I read Bill Ralston's column today with a sense of bemusement. He chose the two things I had used to highlight how National are fiddling, to highlight where money could be saved for taxcuts. The $45,000 on TVs for prisoners and the $761 million of beneficiary debt.
This is the same Bill Ralston that used to host radio talkback. I well remember one day trying to start a conversation about how a welfare culture leads to crime. He made a sarcastic rejoinder that perhaps beneficiaries were committing crime because they weren't paid enough, and cut me off.
In today's column he writes;
Another fact that should make Helen Clark think twice about her handout strategy is the debt mountain in the Ministry of Social Development. More than 500 people are now employed by the MSD to try to control the $761 million of beneficiary debt. While it must be hard, at times, to get blood out of a stone, you do have to wonder about the competence of the MSD in failing so abysmally to manage its own affairs.
Here's a thought - that $761 million, if recovered, would make a nice start in tax cuts for people who work for a living.
Now there's a change in tune.
Apart from which, I am unsure how the $761 million, which is mostly being repaid through further benefit reductions, can be used for tax cuts. But then I am not an economist.
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2 comments:
Ralston's lightweight turnaround is completely unsurprising in that it is simply symptomatic of how there is no philosophical thinking going on in much of our media, none at all; thus fools like Ralston's are as poll led as the politicians and can change in such contradictory fashion simply because they/he has no centre of belief: there is no thought process going on at all, other than for the minute ahead.
Unfortunately the country is run along exactly the same lines.
Mark Hubbard
Oh, meant to say in my first post, that it is also the difference between the classical Liberal, such as I guess you might define yourself Lindsay (?), and the corrupted, modern day liberal, so concerned with trying to believe in everything, in every side of every issue, that they have ended up believing in absolutely nothing, thus, will always contradict themselves, and stand for nothing, so that evil will prevail while liberals stand by and do nothing.
Mark Hubbard
... such is the argument against multiculturalism, by the way.
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