Growing up

Kittens are born...and the next minute they are ready to leave home, or their drawer. One is still looking for a someone who will love and care for it. We simply cannot keep another. Four cats is absolutely enough. Anyway, I can't get any more food in the shopping trolley. An old Geordie gent tapped me on the arm this morning, pushing my piled high trundler out of Woolies, "Back agin t'morrow, will 'e?"

Haiti fund-raising effort

Is $500,000 'generous'? It's only around 30 cents a household. Perhaps 'generous' needs to be prefixed with 'relatively'(as compared to previous appeals, not countries).

In terms of government aid the following countries have pledged;

NZ $1 million
UK 6 million pounds (NZ$13 million)
Australia $10 million (NZ$12.5 million)
US $100 million (NZ$135 million)


The Australian government has pledged 13 times the amount that NZ's has.

Some people have a problem with the government sending 'their' money - I don't. This is a valid area for collective action. In any case, our government can and does waste $1,000,000 at the drop of a hat at home.

Disagreements between Turia and Bennett

The NZ Herald reports on the associate Minister of Social Development strongly disagreeing with the Minister of Social Development over the proposal to require the unemployed to re-apply for the dole after one year.

"This is a vulnerable group ... Surely if you are saying people are unemployed for too long and malingerers, then you have to be really clear about taking steps to help them back into work. "

Except "malingerers" do not want help.

This is going to be a year of sparks flying between these two. Despite The Herald saying they have worked closely together so far, at least two other deep divisions between the two come readily to mind. Work-testing the DPB and putting at-risk Maori children in placements away from whanau.

I don't know how the decision-making hierarchy pans out. You may. An Associate Minister has responsibility for specific areas but I imagine ultimate authority still rests with the Minister. Is that correct?

Apart from which any Bennett/National legislative policy will get the numbers anyway.

Is there a problem with GPs?

I am hoping to attract MacDoctor's attention and expert input. Health is not a sector I have studied in any depth. So I stand to be corrected on the following conclusion.

Waiting in the surgery with my poorly (that's an old-fashioned term for sick) daughter days back I overheard the receptionist telling someone via phone that the practice could not see them because they weren't registered there. She gave a number to ring where someone would tell them which Hutt Valley practices were taking on patients or the caller could go on the waiting list to be taken on at that particular practice.

Another incident was recently recounted to me about a young woman who turned up with shingles or chicken pox at a pharmacy. The virus was getting near her eyes and the pharmacist was very worried about her and tried ringing several practices in an effort to get her in front of a GP.

As I understand it, Labour poured an extra couple of billion into primary health. They changed GP funding. GPs are now paid per capita. That is they are paid for each enrolled patient whether they see them or not. I have heard that the DHBs are now becoming quite frustrated with some GPs because they are taking time off. And they are not enrolling new patients. Apparently GPs describe the problematic situation as an economic one. But it has been suggested to me it is an ethical one.

Not long ago we needed a plumber urgently. It was a Saturday morning and we had a burst main flooding the garden. I deal with a fantastic outfit, and a plumber was there within a couple of hours. He worked all day to fix the problem. He was able to go and get the supplies he needed because hardware stores open all weekend because they are staffed by people prepared to work all weekend.

But if you need to see your doctor urgently, even when he has been paid to see you, frequently it's an impossibility. GP practices work very limited hours. So the alternative is hospital emergency services or after hours - neither of whom has been paid to see you. (It could be argued that the hospital has, indirectly, but you will pay through the nose at the after hours.)

Outcome; Labour upped the spend on primary health substantially for no increase in productivity.

Maori women and smoking 2

A few days back I did a post about Maori women and smoking. A belated comment came in and I am going to highlight it because it rings true and appears to have a credible author. I especially liked the comment about do-gooders;

I did several years in social work and 'early intervention' and my pet hate is health promotion forced on this area. Lets not get real with people and say ' he/she is a looser and you can do better', 'this is how to hang out washing', 'you need to get up at seven to get your kids to school, 'lets sit down and take a look at the list of groceries you need this week', how about we take a family trip to the park/beach/pool and make some sandwiches for lunch', 'how about we look into jobs, or courses'.... instead lets take them to expo's and more agencies to address smoking??? Lets do more assessments, lets keep ticking the boxes and insisting that the babies get all their vaccinations and tick all those boxes and if they dont do it' report them to CYFS, lets give grass roots workers impossible caseloads so they end up unintentionally colluding, so the experts with more impossible caseloads can in turn, miss the warning signs of yet another otrocity and blame it on the grass roots workers blah blah. You said it well Lindsay in your blog , and until people can tackle the everyday monotonous living that they probably never experienced consistently, why would they give up what seems their only pleasure at all. Especially with all the do gooders around to bore them and stress them out more!

I'm Maori, single ma, smoke and drink, have great friends and whanau, have a great job and look after us and I enjoy life. I dont see the health promoters knocking on my door :-) GET REAL PEOPLE!!!

Unemployment and crime according to The Standard

Over at The Standard they are talking about unemployment causing crime again.

A Government that really wanted to reduce crime, rather than one that was simply pandering to populism to get elected, would concerntrate on the well-known and understood causes of crime – the biggest of which are unemployment-induced poverty and deprivation.

When I challenged this theory I was directed to the following graph;



This is a really interesting representation. First let me show you what the crime line looks like when fully depicted;



Now, if you can imagine the unemployment measure on a right axis also starting from zero, the line depicting the unemployment rate would deviate a long way from the crime line. It would drop well below it. Here is a crude sketch;



Or let's put it another way. A forty five percent drop in unemployment, which delivered maybe a 10 percent drop in crime, does not show a strong association.

Return to their graph and consider something else. Using their scale, when the right-hand axis reaches zero - or full employment - the left-hand axis will still be showing about 78,000 crimes.

This "conversation" came out of a post they did today which was actually about violent crime and how it has risen under National. But it had been rising under Labour too. The following is violent recorded offences;



Now, one last thing. Imagine if the same treatment was given to this graph as occurred to the first. There would be no correlation whatsoever.

Are we, or are we not, highly taxed in NZ?

Crusader Rabbit drew my attention to the last of these graphs. I am including the two others. The first (or a statistical variation of) is the one that social democrats always use to show that New Zealanders are not highly taxed in the scheme of things. It shows total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP and NZ is just over the OECD average;



But look at tax on goods and services....



And finally, look at tax on income and profit ....



For historical interest, the statistical tables attached to the final graph show that in 1955 (when our per capita income was relatively high) the OECD average tax on income and profits was 9 percent of GDP. NZ's was 9.1 percent.

By 2007 (when our per capita income is relatively low) the OECD average was 13.5 percent and NZ's was 22.3 percent.

And note also that in Canada, Sweden, Finland and the US the percentage has fallen in the past few years. Ours has risen.

Socialist soap

When I read this headline, Socialist soaps wanted, I thought it was about cleaning agents. And for the life of me I couldn't imagine what a socialist soap would look like. How would it differ from any other soap? Perhaps you are told that you can all share it, use it every day, and it will never run out? Or perhaps that you can all share it, use it everyday and the state will give you more when it runs out? Perhaps, and this would make sense of the headline, it is rationed and acquired only by using soap stamps? Maybe socialist soap cleanses the spirit of nasty self-interest? Any other ideas?

How generous are New Zealanders?

Apparently, based on tax files;

Americans gave 1.60 percent of their aggregate personal income to charity, more than double the 0.73 percent that Canadians donated to charity.

This tweaked my interest. Canada has a bigger public sector than the US and my assumption is that where government does more, taxpayers give less to private charity.

So how would NZ compare on this basis?

It is estimated that NZ individuals, as reported on tax returns, give $356 million annually (c 2004).

In 2004 there were approximately 1.494 million households with an average income of $63,384.

So New Zealanders give an average of 0.38 percent of their aggregate income.

On this basis (tax receipts kept) in 2004 our household gave approximately 0.5 to charity but with economic uncertainty I have cut back to around 0.43 percent.

I am now feeling rather stingy.

(Notwithstanding there are lots of ways people express generosity beyond giving cash.)

Labour and risk aversion

This post could get me banned from Red Alert because people do get banned from there, quite frequently.

Yesterday Trevor Mallard posted a brief reaction to Kerre Woodham's column in the Sunday Herald. In full;

Kerre Woodham’s column in the HoS today promotes letting or even encouraging kids to take some risks.

Too often risk averse parents and schools wrap kids in cotton wool to the point where they don’t develop the power to judge risk and make their own decisions.

That was it. Plus 38 comments including a number which were deleted because they were offensive or off thread. The last comment is from Trevor;

expat – every now and again we do a more general post to test reaction to Red Alert and the style people want. What comes through very clearly is that users want a much tighter moderation policy here than at Kiwiblog or The Standard. That includes staying on thread, language and tone. It means that lots of individuals who don’t feel safe on other blogs feel ok commenting here.

That is the end of the debate on moderation on this thread. All further off thread comments will be deleted.

I couldn't post my reaction to this at the site because my comment would be "thread-jacking" as was expat's. But do you see the delightful irony in Trevor's closing remarks?

(While I am on the subject (I think???:-)), a commentor on this blog was upset about comments directed towards them and emailed me about it. There is very little I will delete in the way of comments. Many that are offensive are directed towards me anyway. Eventually I did remove the entire post because one commentor had gone too far. Otherwise I cannot and will not take responsibility for people upsetting one another in the comments section. They have to do that. There isn't a skerrick of authoritarianism in me.)

Crime theory "demolished"

According to the Wall St Journal the theory that crime is caused by "income inequality" and "social injustice" has been "demolished" by continuing falling crime rates coupled with rocketing unemployment.

Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s.

The response to the theory is described;

If crime was a rational response to income inequality, the thinking went, government can best fight it through social services and wealth redistribution, not through arrests and incarceration. Even law enforcement officials came to embrace the root causes theory, which let them off the hook for rising lawlessness. Through the late 1980s, the FBI's annual national crime report included the disclaimer that "criminal homicide is largely a societal problem which is beyond the control of the police." Policing, it was understood, can only respond to crime after the fact; preventing it is the domain of government welfare programs.

Of course, it wasn't only the US that went down this path.

The writer concludes that policing and incarceration have kept the trend moving in the right direction and looks specifically at Los Angeles and New York;

At the start of the recession, the two police chiefs who confidently announced that their cities' crime rates would remain recession-proof were Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. As New York Police Commissioner in the mid-1990s, Mr. Bratton pioneered the intensive use of crime data to determine policing strategies and to hold precinct commanders accountable—a process known as Compstat. Commissioner Kelly has continued Mr. Bratton's revolutionary policies, leading to New York's stunning 16-year 77% crime drop. The two police leaders were true to their word. In 2009, the city of L.A. saw a 17% drop in homicides, an 8% drop in property crimes, and a 10% drop in violent crimes. In New York, homicides fell 19%, to their lowest level since reliable records were first kept in 1963.

The Compstat mentality is the opposite of root causes excuse-making; it holds that policing can and must control crime for the sake of urban economic viability. More and more police chiefs have adopted the Compstat philosophy of crime-fighting and the information-based policing techniques that it spawned. Their success in lowering crime shows that the government can control antisocial behavior and provide public safety through enforcing the rule of law. Moreover, the state has the moral right and obligation to do so, regardless of economic conditions or income inequality.

That may be right. But I think there is more to it. There has been a sea-change in US thinking over the past 30 years. Americans were focussing on welfare and its role in society long before Clinton's federal legislation was enacted. For instance from the 1970s people receiving social security because they were drug or alcohol addicted had to attend rehab courses, have a benefit payee and there was a 36 month time limit. I am not saying this was particularly successful but use it as an example of their keenness to prevent long term worklessness. More importantly, various states were trying out different approaches to prevent welfare undermining the institution of family, particularly black families, recognising that strong and enduring families are one of the greatest deterrents to crime.

All of this culminated in the famous 1996 Clinton welfare reform act - PRWORA - the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. It's a mouthful but when you break it down and think about it, the words embody the opposite of what leads to crime. Irresponsibility and idleness.

The state can and does influence moral thinking. Americans do not wince about using the words "personal responsibility". They use them to name laws.

In NZ too many people do wince. For them it means "individual responsibility", which translates to "individualism", which translates to "selfishness and greed" (see a comment from Friday that directed me to "stop thinking only of yourself").

So what do we have as a result. Our crime rate, specifically violent crime, continues to grow. And it would appear we are going to go down the unavoidably hard line of locking up more and more people but without any accompanying move towards instilling in society a different attitude towards responsibility. It has to start with the individual.

As time goes by

Click on this and sit there watching the time you are wasting go by.

ACT and taxpayer-funded privilege

I have been mulling over ACT's scholarship policy which was under attack yesterday. This isn't the vouchers policy but a scheme Heather Roy pushed through as part of the National/ACT agreement. It wasn't campaigned on. She acquired $2.6 million for 150 scholarships for low socio-economic children to attend private schools.

The question I have been asking myself is what part of a classical liberal philosophy does the policy satisfy? And if ACT isn't a classical liberal party which other principles does this policy fulfil? Isn't it simply an example of taxpayer money being spent on privilege or special interest? There is certainly an argument that it is a better use of taxpayer than many others but is this the track ACT should be going down? Isn't that what leftists are all the time doing? Harnessing taxpayer money for what they believe in?

Personally I would have expected ACT to be encouraging private or charitable enterprises to fund scholarships.

Humour in unexpected places

If you want a laugh you wouldn't ordinarily go looking for it at The Standard but this is passably funny.

Garth George should leave child abuse alone

Garth George has chosen to write about child abuse in today's column. He has struck on this theory;

Rodger McDaniel, a lawyer, church pastor and former state legislator who is deputy director of the Wyoming Department of Health, reckons that whenever there is fast growth in an economy it brings with it a variety of social problems, including drug use, alcohol abuse and child abuse.

That makes sense, for all of those have soared with a vengeance since the economic revolution of the mid-1980s.

Rogernomics has been blamed before for New Zealand's seemingly high rate of child abuse. But not because of fast economic growth. Tariana Turia for instance;

“This latest report makes it quite clear - the peak in child deaths was from late 1980s and 1990s - the so-called experimental years in New Zealand’s economy - when unemployment was highest and when benefits were cut” says Mrs Turia.

Poor old rogernomics. Damned if it did; damned if it didn't.

The statistics alone do not support either theory anyway because the death numbers are so low very small differences can substantially change the rate. And any debate about the rate of abuse gets incredibly muddied by changing definitions, changing attitudes and reporting rates, and changing laws and their application.

According to George;

Eight children aged between five weeks and three years died from abuse in the year just ended, which is the average for any year in this country.

Yet deaths from child maltreatment have averaged around 8 a year for a long time.



In 2004,05 and 06 the yearly average was 8.6

Then the statist in George goes looking for a quick fix. The Do something, Anything approach.

And, perhaps, undo the shocking discrimination instituted by the Clark Government that denies the child-related supplement called the in-work tax credit to the poorest children and has left them further behind and well below the poverty line.

Says Susan St John, of the Campaign Against Child Poverty: "It would cost about $450 million a year to extend the in-work tax credit to all low-income children. They would then be treated the same as others regardless of the source of their parents' income - as they do in Australia.

"Money is not everything but it is a very important basic foundation. Society deliberately denies the poorest children adequate financial support and then blames them when their children become social costs."

Certainly money isn't everything, but for God's sake let us start somewhere - and soon.

Unfortunately, to some people, money is everything. Let's strip this thing down.

Children are abused, very occasionally to the point of death, because they are not wanted. They are brought into this world oh so casually by people who do not have the maturity to look after a puppy. Why, when avoiding unwanted pregnancy is easier than it has ever been, does it keep happening? Because 'dropping sprogs' is part of a lifestyle. The same lifestyle that involves the drug and alcohol abuse George refers to.

It's a mean lifestyle that has always existed. But without a doubt, paying people to not only live it, but add children to it, has exacerbated the incidence.

Forget all the crap about slow economy/ fast economy. Like other developed countries, in our 20th century crusade to redistribute wealth - to obliterate need and inequality - we grew this group of disaffected and dysfunctional individuals.

And Garth George is calling for more of the same.

Halfdone blog ratings for December 2009

I like Halfdone's blog ratings because so far I have only climbed the table:-)
Half Done rated 683 blogs in December 2009.

What I can't figure out is what the little yellow icon denotes.

Welfare UK-style

The following is from James Bartholemew, author of The Welfare State We Are In. Which NZ government does the opening paragraph remind you of? Hint. National hasn't even talked big - yet.


Housing benefit provides the biggest discouragement to work


In the great roll call of this government’s failures and blunders, its record on housing benefit deserves to have a prominent place. This was the government that was going to “think the unthinkable” on welfare benefits. Instead it “did the predictable”. Instead of embarking on radical reform like the administration of President Clinton in America, it opted to muddle along. It talked big and acted small.

Housing benefit is arguably the worst of all the benefit failures. Why? For two important reasons. One, it costs an amazing amount of money after nearly doubling since Labour came to power to £20 billion. That – for those who can bear the idea – amounts to £692 for every working person in Britain. Most people imagine that Jobseekers’ Allowance is the big, key welfare benefit. Not at all. Housing benefit costs more than three times as much.

The second and even more important reason why this failure matters is that housing benefit is probably the biggest single discouragement to the low-skilled unemployed to getting a job. Get a job and you lose housing benefit at a rapid rate. So housing benefit is one of the most important reason why more one in four people of working age are not working.

The official cost of £20 billion is just the beginning. Nearly all the people who are discouraged from working are also getting other benefits including Jobseekers’ Allowance and – in many cases - Incapacity Benefit or Income Support. But worse even than that is the effect on the morale and culture of those at the lower end of society who get accustomed to welfare dependency. It causes depression and alienation and contributes to uncivil and even criminal behaviour.

There is a simple rule for creating sound welfare benefits. It was described 175 years ago in the report of a Royal Commission into the operation of the poor laws. The commissioners decided that benefits should not be more advantageous than the income that would be obtained by the individual taking on low-paid work. It is as simple as that. Work must always pay. .

On radio phone-ins I have often heard people exclaim: “Do you realise how little you get on Jobseekers’ Allowance? You can’t live on that!” Unfortunately interviewers – being part of the upper middle class - rarely understand that the Jobseekers’ Allowance and other benefits are normally accompanied by other benefits such as a free school meals and, very likely, the big one: housing benefit. Only when they are all added together do they amount to a meaty discouragement to work for the low-paid.

It will come as a surprise to many people to know that not all countries pay housing benefit – or at least not to as many classes of people as Britain does. In Italy, for example, an unmarried teenage mother does not climb up the council housing queue, get income support and housing benefit. She is expected to live with her parents or other relatives or perhaps the father of the child. The result is that there is far less unmarried parenting in Italy than here. They make their decisions and live with them. That means they make better decisions.

If there were prizes for tinkering with the welfare benefit system, this government would certainly win the gold trophy. I used to get press releases from the old Department of Social Security as it was called. If I had had a strange notion of interior decoration, I could have wall-papered my bedroom with them within a few weeks.

To be fair, some reforms have gone in the right direction. James Purnell, when he was in charge, decided that people should only get benefit to pay for a maximum of five bedrooms. Yet you can see from this example just how cautious the reform has been. For people who struggling to afford accommodation with two bedrooms, it will seem outrageous that others can going on having babies and getting more and more bedrooms at the expense of taxpayers. And people sometimes get benefit at a level based on expensive housing. Hence the scandalous case recently of one family getting £2,875 a week.

America was far more radical in its reforms. President Clinton agreed to a limit to the total number of years in a lifetime during which people could claim unemployment benefit. America was determined to do something about the benefits culture. Britain under Labour has merely strutted on the stage – posing, pontificating and making precious little difference.

What could be done? One idea – from the Centre for Social Justice - is to subsume housing benefit with many benefits into just a couple of major benefits. The benefits could be withdrawn at a slower rate than now when someone gets work, thus reducing the discouragement to getting a job. The trouble is that, other things being equal, this would cost a lot more.

The truly radical idea would be do something like that but significantly reduce the amount paid and leave it to the recipient entirely what accommodation is rented – if any. That would provide a powerful incentive to lodge with relatives or to go to a different area with lower rents.

But has Britain got the guts to do this sort of thing? I would like to think so but there is every reason to doubt it. The upper middle class elite does not get the seriousness of the problem. The BBC, the readers of Guardian and the Independent believe that their support for generous benefits makes them into generous, good people. Unfortunately it does not. It results instead in the continuance of a welfare dependant lower class with tremendously damaging social effects both to the poor themselves and everyone else.

(This is the unedited version of an article that appeared in the Daily Express today.)

Maori women and smoking

If one in three Maori women is on a benefit, one in two Maori women smoke, and smoking rates are highest among low income groups, the chances are the taxpayer is paying for their cigarettes or rollies. The taxpayer is also paying for their cessation attempts, on average numbering 14 before successful.

So we pay for Maori women to smoke, and we pay for them not to. There seems a more obvious solution, although there is little political will to explore it.

Quitting smoking is tough. It is doubly tough if you are depressed, bored, idle, with nothing to look forward to and nothing else in your life that gives you pleasure - albeit fleeting pleasure. And when in such a rut the prospect of foreshortening life doesn't hold much sway either.

Kiwiblog recently ran a story about a no-smoking prison that was deterring people from committing crime. They would rather give up crime than quit smoking. Given a choice I am sure some people would rather get a job than quit smoking. Such is their desire to smoke.

While people have multiple problems in their lives, quitting smoking will never be a priority. There are more fundamental issues that need sorting first.

Hectoring ad nauseum

The Australian holiday road toll is 68. The legal minimum driving age is 17. The Australians are blaming the state of their roads and irresponsible driving.

In NZ the holiday road toll is currently 11, which is, on a per capita basis, lower than Australia's. New Zealanders are blaming the minimum driving age of 15.

NZ and Australia are obsessed with holiday road tolls. Perhaps because it fills a gap in news stories. Perhaps because various interest groups want to use the toll as a lever. But do many more people lose their lives over this particular period?

According to the MOT;

The Christmas/New Year holiday road toll period begins at 4pm on Thursday 24 December and ends at 6am on Tuesday 5 January.

The holiday period will be 11.6 days. Last year the 2008/09 holiday period was exactly the same - from Dec 24 to Jan 5 (11.6 days).

11 deaths in 11.6 days is, so far, under the average for that time period.

In 2005 New Zealand's road toll was only very slightly above the OECD average. Per 100,000 population, NZ's average was 9.9; OECD 9.5. The NZ figure has improved since. There are a myriad of factors affecting the rate but, in the scheme of things our rate isn't really, really bad - and neither is it really, really good. Accidents, tragic accidents, happen. But, the trend is heading in the right direction - down.

I guess I am just tired of being hectored about the road toll, along with smoking, eating junk food, drinking alcohol, water safety, sun safety, ad nauseum. No wonder so many New Zealanders are neurotic nutbars. Best just stay indoors and diet. In an unhappy coincidence, Wellington, the home of hectoring, taxpayer-funded harpies, has served up the weather to make you want to do just that.

What happened to Maharey's grand plan?

In 2003, then Minister for Social Development Steve Maharey outlined his vision for people on the DPB. Labour was scrapping work-testing (which National says it will soon re-introduce) in favour of 'enhanced case management'. According to the Minister;

Work and Income will be doing more to help sole parents into work with changes to legislation that comes into effect this month, says Social Services and Employment Minister Steve Maharey.

The Social Security (Personal Development and Employment) Amendment Act, which comes into effect on 10 March 2003, delivers on government promises to develop a social security system that responds better to the needs of individuals and their families.

“The legislation abolishes the arbitrary work test on sole parents receiving the Domestic Purposes or Widows Benefits. Currently 19% or 21,924 are subjected to a work test requirement to seek part or full-time work because of the age of their youngest child.

“As a result of the change all people receiving the DPB, Widows or Emergency Maintenance Allowance will receive enhanced case management to help them in training and work planning for their future.

“All 118,098 in the three benefit groups will be required to work with their case manager to develop and implement a Personal Development and Employment Plan. The plan will outline personal development, training and employment goals and the action points required to reach those goals.

I asked MSD how many beneficiaries had a PDEP. By June 2009 the grand total was 35,161. Of those 24,096 were on the DPB. Only 23 percent of all DPB recipients. If you are thinking that the policy had been abandoned because of a change in government, hence the low number, you are wrong. 66 percent had been implemented between June 2007 and June 2008 and the remainder over the next 12 months.

The interesting thing is that only 17 people on the DPB who had a PDEP had had it put in place 3 or more years ago. Which may indicate that 1/ The plans do motivate people to move off a benefit or 2/ The ministry's record keeping is suspect.

If it is the first, no surprise. Around a third of people on the DPB are motivated to get off it. They would probably do so with or without the plan. It is easy for case managers to work with this group.

But what about the rest???

At the time of Maharey's press release there were 108,000 on the DPB.

Now there are .... 108,000 on the DPB.