Posts by Kyle Matthews
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__Quite a few received a well funded education__
Sure they did. By their parents, or by scholaships. But not by the state. None of that has changed.
Per Equivalent full time student government funding in 2002 NZ$:
1980: $11,293
2002: $7,367A 35% cut.
What you’re ignorant of, willfully or otherwise, is that there was no student allowance prior to Goff’s introduction of user pays in the late 80s. Those without private means had to work part time and holidays to support themselves. The dropout rate was rather higher than today.
Well for starters, my postgradute study was on user pays and student resistance to it in NZ tertiary education. And I spent a number of years working in student associations, so it's an area I know a fair bit about.
Prior to the 1976 there was no universal system, student support was largely based on bursaries and scholarships. Some baby boomers would have ended up in that camp. In 1976 the government funded bursaries were introduced and included a living cost grant that was available to most students.
Currently about 25% of students under the age of 25 receive an allowance while studying. That's dismal student support.
__Please point out anywhere where I scapegoated baby boomers.__
Are you being cute? Everything you’ve posted on this topic has been selectively presented as an intergenerational blame game. Until this:
The one quote you can provide is where you say I wasn't scapegoating them? I mean it, provide a quote. I was quite carefully not scapegoating them. My parents are baby boomers and benefited tremendously from the changes that I've described. Yet they would have voted against many of them if they had had the chance. It's not necessarily their fault, but it's a distinctive line drawn in our history (another one which went the other way was the creation of the welfare state, when people who were earning and hadn't had welfare support, funded it for the generation that followed them).
Things do tend to focus that way once you step back from convenient self-serving generalisations.
If you could focus on what I'm saying rather that continually attacking me personally that would be good. It's simply ideas after all.
I must say Kyle you have certainly worked yourself up into a tizzy about all this.
I have no tizz. The intergenerational shift between those born in the 40s-60s and those born in the 70s-80s isn't particularly controversial. Brian Easton isn't the only economist who was written on it.
Ben and Jimmy have outlined pretty good examples of stories that I heard dozens of time when I worked at a students association - my parents/grandparents/uncles/aunties don't understand how the tertiary funding system has changed. Taxpayers tended to have very little understanding of just how little they were supporting tertiary students compared to 'back in their day'.
I’m still paying off my student loan which means the amount of money to put towards a house, marriage and kids is reduced – i’m hoping to have it sorted by the time i’m 35.
My loan zeroes out later this year. I couldn't have brought my first home or first car without my parents providing a money - saving isn't really an option.
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Eric Holder (and the Democrat run US Senate oversight comittees) have had unfettered access to all actual proof that exists. There has been no court hearing.
This is from the "political issues play no part in decision to prosecute US Presidents" school of thought. See Starr report, Nixon etc.
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That’s what I meant by “waiting for the South to get with the programme”, because enfranchisement was just the biggest issue of a multitude of segregationist matters that were addressed in that period in the South but which hadn’t been a consideration in the North for quite some time.
In relation to comparison with the current political US climate however, the north had some of the more interesting things going on. The Black Panthers invaded the California State Assembly openly carrying firearms. There was an on and off war between them and the police with a number on both sides being shot. They were also very influential in the decision to break up SDS and form the Weather Underground.
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And you miss the point that most of the bombings and such in the 196os were fringe, unless you equate the Weathermen with the likes of the ugly Senator King of NYC. The central political discourse was largely polite even when heated. That is increasingly often not the case now.
The structure was different (everything's always different), but in the South it certainly wasn't fringe. It was mainstream political leaders who were often endorsing or helping organise political violence, and then fronting up to the TVs and saying "this is what happens when uppity niggers start riling up good white folks". Some of these people were quite popular nationally.
No they don't, simply because I'm not old enough to remember those events first hand so the statement stands.
Well OK, I'll give you that technical point. I think my thesis still stands though. There's a tendency to see things that are here and now as the most significant ever. The American political system might be nasty at the moment, but it's certainly no where near as dangerous as it used to be (probably for a number of reasons).
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Where do I start calling bullshit on that?
The original statement was: "There is an ugliness near the centre of the US political discourse (if it can now be called that) which I’ve never seen before – Nixon’s rantings, which were not intentionally public, were nothing next to the words on the hustings and in the media of some of the now elected members of the layers of US government and their advocates."
The events of the 1950s and 1960s in various parts of America counter that. In some towns mayors and the elected sherrif went from their day jobs to KKK rallies. Numerous political assassinations, and of people much more significant than we've seen in this time period. A left wing anti-war movement that tore itself apart and went on a rioting and bombing campaign to 'bring the war home'.
It's probably more centralised at present, but that's probably also because it's by no means as radical so therefore more able to get itself elected to high profile federal positions.
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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”.
This particular generation is unique in the period after the creation of the welfare state. Quite a few received a well funded education, graduated from university without student loans, and then when they hit peak earning capacity, the government reduced taxes on them tremendously and brought in user pays. As higher income earners, lower taxes and user-pays works out pretty well. It created tremendous wealth, a lot of which we've seen go into the property market and put first homes out of the reach of the next generation.
Their children had/have the same lower taxes, but carry student loans, and face a full adult life of user-pays in various facets of society.
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.
Please point out anywhere where I scapegoated baby boomers. The social contract was broken, and baby boomers benefitted tremendously as a generation from it. Some of them undoubtably were the pivotal in causing this, but many were opposed. As a generation they benefitted however, there's effectively been an accumulation of wealth gathered together from both ends of the age spectrum towards the middle.
I was talking about the years 1985-1988.
During which NZ did not have a 66% top tax rate.
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There is an ugliness near the centre of the US political discourse (if it can now be called that) which I’ve never seen before – Nixon’s rantings, which were not intentionally public, were nothing next to the words on the hustings and in the media of some of the now elected members of the layers of US government and their advocates. Witness the calls to hunt down and kill Julian Assange.
What you're seeing at present pales in comparison to the 'dialogue' that took place in the 1950s and 60s around Civil Rights issues. Frequent bombings, shootings, lynchings followed open threats to do so, which often wasn't punished and was even endorsed by local authorities. Birmingham, Selma, the freedom riders etc.
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I don’t think I am really; I think saying : you (or some people, or whatever) are using this to get their hobby horses out, is in fact quite offensive*.
I have no hobby horse. I just think that the conclusion that these events are in any way strongly linked to Palin's maps, some NRA morons turning up at rallies, tea party rhetoric, etc is a stretch without concrete evidence.
I also find the use of people who aren't even the ground yet to score political points lacking in class. No doubt there will be lots more about this guy and why he did what he did, would it hurt to wait for that before blaming people across the political aisle?
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What about 1991 ? When the US-led coalition “liberated” Kuwait from the Iraqi invaders (spurred on by international condemnation, created by Hill & Knowlton’s creative use of, well, lies – about babies being tipped out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital…
Jackson filmed a movie in the late 1990s which came out in the 2000s in support of a invasion or Iraq that finished almost a decade before? I think you're reaching.
Did Tolkien write a book largely about Western white guys beating up on Eastern not so white guys? Yup. Did Jackson break that and do something different? No. Does it join umpteen other movies which have similar issues? Yup.
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And, what Joe said- GST was the bane of my life, and it was *in addition* to income tax.
You wouldn't have paid GST and 66% income tax. GST was a partial replacement for the massive reductions in income tax that Douglas brought in, they didn't exist at the same time.