The Greens are riding the child poverty issue for all its worth. According to Stuff , quoting Meteria Turei from yesterday:There were 275,000 children living in severe poverty and two out of every five of those children came from households with parents in work but whose pay rates were too low, she said.
The figure seems to grow at each turn. That's the highest I have seen yet.
What do official measurement sources say?
• In 2010, there were 1.07m dependent children (under 18) – on the measures in Table S.2, between 170,000 and 270,000 children were in households with incomes below the low-income thresholds (ie ‘in poverty’).
• In 2010, on the Social Report measure (AHC ‘fixed line’ 60%), there were 230,000 (22%) children in households below the low-income threshold (ie ‘in poverty’), down from 380,000 (37%) in 2001.
Note though Turei's use of the word "severe".
Severe poverty would be indicated by using not the After Housing Costs (AHC) 60 % threshold but the AHC 50 % threshold which is 16 percent.
That produces a number of 171,200.
But what does it matter if you overstate a problem by one hundred thousand plus when you can trust the media to accept anything you say?
5 comments:
You're right, the Greens just feed the media anything and they print it without checking the facts. Why has there been no mainstream media investigation into whether Russell Norman did in fact know of the hoarding sticker scandal? I don't believe a word that comes out of the Greens' mouths. They're cult-like and spew hate; I have as much regard for them as I do for Destiny Church.
The really dumb thing about the child poverty debate in this country is the assumption that there is a bottomless well of money to address the problem. There is not. 17% of households already pay 97% of the income tax. The vast majority of these households are not rich by any global measure and their standard of living is continually being eroded by rising living costs (driven in a large part by increased government charges and compliance costs). Yet it is this group that Labour and the Greens expect to fund more and more state welfare through higher taxes. History shows us that the Laffer Curve really does work - higher tax rates lead to lower overall revenues and vice versa (e.g. see http://onforb.es/sbH0vd). So the outcome of raising taxes undoubtedly will be less revenue. Therefore higher tax rates and increased welfare benefits will only lead to higher government deficits funded by more debt. And if you want examples of where that leads, look at Greece, Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal today.
If you can't feed them, don't breed them!
Sadly you cannot accept anything logically from Turei. Sad to slant what is a real problem.
Politicians should be held accountable for saying things without proof. That will stop such slander
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