Hard News: Just marketing to the base
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Grant and others of his ilk seem more interested in telling we peasants what they think is good for us, rather than leading by example.
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In the words of Lyndon Johnson (who unfortunately squndered his Great Society goodwill by launching into the Vietnam War) ...
But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
Most will agree that social welfare is an elephant in the room. But with apologies to Jim Bolger, it's easy to abolish the welfare state but how would you govern the country tomorrow?
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Just so we're clear what we are "tolerating" here, when Mr Dexter pronounces that "humanity has a problem", he means this:
What is the greatest social issue of our time?
Well .. it's a tough issue. For a start there are far too many homos running around. It's really annoying not being able to take more than a few paces outside without having to risk losing one's lunch. Then there are the adulterers. They should be strung up as an example. I'll not say where or how. But the most egregious social issue of our age is the endless stream of lives that are sacrificed through abortion.Yep, any reasonable person knows that abortion causes poverty. It is undeniably a fact that only the old testament has the answer for that, and it aint welfare (or shellfish-eating or any other quaint customs prevailing a couple of millenia ago in a dusty corner of the globe). Sure aint love either.
Thusly fair Sofie, you were closer to understanding Grant's prescription than mine. Although I imagine a characteristic lack of christian charity from him at any mention of witches.
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:think:
Well, DeepRed said something useful, I suppose...
Red, I wouldn't advocate eliminating welfare overnight. That just wouldn't work :)
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More :think: ing.
I'd probably keep welfare much as it is. Start off gradually by denying new unemployment benefit applicants. Anyone who is on a benefit can stay on, but nobody else can get in.
Shut off student loans and benefits in a similar way....
I'd want any existing contracts honoured, of course. That'd do for a little breathing room. Taxes can come down. The economy can breathe a little better.
What would be wrong with that? Other than there being a few people wanting to beat me up for some reason...
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I've followed this thread with some fascination, and I've learned a bit. Cool. I've learned nothing from Dexter, and I refuse to feed anything to trolls except chunder.
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Grant is your objective to have everyone crawling back to the church for
education and handouts?I have nothing but admiration for the work the church does in places where welfare does not exist but it's not going to work brother the way I am hoping you see it, otherwise you are a man of little compassion.
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Blake, I can only assume you mean the church as an organisation. I prefer Che Tibby's analysis of what the church is.
It doesn't matter who is handing out freebies people will always become accustomed to living as comfortably as they can. And if they know they can rely on some organisation for support then they will live up to that.
I think it is important to make a distinction between a gift when one sees a need and a "benefit" like the dole. It should be clear that at times the two might look very similar. But the important distinction is the motivation of the giver and the expectation of the receiver. When the giver is generous of his own volition there is little chance of resentment forming.
It should also be made very clear that you are again playing the sympathy card. Institutionalised generosity does not address individual needs. It sets conditions that people must meet. When a person gives out of charity they are able to directly meet a need.
I do not accept any charge that removal of benefits is bound up with a lack of compassion. Quite the opposite. If people here were prepared to engage in discussion rather than threats, taunts, invasions of privacy, diversions and vulgarity then perhaps that misconception could be addressed.
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I disagree with everything Grant posted, but isn't it just the overt policy of ACT and the covert views of a lot of National supporters?
I think you are right there Rich.
I don't fully understand the whole "troll" concept, at least insofar as for people posting sincerely held views. Is the idea that one should only "debate" from a position of broad agreement with the general leaning of a forum?
I thought a forum was the coming together of like minded people, not to just kiss arse, to discuss, but to deliberately attach oneself for the sole purpose to disagree would in my view be a troll. There are all sorts of appropriate places for a PA troll to piss off to and we have seen that person go there in the past just to shit stir regarding the blog about abortion. Otherwise he could always crawl back under his very little bridge and wallow in his own shite.
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It should also be made very clear that you are again playing the sympathy card. Institutionalised generosity does not address individual needs. It sets conditions that people must meet. When a person gives out of charity they are able to directly meet a need.
Tosh. "Institutionalised generosity" met my individual need for food and shelter -- or more importantly, those of my young family -- during the brief period in which I claimed an unemployment benefit. I have since repaid that many times over in taxes, and I see that as a reciprocal obligation.
There is evidence that such transfers have a slight positive impact on GDP per capita, and a very significant impact on absolute poverty rates. Short version: in states with welfare systems, far fewer children suffer.
And, for that matter, die. The countries with the lowest infant mortality rates are all welfare states.
People in welfare states also tend to have homes. By comparison, the US, especially in the wake of welfare reform, has not only high rates of working poor, but the highest rate amongst developed nations of the working homeless.
Your statement above is less as argument than an article of faith.
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Shut off student loans and benefits in a similar way....
Ah, so you want an uneducated, unemployable, poverty-stricken population? Do you have a degree, Grant? Did you pay the full cost of it?
The great thing about all the right-wingers your age is that you were quite happy to take your state-funded education but heaven forbid that my generation be allowed the same benefit. And that's just the ones who think that partial-funding is too much. You want to go further, and make people pay the whole cost and do it through the private loans market. At least people such as David Seymour (who tutored me for economics in my first year) aren't preaching from a very flimsy high horse on matters of education funding, unlike yourself.
Who's going to be able to afford to visit a dentist when dentistry students have to pay the whole cost of their education? Or doctors? Coz I'm sure your utopia does away with fee maxima and state funding of doctors' visits for children or low-income earners.The countries with the lowest infant mortality rates are all welfare states.
But, Russell, so long as the children are allowed to be born Grant doesn't give a flying fruitcake whether they live to see their second birthday. If they do, more slaves for his buddies to exploit. If they don't, well, he's fulfilled his calling to ensure that abortions are banned and after that the state should just stay the hell out of everything. Kinda ironic, really. "Abortion is bad, but so long as the baby's born I don't give a damn if it lives or dies beyond that."
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But, Russell, so long as the children are allowed to be born Grant doesn't give a flying fruitcake whether they live to see their second birthday. If they do, more slaves for his buddies to exploit. If they don't, well, he's fulfilled his calling to ensure that abortions are banned and after that the state should just stay the hell out of everything. Kinda ironic, really. "Abortion is bad, but so long as the baby's born I don't give a damn if it lives or dies beyond that."
Ha, too true.
The countries with the lowest infant mortality rates are all welfare states.
A quick search on Google Scholar reveals a number of papers like this one:
Social epidemiologists have found a relationship between poverty and infant mortality. Welfare policy experts have found that welfare benefits affect work effort, family structure, migration, and the rate of intergenerational transmission of welfare receipt. Social epidemiologists have paid little attention to the effects of poverty policies on infant mortality. Welfare policy experts have paid little attention to the effect of welfare on infant mortality. This paper merges the concerns of social epidemiologists and welfare policy experts by examining the relationship between welfare and infant mortality. The key finding is that welfare directly and indirectly affects infant mortality rates. States with higher welfare benefit levels also have lower infant mortality rates.
Lewis, M (1999). A path analysis of the effect of welfare on infant mortality. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare. Vol 26(3) pp 125-136 . -
I have to confess to being able to see some (albeit very twisted) logic in Grant's position, aided by the evidence that demolition of the welfare state does awful things for infant mortality.
If you do away with welfare, only the rich will be able to afford to raise children. Only rich children will survive. The children of the poor, who don't deserve to survive because they're poor, won't. Iterate over a handful of generations, and voila you have only deserving children being raised in wealthy families.Of course we then have to find the dusties, and cleaners, and secretaries, from this pool of privilege and expectation. We've seen what happens to the pay rates of tradesmen (not knocking them, but they're traditionally not paid like accountants or lawyers) when there are serious supply-side shortages - plumbers and sparkies earning $80k+, for example - but what would happen to the wages of cleaners if suddenly there was a shortage? Someone's got to do it, after all, and the traditional way to make under-serviced jobs attractive is to increase the pay.
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Indeed. Though you're going to be seeing a lot of benefit abatement by the time you cross the repayment threshold anyway.
Actually, if your benefit and supplements is over $300/week, you're going to get over the student loan repayment threshold (just over $18K at present) real quick once you start earning.
There have been some beneficiaries who have had to repay loans straight out of their benefit, though that's not very common.
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Russell:
"Institutionalised generosity" met my individual need for food and shelter -- or more importantly, those of my young family -- during the brief period in which I claimed an unemployment benefit. I have since repaid that many times over in taxes, and I see that as a reciprocal obligation.
You think people are obliged to give to those in need .. I don't.There is evidence that such transfers have a slight positive impact on GDP per capita, and a very significant impact on absolute poverty rates. Short version: in states with welfare systems, far fewer children suffer.
I'll have a look at wikipedia tonight. :)And, for that matter, die. The countries with the lowest infant mortality rates are all welfare states.
I'm sure they are also the ones with the most well established health systems as well.People in welfare states also tend to have homes. By comparison, the US, especially in the wake of welfare reform, has not only high rates of working poor, but the highest rate amongst developed nations of the working homeless.
What, on Earth, is a working homeless? Who qualifies to make up that demographic? As noted there is nothing wrong with being poor. I think it would be much better to be working and poor than not working and poor. -
Just so we're clear it's not the position that offends me:
Priest rubbishes welfare system
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/author/story.cfm?a_id=135&objectid=10524008&ref=rss -
Priest rubbishes welfare system
Bit ironic, what? Considering that the priesthood relies almost entirely on the goodness of their parishioners. Bah.
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And their massive property holdings, exproriated from Maori. And their tax-exempt status, which effectively represents a subsidy from every other taxpayer. Love to see a fundie defend that one.
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What, on Earth, is a working homeless?
Grant, it's not that difficult to understand. In the United States, people can work full time in low wage jobs and yet still not have enough money to pay for rent, food, and transport to work (remember that many American cities are impossible to navigate via public transport) at the same time. They live in their cars or crash with friends or sleep on the street; some of the working poor live in shared motel rooms because they can never afford to save enough for a bond and rent in advance on an apartment. (This also why the working poor mostly have to live on unhealthy fast food, since cheap motels in the United States rarely have kitchen facilities, as ours do). I suggest you seek out Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. It's particularly eye-opening on this issue and is a short, easy read. There is a summary of it here.
In many ways it's such a cruel country, particularly for the most vulnerable of its citizens.
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So a "working homeless" is a guy who lives in a cheap hotel and has a job. What would we prefer here? The same guy to be living in a cheap hotel and not working?
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Correlating welfare and infant mortality rates is statistically an impossible mission. The number of factors involved that make up a society will always make any result questionable, but the most pressing concern is the lack of control to any analysis. One cannot take the numbers for before and after to test for welfare influence on a single country because the data just isn't available. I accept that countries with welfare may generally have better mortality rates, but the causal factor is more likely the lack of medical infrastructure. And medicine can be dispensed with or without a welfare system.
Correlation does not mean causation. I'm prepared to concede that welfare states have generally lower infant mortality rates, but I am not obliged to accept that welfare is the reason for such.
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What do I think about the Cubans? I think it's great that they meet needs and show generosity as you've described.
Steven. What would you think if the American government forced Cuba to send it's doctors to do the same jobs under the threat of invasion?
Why do you think it is OK for a government to make people give to the poor under the threat of imprisonment?
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Matthew's mockery of me and his earnest desire to hear what he wishes I'd say rather than what I actually say show his fundamental misunderstanding of how people work together. When rich people have money they PAY poor people so that they might work for them. When the rich people do not pay, feed, house and clothe the poor people then the poor people leave .. they don't die. They go and find other work.
I think you're all still not aware of the fundamental issue: It is not wrong to be poor. It is not wrong to live in a car, at your mate's place, in a cheap hotel or even under a bridge. It is possible to be wrong in response to being poor. Stealing is one of the ways to be wrong. The government making an institution out of theft doesn't make it right. It just makes it a whole lot safer and easier to defend or ignore.
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I think you're all still not aware of the fundamental issue: It is not wrong to be poor. It is not wrong to live in a car, at your mate's place, in a cheap hotel or even under a bridge.
I don't often get personal online, believing, as I do, that one shouldn't say anything to someone online that one wouldn't say to their face offline. So I'm not really breaking my rule. Because I would definitely say this to you, Grant, if I ever met you. And I apologise in advance to all my erudite and reasonable PA colleagues.
Grant - you're a dick. -
So a "working homeless" is a guy who lives in a cheap hotel and has a job.
No, that person would be the member of the working poor. A working homeless person lives under a *bridge* and has a job.
If you think that's a perfectly reasonable existence for someone working full time in the richest country in the world, then Jackie's right. Except I'd probably add 'idiotic' as a modifier.
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