Wednesday, June 20, 2007

To 'anonymous'

Oh Dear. I made a blue. Here's an 'anonymous' comment from yesterday.

Lindsay, you've blatantly misrepresented Hyman's article, which is headed "A Universal Benefit Works for Women". She was writing about the benefits for women of a universal basic income. The article also points out that a UBI would not discriminate - by definition, everyone would get it. Now if you want to argue about UBI (which seems to be a dead issue, so not much point in that) go ahead, but don't depict it as 'wages for housework' only for women. It never was.

Quite right too. I was being flippant and hasty.

So let's be serious. A UBI of $8,000 for everybody would discriminate. Why? Because the lion's share of the tax paid to fund such a scheme would come from men. It would simply add to the forced redistribution of wealth which already moves broadly from male to female through the benefit system.

Also the children's UBI would go to the main caregiver which is usually the mother. That's $8,000 per child she has control of.

And finally, I depicted the UBI as being for caring and cleaning services. Prue Hyman most certainly did see the payment as recognition for the 'value of caring for children and dependent relatives'.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're a Statistics junkie Lindsay

Just check out this table on sources of income from the 2006 census. I'm sorry blogger wont let me format it nicely for you but even so it speaks for itself.

Selected Sources of Personal Income by Sex
2006 Census
Sources of personal income Men Women
Percent
Wages and salaries 62.0 58.0
Interest and investments 25.2 23.2
Self-employment 21.5 12.1
NZ Superannuation 13.5 16.1
No source of income 4.6 7.2
Other superannuation 3.3 2.3
Other government benefits 1.8 4.6
Other sources of income 1.5 2.9
Domestic purposes benefit 0.6 5.5

And the headlines from this latest dump from the census generates?

Figures show huge income gap between men and women

That table kind of explains why methinks

Lindsay Mitchell said...

Sometimes referred to as the feminisation of poverty