You can always find some reason or other as to why someone is not deserving of help.

Nevertheless, when not employed as a pretext for hardness of heart, the concept is helpful.  There are plenty people who believe they are owed charity by everyone else.  It is their right to get support from other people. Their job, if they think of themselves as having one, is to extract money from other people to sustain them. Deserving poor people are not like that.  They do not particularly appreciate being dependant upon others.  They strive as best they can to better the circumstances of themselves and their families so that they are not a burden upon others.  In other words, the deserving poor are those who are doing the best they can to be self-supporting.

It goes without saying that state welfare is built upon concept that welfare provision is a duty of everyone else, and a right of the recipient.  It proceeds on the idea that society "owes" me and that I have a human right to their support.