Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Angus Robertson,
It is not discernably different than 5 years ago.
But it's very different from 20 years ago, when Americans seemed to precede an opinion with the disclaimer "I may not agree with your liberal commie pinko viewpoint, but I'll defend to the death your right to express it". That sort of nicety went out the window with the take-no-prisoners attempt to portray twice-democratically-elected Clinton as Public Enemy No. 1.
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Um, demographic bulge.
Unless the post-war urge to procreate has some kind of democratic basis. -
As for the “parents and grandparents” of those vile “boomers” “having to sell their homes to fund their hospital care”, whenever that might have happened it would have been due to the deliberate running down of the health system in the 90s. To her credit Helen Clark undid much of the damage in the ensuing decade, which hardly fits with the convenient scapegoating of the “boomer” generation’s inexorable eroding of the social contract.
I know of more than one case of elderly people depleting what savings they might have had to pay Shipley’s “market rents”. Universal home ownership has never been a given in this country.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
The fact that you might not have benefitted personally from the changes (like all generalisations it’s not universally true) doesn’t negate the fact that many baby boomers from the mid-1980s onwards benefitted tremendously from tax cuts. To go back to the original statement. Baby boomers were at the most 40 years old when the 4th Labour government hacked taxes. During the following 25+ years – their peak earning years when people pay the most in income tax, they did not fund the care of their elders as per the social contract that had built up for several decades. Within a few years their parents and grandparents were having to sell their homes to fund their hospital care.
According to that rather deviously worded scenario, everyone entering the workforce, not just those selfish dotards born to the WW2 generation, would have “benefitted tremendously” from the ongoing fourty pieces of silver they’ve received for abdicating their part in maintaining the “social contract”.
You appear to assume the usual comfortable slacktivist mythology of universal home ownership and lifelong comfortably-remunerated income security. My own experience has shown that the reality for many is very different. No doubt there are plenty of smugly self-absorbed “baby boomers” who may well deserve that increasingly pejorative classification. I’d suggest that they’re not the only ones who might benefit society by having to rediscover the meaning of fiscal fear. Simply being born before or after that particular democratic bulge doesn’t automatically grant a handy halo of moral superiority
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There's an Edward Lear painting in the Oamaru art gallery. Don't know how it got there, possibly via 19th century Oamaru artist Emily Gillies, who was his great-niece.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 1: Beach…, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Congratulations on your find, wonder how it wound up in Oamaru? Must be some kind of literary lodestone deposit underlying Janet Frame’s kingdom by the sea.
Lawlor was once NZ correspondent for the Australian Bulletin. His two books on his childhood reminiscences of Wellington, published in the early 60s, were great pieces of storytelling. Apparently he wrote a couple of novels that no-one seems to have read.
One for the guy in Kaikoura. -
Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
I saw Glenn Beck in action last summer at his Restore Honor Rally. His speech sucked and his audience looked ancient and out-of-shape.
That Henry Rollins eh. If Beck’s audience had been ancient yet buffed ’n toned he’d have been bound to have cut them a little slack.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
. . . the response of quite a few people on the political right to Giffords being shot has been to declare they they are the real victims.
It's become a familiar reflex. I'm pretty sure it was you who noted back at the time of Hurricane Katrina that the howls of outraged sympathy from that quarter were not so much for the victims in New Orleans, but for the unfairly maligned Dubya.
I’d say you were drawing a long bow but you might accuse me of encouraging arrow crime.
Another goshdarned Versarchery liberal.
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Baby boomers are starting to approach retirement age. During their peak income years - 40s onwards they had large tax cuts while their parents and grand parents had income testing. The 1980s and 1990s are a generational split in our social contract.
What smug self-serving deliberately divisive drivel. If you happened to be attempting to run a small manufacturing business in the mid-80s, actually making stuff, you got hit with GST, with no appreciable reduction in personal tax. I know, I was there, I didn't get rich, I paid a shitload of tax, and I'm a damned fool for having done so.
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I haven’t heard of any outbreak of people shooting maps.
There was a bit of that sort of thing about in the late 80s:
Make a hole with a gun perpendicular
To the name of this town on a desktop globe
Exit wound in a foreign nation
Marking the home of the one this is written for . . .