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.

Teen Mothers and Positive Results

Intelligent Welfare, Prudent Interventions

And now for some good news.  One of the outstanding successes of the present NZ Government is the way it has been able to reduce welfare rolls.  Here is the latest success:  

The number of teen mothers on welfare has more than halved since 2009, the Government says.  There were 1836 teenage mums on "main" benefits at the end of last year, down from 4263 in 2009 - a fall of 57 per cent.

Social Development Minister Anne Tolley said teen parents had some of the highest lifetime costs of any group on welfare. On average, they spent more than 17 years on welfare.  "If we can give young mums opportunities to be independent and successful then that will mean better lives for their children," she said.  "We know that kids who grow up in benefit-dependent homes are more likely to go on to a benefit, are more likely to be notified to CYF and are less likely to achieve NCEA Level 2."

Tolley credited the reduction to the Government's Youth Service, which supports young solo parents in job training, education, budgeting and parenting.  An additional $41 million was invested in the service last year to extend it to 19-year-olds.  [NZ Herald]

There have been some remarkable effects demonstrated in countries where a concerted effort has been made to reduce people on welfare rolls.

Just Another Uncle Tom

Eleven Great Thomas Sowell Quotations

Breitbart News
Jerome Hudson

Legendary economist, author, and social theorist Dr. Thomas Sowell submitted his final column Tuesday after 25 years in syndication.

“Even the best things come to an end. After enjoying a quarter of a century of writing this column for Creators Syndicate, I have decided to stop. Age 86 is well past the usual retirement age, so the question is not why I am quitting, but why I kept at it so long,” Dr. Sowell wrote.

For more than fifty years, Dr. Sowell has published books and journals on race, economics, cultures around the world, and government policy. He has inspired generations of conservative activists with his humor and ability to condense complex matters into relatable lessons.

A self-proclaimed Marxist in his twenties, Sowell served in the United States Marine Corps. (during the Korean War). He earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, his masters from Columbia University, and his Ph.D from the University of Chicago. It was at the University of Chicago, under the tutelage of Milton Friedman, and after his short stint as an economic analyst at the U.S. Department of Labor, where Dr. Sowell lost faith in government institutions’ ability to effectuate positive outcomes in society.

Dr. Sowell has taught economics at Cornell University and UCLA and has been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University since 1980.  Dr. Sowell’s books, columns, and photography can be found at his website tsowell.com. Below are a handful of the most influential quotes from America’s great living philosopher.

1. The Welfare State:

The blacks in the West Indies had all sorts of experiences growing their own food, selling the surplus in the market, and, in fact, being responsible for budgeting what they had. Black [slaves] in the United States were deliberately kept from having that. Dependence was seen as the key to holding the slaves down. It’s ironic that that same principle comes up in the welfare state 100 years later.

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.

2. A Legacy of Liberalism:

Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960.

You Get More of What You Pay For

Subsidising Criminal Gangs

Gangs, criminal gangs, are a real problem in New Zealand.  They have now been around long enough that they are creating inter-generational problems.  Officials have started  researching the cycle of violence and criminal behaviour that moves from one generation to another.  Most of this stuff is what everyone really suspected or expected, but measuring and quantifying is very useful.

Firstly, it shows that the taxpayers subsidise gangs and virtually fund their continuing existence.  The old adage has it, What you pay for, you get more of.  To the extent that society (the taxpayer) funds and supports gangs and gang members is the extent to which gangs and gang culture will always be with us.

Scepticism Over Poverty Measures

Poverty is A Wax Nose

Every few months we in New Zealand are confronted with the "reality" of poverty in New Zealand.  The latest is a report from the Child Commissioner on the rates of child poverty--that is, children living in poverty.   It's got to the stage where few people take such confrontations seriously any more.  

We are pretty confident that actual poverty exists in New Zealand.  We are very confident that child poverty most certainly exists.  Here is a case in point:

An Auckland mother who kept her toddlers in a cockroach-infested house has pleaded guilty to failing to keep a safe and hygienic living environment for her children.  The woman appeared for sentence on Monday though she was granted a discharge without conviction after a judge found a criminal record would prevent her from seeing her children again.

The North Shore woman, who cannot be named to protect the identity of her children, earlier pleaded guilty to two charges of failing to discharge a legal duty, namely keeping a safe and hygienic living environment for her children. . . . Police arrived to find dozens of dirty nappies on the floor, hundreds of cockroaches, rancid dishes, only one working light, and little food- some which had been left to rot and was covered in maggots.  By way of explanation, the mother had told police that she knew the house was a mess but that she was too busy to clean it because she spent nights at a local hospital, where Judge Philippa Cunningham said "ironically" she worked as a cleaner.

What we are deeply sceptical about, however, is relative measures of poverty.

Finland: Anti-Welfare Welfare

Brave New World

Finland is embarking on a grand experiment.  It is going to scrap all welfare payments and pay every adult a flat amount of 800 euros per month (which roughly equates to around $1,000 per month).  It will be a universal entitlement.  No means testing.  

The objectives are clear and laudable.  All welfare systems and entitlements become exorbitantly complex to administer, requiring large bureaucracies.  The complexity means economic inefficiency and high transaction costs.

Secondly, all means tested benefits--particularly generous ones--erect barriers to work and self-sufficiency.  This is particularly the case with unemployment payments.  There is little incentive to get out and look for work, let alone take a job, when it means a reduction in state unemployment payments.

These failures and weaknesses of the welfare system in Finland are in the sights of the government in its proposal to scrap all means testing and all welfare benefits, and just dole out a flat amount of money to every citizen regardless of their circumstances.

Two of NZ's Finest

Drowning in a Puddle

In New Zealand--as is the case in most Western countries--we are "blessed" to have the services of opinionistas whose learning and perspectives reflects  all the depth and perspicacity common to secularist cultures.   Being secularists, these folk can have recourse only to the ethics of pragmatism when it comes to wrestling with the great issues of the day.  "What works, baby.  That's all that matters."

One of these chaps is self-styled economist, Gareth Morgan.  He is a public provocateur, a member of the nouveau-riche, who has come to believe that his solutions to a wide swathe of social and economic problems actually matter.  In his world view the only thing which carries the day is results.  Economic efficiency is both his moral foundation and beacon.

Recently, this worthy proposed his simple and direct solution to a genuine problem.  New Zealand has raised four generations on social welfare.  This has given a pervasive sense of entitlement to virtually everyone in the country.  The government (that is, other people) owe me something.  In New Zealand this ethic runs deeper than the Mariana Trench and broader than the mighty Pacific .

A Cautionary Tale

Obese on the Taxpayers' Dime

They say that sunlight is the best disinfectant.  Sadly the sunlight is not found too often on the pages and screens of the archaic media.  So, letting the searchlight shine has become a responsibility of the new media.  Here is the latest thrust and parry.

The NZ government has been trying to move the delivery of social services away from bureaucrats and government ministries to the private sector.  The government is attempting to recast its role to be funder and auditor, with the delivery of services contracted out to the private sector.  The rationale behind this change is that historically government bureaucracies have failed systematically and repeatedly to deliver services efficiently.  After all, in this country we have seen  a nationalised train company employing 18,000 people, largely to shuffle paper, not trains.  But more "employees" were being added by the day to help keep the country's unemployed numbers down.  In other words, the train business had become an arm of social welfare services.  [See Richard Prebble's account in I've Been Thinking (Auckland: Seaview Publishing, 1996)]

See No Evil

Easy Passes and Double Standards

Here is the latest mini-scandal in New Zealand.

Labour leader Andrew Little has stood down his welfare spokeswoman Carmel Sepuloni after her mother was accused of benefit fraud.  Little said there was an obvious conflict of interest.  TVNZ said it had broken the news to the Labour MP about the charges her mother faces.

Little said he was temporarily standing her aside from the social development portfolio, but she had done nothing wrong.  "Carmel is an adult and her mother is an adult. Carmel is not responsible for the actions of her mother," he said.  "We have agreed she will step aside ... on a temporary basis while these matters are dealt with. There is a conflict of interest at the present time."

Everyone has rushed to extend sympathy to Sepuloni.  Liberal blogger, David Farrar's contribution is representative of the whole:

One can only have sympathy for Sepuloni. Having a parent charged with an offence would be embarrassing for anyone, let alone when you are an MP. But no one will reasonably think it reflects on her at all.

Not so fast.

Silver Spoons are Few and Far Between

Life is Hard

The New Zealand government has trumpeted another decline in beneficiary numbers.  This is good news.

Social Development Minister Anne Tolley said today the 309,145 people on benefit at the end of the December 2014 quarter was 12,700 fewer than last year.  "This is the lowest December quarter since 2008 and the third consecutive quarter with such record lows," Tolley says.  Numbers on the Jobseeker Support benefit had fallen by more than 5500 since last year and had declined consistently since 2010, even as the overall working age population increased. [Stuff]

There is a peculiar world-view which takes great heart from permanently increasing beneficiary numbers--and the emergence of a class of perpetually unemployed.  It celebrates this as evidence of the success of government welfare programmes and of the central importance of the government in everyones' lives.  It is offered as a hallmark of an advanced, civilised society . . . until the "house that Jack built" runs out of citizens' money and the cards tumble down.  Politicians love to be doing "good things" with your money to justify their existence and ratchet up their ratings on the meter of self-importance.  The unintended consequences, however, are inevitable and very painful.

But for the most part people see reducing welfare rolls as very positive--for all concerned.  But not all.

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.

Vulcan Blessings

Moving Off Welfare Into Work

We have more good news from the trenches.  The battle against being enslaved to welfare has not only been joined, but--for the moment--is being won in New Zealand.  The present government has been quietly opening up a number of  fronts in the war against welfare benefits as a human right.  The common theme in this battle is to reject the notion of welfare as a lifestyle choice. 

As in the United States under the Clinton administration, the driver is not ideological (at least, not overtly so).  Rather it is part of the wider effort to get government spending under control and bring the fiscal situation back into surplus--then, eventually, into government debt reduction.  Therefore, welfare needs to be discriminatory--delivered to those who really need it, not to those who would prefer it as their chosen lifestyle.  This, from the NZ Herald:

Escapees From the Welfare Trap

Progress and Accomplishment

The New Zealand government is engaged in a programmed campaign to get people off public welfare and back to work.  Opposition parties play the guilt-and-pity card constantly in the Parliament these days.  By their lights, untold suffering has fallen upon legions of victims as a result of these benighted policies.

For our part, as grass roots level, we are seeing lots of positive fruit.  Even something as simple as an official expectation of returning to work and getting off welfare is paying dividends. "You have to get a job" is a revolutionary, and liberating message at the local welfare office. Stuff carries a case study to illustrate the quiet revolution that has begun and continues to gather momentum.  In this particular case it was self-motivation that made the difference.  But the wider social and government expectations would no doubt have strengthened the resolve.

Daughter's words motivate mum to get off benefits

HARRY PEARL

Last updated 05:00 26/10/2013

A 9-year-old's comment about how "cool" it was to be on a benefit has changed a Huntly woman's life.  Until six months ago, Judy Wilson was one of about 80,000 sole parents in New Zealand receiving a benefit.  She was devoted to raising her six children but, in her own words, she was also drinking, smoking, and not doing "anything".  And she had been for close to 20 years. 

Six children being paid for by the taxpayer.  Solo-parenthood as a lifestyle choice.  These not-untypical-cases have been consigned to the very back of the closet by the welfarists.

Letter From the US (About Europe)

Europe Tries Welfare Reform

Even Scandinavians want to cut back on benefits to encourage growth.

By Michael Tanner

National Review Online

October 16, 2013 12:00 AM 

 

If Congress — once it reopens the government and gets back to its usual business of redistributing taxpayers’ money — has any interest in reforming our burgeoning welfare state, they might look, of all places, to Europe, where serious reforms are underway.

Leading the way is Great Britain. While in the United States the federal government funds 126 separate anti-poverty programs, 72 of which provide cash or in-kind benefits to individuals, Britain is consolidating its six major welfare programs (the jobseeker’s allowance, the income-support allowance, the employment-support allowance, the child tax credit, the working tax credit, and housing benefits) into a single grant.

Another Jigsaw Piece

Doctors to Help Reduce Welfare Beneficiary Numbers

Social expectation is powerful.  What people expect of us, along with society in general, is powerful--for good or ill. 

New Zealand is embarking upon a programme of changing social expectations of welfare beneficiaries.  The fruit of old nostrums lies rotten on the ground.  It's time for something different.  The government is trying to set a social expectation that its not acceptable to remain on a perpetual benefit unless circumstances are particularly pressing.  Lifestyle beneficiaries are to feel the heat of social expectations upon them. 

Sickness beneficiaries, whose numbers have exploded over the past twenty years, are required to go to doctors periodically to get medical approbation for remaining on a sickness benefit.  Now doctors are required to diagnose what is required medically and physically to get the beneficiary back to work--which will be a very different conversation to those of previous years.

Acting With Intent

Rolling Back the Curse of  Unemployment

In New Zealand we have begun a welfare "shakedown".  The approach is not Big Bang; rather the strategy has been to change a number of "at the margins" structures.  Taken together, however, they amount to a significant move in the right direction.

The core problem with state welfare is that it rapidly creates a psychological and material dependency.  Crudely put, getting paid for doing nothing makes more sense--it has greater marginal utility--than getting paid for blood, sweat, and tears (that is, work).  Why work when you can get paid for doing nothing?  People who enter that matrix are not dumb.  They are making a smart, rational choice from the perspective of economic utility. 

Of course most folk have a sense that the morality of the deal is not quite on the square.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

July 17

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Republished from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
If I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless, when I saw my help in the gate: Then let mine arm fall from my shoulder blade, and mine arm be broken from the bone. —Job 31:21, 22

Devotional:
Let us bear well in mind that if the poor pass before us, and we see their need, and keep our purses shut, so as not to help them, it is a sure sign that we are like wild beasts, and that there is not one spark of pity in us.

We ourselves shall some day feel the same lack of mercy when God sends us afflictions; and although we shall be miserable, no man will be moved by it, but men shall look on us with disdain, and we shall be pushed aside and left utterly destitute. For it is the measure and wages which God is accustomed to give to all who are hardhearted toward their neighbors; according as it is said, that he who is merciless shall have judgment without mercy.

Progress

Fairness Ethic Has Its Good Points

The New Zealand government is starting to crack down on some beneficiaries who have their cake and want to eat it too.  The hapless left describes this as "beneficiary bashing".  But the measures are showing up as well supported by the electorate.  This is because New Zealanders don't like "unfairness".  It's a cultural value which has ill-served the nation of often, but at times it proves helpful. 

The first group being targeted by the government is student loan beneficiaries who refuse (or wilfully neglect) to repay their loans.  The worst offenders are those who have gone overseas for extended periods and have declined to repay their loans.  They have effectively skipped town.  The government announced recently that the worst offenders--the hardened recidivists--risk arrest when they return (even temporarily) to New Zealand.  This means they are effectively exiled from their home country. 

It is reported that this has prompted a flurry of activity on the part of some of the overseas negligent payers to start to make appropriate "arrangements" and commence repayments.  It is also reported that a majority of the electorate in New Zealand supports the move.

Means of Grace

Breaking Down Paganism

Tertullian on church charitable capacities at the beginning of the Third Century, AD.

"There is no buying or selling of any sort of things of God.  Though we have our treasure chest, it is not made up of purchase money, as of a religion that has its price.  On the month day, if he likes, each puts in a small donation; but only if it be his pleasure, and only if he is able; for there is no compulsion; all is voluntary.  These gifts are, as it were, piety's deposit fund.  For they are not taken thence and spent on feasts, and drinking bouts, and eating houses [as was the case in pagan religious meetings and temples], but to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls of destitute means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house; such, too, as have suffered shipwreck; and if there happen to be any in the mines, or banished to the islands, or shut up in prisons for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God's Church, they become the nurslings of their confession."  [Tertullian, Apology, Chapter 39.  Cited in Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion (New York: Harper One, 2011), p. 113.]

Beneficiary Enlightenment

Good Things Coming Out of Bad

In New Zealand we have a perpetuating state beneficiary problem.  The "welfare state" commenced in the early 1930's and has now grown to a gargantuan monster.  We have people that are preceded by three generations of lifetime welfare beneficiary dependence having never worked in paid employment all their lives.  This latest generation are continuing to walk in the footsteps of their fathers and mothers, living off the benefit. 

The government has introduced a "back-to-work" policy that requires welfare beneficiaries actively to look for work, make applications for jobs, proceed to interviews and so forth.  If they do not, they will face cuts in their benefits.  The reflexive response from the Left, which believes there is never any shortage of other people's money, decries this as "beneficiary bashing". 

We are sure that the new programme will have all the normal lacunae and weaknesses.