There were 56,769 on the sickness benefit and 85,085 on the invalids benefit, he said. The figures were close to those of a year ago.
Or the reporter?
Because 'close to' would be a stretch of the imagination.
On those sort of numbers 'close to' would indicate maybe a few hundred either way.
I cannot make a comparison to exactly one year ago but in September 2008 there were 48,208 people on the sickness benefit and by December there were 50,896. Now there are 56,769. Is that 'close to'? Maybe a 14-16 percent increase?
Doing the same with the invalid's benefit indicates around a 2 percent increase. Now that is closer to 'close to'.
The 59,028 people now drawing the [unemployment] benefit was 1722 fewer than seven weeks ago, and well below the 82,000 Treasury had predicted in one estimate.
OK. That's more positive. But The Standard yesterday pointed out that the recent drop may be nothing more than normal seasonal fluctuation. So what have we got. A recent drop in the unemployment benefit due to a combination of seasonal change and job subsidies and every other benefit continuing to grow. As the DPB is not mentioned you can be fairly sure that is also continuing its upward trend.
Anyway, the main point of the article was to announce that more jobs are going to be subsidised. I have posted before about the problems therein. Skewing markets, in this case, the labour market, is just another example of squeezing the partially inflated balloon.
5 comments:
Lindsay, I would suggest you get annual data, express them as a percentage of population or some such measure that takes in population growth and then see if it has anything like a normal distribution, so you can make some statistical sense of the variation involved.
(If that doesn't work, just pull a "phil Jones" on it, and create any hockey stick to your liking by using different calculations from year to year, or adjust your definitions a bit till it fits your argument, that's accepted science now).
The real problem is that the number of people on the dole are far far too low for any real restructuring to take place.
There is also the fact the the dole and other benefit payments levels are far too high, and the stand-down and other periods far to lenient - but that should lead to more people on the dole, not fewer.
Just goes to show that this government doesn't have the guts to "reform" or "rebalance" anything,
There you go again, Ms Mitchell, derailing stories with facts. There is just no place in politics for that kind of behaviour.
Go sit in the corner until you decide to behave like the rest of the flock.
www.inpho.co.nz
"Squeezing the partially inflated balloon'
Your turn of phrase cracks me up!
Dirk.
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