"If I had my way you'd take it away from the decrepit old folk and give it to the young ones. Make super means-tested and a benefit for children unconditional. Older people don't need it, they have money."
Here's the thing. Not once in the entire article is Working For Families mentioned.
The author writes:
It would not be the first time such an initiative has been offered: New Zealand had a family benefit until April, 1991.When it was scrapped it was worth $6 per week.
$6 in wages in 1991 would be worth $13.55 today.
Even in 1946 when the universal family benefit was introduced at the rate of 1 pound a week that equated to only $76.87 today calculated under general CPI.
Here are the family tax credit rates from 2018. The IRD no longer publishes them (or I cannot find them).
I have included the Best Start payment which applies until 3 years-old for lower income families.
Clearly children are getting more cash assistance today than they were in 1991.
If you were a visitor from another country reading this claptrap though you'd think NZ gave no financial support to children at all.
3 comments:
What an awful person.
There's a crisis out there with the elderly poor whom central bank simulunacy has doomed to little or no income off term deposits at 2.5% (or having to take ludicrous risk for their age).
Yes Mark is right, you can't live off your savings any more unless you put them into something like housing - and we know what we think of those people.
Easy to talk tough when those doing the pontificating are pulling a couple of hundred thou a year. I know old folk whose life choices were limited, who now spend their twilight years eating dog roll because they get more bark for their buck. Not everybody goes cap in hand to the man demanding more than their share.
I've seen young folk give up working a community garden when they observed cats defecating in the dirt. "Better to starve, than eat anything grown in catshit" they declared.
1987 my then wife and I capitalized the family benefit and used it to help us purchase a home for our family. We were poor financially,our children wore hand me down clothes and lived in a house lacking insulation. By todays standards it might be suggested we lived in poverty. But our reality was we lived like kings. Food was basic but there was plenty of it, thanks to a big garden full of the house cats crap. We milked a cow and never got sick because the milk and butter came from the udder and not a bottle or packet. The fire never went out because there was firewood everywhere, we just had to go and get it and while our income was small, we earn't it the hard way. And I suggest during these times there were literally thousands of other families doing exactly the same thing . They talk about "Boomers" as if our good fortune fell like mana from heaven and unlike many of todays millennials who whinge about how hard done by they are, lots of us slow moving boomers are still working hard.
Just saying.....
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