"There isn’t a ‘blow-out’ in the numbers on the Invalids’ either, it’s increasing just a touch above population growth due to the fact the population is aging (most people on the Invalids’ benefit are older – 72% over 40, 35% over 55)."
Reacting to Michael Laws' comment that potentially awful parents could be offered cash as a sterilization incentive,
The Wall St Journal has an interesting article about research into the brain development of degu pups that are raised without fathers. These relatives of chinchillas are apparently normally raised by both parents. When the father is taken out of the equation the neurones develop differently.When deprived of their father, the degu pups exhibit both short- and long-term changes in nerve-cell growth in different regions of the brain. Dr. Braun, director of the Institute of Biology at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, and her colleagues are also looking at how these physical changes affect offspring behavior.
Their preliminary analysis indicates that fatherless degu pups exhibit more aggressive and impulsive behavior than pups raised by two parents...
...Of course, the frontal cortex—where thinking and decision-making take place—is more complex in humans than it is in other animals. Thus, says Dr. Braun, it is important to be "really careful" about extrapolating the recent findings to human populations.
It seems to have eluded Federated Farmers economic spokesperson Philip York at least – just as it eluded Ruth Richardson – that spending on welfare is one of the engines of the domestic economy. Beneficiaries spend the money that they get from the state in local shops – not on overseas trips or on luxury imports.
Same story with the low paid. It has been estimated for instance, that 2/3 of this year’s wage rise to staff at Progressive’s supermarkets will be spent back at Progressive, on groceries. The money circulates back through retailers, and government gets some of it back in tax.
It is impossible to estimate the social cost in crime, marital breakdown and mental health problems that have resulted from this ongoing pressure on benefit levels and entitlements.
Responsibility has drained away from the British welfare state, leaving a poisonous blend of entitlement and apathy.
> Abolish middle class welfare and benefit gimmicks, with immediate cuts that would save £14 billion. Further savings, including from migrating individuals from the state pension onto personal protection accounts, should be made as part of a medium term plan to restore the public finances.
> Hand benefit rules and operation to social enterprises and companies, funded through employee national insurance contributions.
> Develop flexible Personal Protection Accounts, building on the success of ISAs and the introduction of auto enrolment and personal accounts for retirement savings in 2015.
> Where possible, replace social security benefits with private provision, with private insurance being a potentially useful but largely underutilised tool, particularly for disability but also in other areas.
"Alcohol has become totally over-commercialised in New Zealand, encouraging a heavy drinking culture that leads to serious health problems, fractured families and increased violence and crime affecting thousands of people.
"Over a thousand people die every year from an alcohol-related injury or chronic disease and there are over 70,000 physical and sexual assaults perpetrated by people who are alcohol affected."
The reasons were clear.
"The easy availability of alcohol at all hours, low prices and continuous bombardment by very clever advertising and highly strategic sponsorship deals are key drivers of our dangerous drinking culture," he said.
"I think we all agree that children should be provided for, whatever their family situation. If we penalise the caregivers for moral reasons, I can only see this impacting upon the ability of the state to help the children of these caregivers.
The benefit system, including the Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB), is designed to supply a level of income support to enable parents to provide for their children. Benefit entitlement is based upon a person's individual situation. I could not agree to withholding money from people looking after children. It is the children that would suffer from that type of decision.
You might be interested to know that the vast majority of DPB recipients are in fact sole parents who have been married or in a relationship and who have lost the support of their husbands or partners for a variety of reasons.
As the Minister for Social Development and Employment, I will be looking into solutions that assist people into getting off the DPB and into work. Our policies will support parents while also recognising the value of paid work."
"Income Support in the form of DPB contributes to the needs of children, and towards the valuable task of childcare, and is intended to provide a good start in life for children. Children are our country's future.......The government and the law cannot discriminate on moral grounds
The majority of DPB recipients are separated or divorced from a legal or de facto spouse (63% in 2001).
Officials are looking at the best means by which sole parents can be supported and encouraged to balance their work and family responsibilities. The idea is to get alongside them, talk to them about what they want to do with their lives, then help them get there."
Hon PAULA BENNETT: This Government is committed to helping sole parents into work. We intend to change the work-testing rules to incentivise those parents to get a part-time job when their youngest child turns 6. However, I am committed to setting up domestic purposes beneficiaries to succeed, so we will hold off on making the changes until the economic conditions change and there are jobs for those people to be getting those sorts of opportunities.
Suppose you and your spouse are in charge of a family of, say, three young children. That means you are legally responsible for bringing them up to school leaving age and morally responsible for helping them in further training or education after that.
There are problems with ACC, but they very much depend on how the issues are framed. Truly, New Zealand can have a decent, efficient, state-run accident compensation system without breaking the bank. Don't fret about it. Get back to figuring out how you are going to pay for bringing up those kids.
Martin Wells, a statistician at Cornell University, re-ran the statistical test to check whether regional variations in IQ -- which is lower in Latin America and Africa -- could account for the IQ differences Prof. Straus found. After accounting for regional variations, Dr. Wells found the effect of spanking vanished. Dr. Wells plans to use the Prof. Straus's research in the classroom to demonstrate why it is important to consider alternative explanations.
In recent years, Mr. Shultz says, "There has come to be more and more of a realization of the nature of the problem. I thought it was interesting six or eight months ago, that three former presidents of Latin American countries, President Zedillo from Mexico, President Cardoso from Brazil and President Gaviria from Colombia made a report basically saying that we have to look at this problem in all of its dimensions if we are going to get anywhere with it. And we have to realize what its origins are."
Yet it is also true that those presidents spoke up only after they left office. I asked him if there is any hope of policy leadership from those in office. "There is a certain amount of evidence that people are realizing the nature of the problem and have more of a willingness to try to deal with it."
But, he says, we still have not created the "political space" necessary to raise the issue in public. "Right now if you are in politics you can't discuss the problem. It's just poison. The result is that we have this giant problem that is tearing Mexico apart . . . and we have plenty of problems here too and we're really not having a debate about it."
Mr. Shultz is a strong proponent of education to reduce demand. "If we want to get serious about this issue, we should start with a gigantic campaign to persuade people that drugs are bad for them. And it has to be based on solid factual material. You can't try to mislead people."
Abstract: Jean-Baptiste Michau argues that a declining work ethic helps to account for raising European unemployment from the 1970s.Link to study
Numbers on the unemployment benefit declined from a postwar peak of 177,000 in 1993 to 17,710 in June last year, but rose almost four-fold since then as the world plunged into recession.
Oregon became the talk of the West Coast for making pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient for illegal meth, a prescription drug.
And yet you don’t have to go far to hear about how meth is still very much in circulation.
Todd Eno: “I’m Todd Eno. I know a few friends of mine that are into it. I do once in a while.”
Eno spent last Sunday morning at a North Portland grocery store, feeding bottles and cans into the recycling machine for some change.
He’s beyond skinny, emaciated, really, his long blue jacket hanging on him like a scarecrow’s coat.
He says he definitely noticed changes between the meth that’s on the street now, and what was sold when pseudoephedrine was easy to get.
Todd Eno “It’s a lot different. MSM is what they’re using.”
Eno’s talking about Methylsulfonylmethane -- one of several alternative meth ingredients you can still get over the counter.
Todd Eno: “You go in there and buy that for a couple of bucks, spend two or three dollars and you can smoke all you want.”
But he says, it’s not as strong as what was on the market before...
Arrests for meth production, trafficking, and possession trended down between 2006 - the year pseudo became a prescription - and last year.
Even officers who were skeptical about the change admit they’ve seen a shift. They’re relieved to find fewer biohazards on crime scenes.
At the same time, Jeff says the days of swooping in on meth cooks coming home from the drug store are long gone.
Jeff: “We obviously can’t do that anymore. We deal with informants, people that are charged with crimes that want to talk. We continue to run with troopers on the highway running interdictions, stuff like that. Working narcotics is the darker side of the business sometimes.”
And getting darker. Jeff says one thing the pseudoephedrine law also changed: when Oregon’s mom & pop shops started to shut down, and drug trafficking organizations solidified their hold on the meth trade...
Bill Piper “Meth labs are down, but most of what you call meth labs weren’t 'labs'. A lot of law enforcement in a lot of states, if they went to a house and someone was making meth in the kitchen sink - most cases that was for persona use – there was a tendency to call that a lab largely because they had to prove they were busting up these labs to get more money. That’s not at all a criticism of law enforcement, it’s more a criticism of the funding streams, which kind of distorted incentives."
Piper says it’s a little too soon for policymakers to say whether the the pseudoephedrine law helped or hurt. There are officers around the state who say the law really cut down local meth production, which caused a slew of environmental and social problems.
But others say it’s eliminated some homegrown competition for large drug trafficking organizations. There’s general agreement these groups are regaining the influence they had before the "Mop & Pop" meth labs set up shop in Oregon.
Livingston says the pseudoephedrine law wasn't a bad idea, but it hasn't really made meth less available. Her counselor, New Step Director Maria Couch, agrees she's not seeing fewer meth addicts either.
Maria Couch "I have not. I don't see that the numbers have dropped at all."
Addicts are taking advantage of meth made out of state, or meth made without pseudoephedrine at all.
The year the pseudoephedrine law was passed, 15,000 people sought treatment for meth at state-funded facilities. Last year, that number was closer to 11,000. That's 4000 fewer people.
So did the stranglehold on meth ingredients lead to lower addiction rates? Not exactly. There were plenty of people who needed treatment for meth abuse, but didn't get it, because there wasn't enough money to pay for it.
Karen Wheeler runs Addictions Policy and Programs for the state of Oregon. She says funding for treatment of all addictions has actually dropped by tens of millions of dollars, in the years since the pseudoephedrine law was passed.
“I support Ngati Manawa’s call for help to address the cultural dislocation and disconnection that leads people to commit acts of violence, and as a minister I will do my very best to help them."
A third framework, focusing on the role of cultural identity has, over the preceding two decades, been the dominant explanation employed to account for the ethnic asymmetry in child maltreatment rates in New Zealand. This view proposes that it is the degree of association that Māori families have with Māori kin groupings and the level of commitment they show to traditional customary practices that will influence the likelihood of Māori children experiencing maltreatment. From this perspective, strength of Māori identity in families is a protective factor for child abuse, and a lesser identification with Māori cultural domains may increase the risk of children being exposed to maltreatment. Intervention guidelines for child abuse have therefore been specifically developed for Māori, by Māori. These focus on determining the levels of affiliation Māori families have to cultural domains and the strength of cultural identity of individuals who reside in the family. Reattachment of Māori families to cultural domains and customs has therefore become a key feature of current child abuse intervention efforts.
Comparisons of the sole Māori and Māori/other group showed consistent differences between the groups in terms of several aspects of Māori culture, including:
* frequency of marae visits (p < .001)
* being a member of a Māori group, organisation or sports team (p < .05)
* being a member of a kapa haka (cultural performance) group (p < .001)
* attending a tangi (funeral) or unveiling (p < .001)
* listening to Māori-language radio programmes and watching Māori-language television programmes (p < .001)
* listening and watching programmes in the English language about Māori (p < .001).
It was concluded that Maori, and in particular those of sole Maori cultural identity, were at higher risk of exposure to physical punishment and inter-parental violence, and that the associations could not be fully explained by either socio-economic deprivation or exposure to family dysfunction in childhood.
Disability benefit receipt has almost doubled in Australia since 1990, with the biggest growth among the working-age population.
"Unlike other countries, we don’t hand over a benefit and then offer to help someone find work."
Young people who have grown up in welfare-dependent families are disadvantaged in more ways than has previously been realised, a study shows.
From much higher rates of asthma and hospitalisation to much lower rates of post-school study and entry to university, the young are likely to suffer the disadvantages of their parents....
..."People have suspected these differences but I'm not sure we knew of the extent of the disadvantage and the breadth," Professor Cobb-Clark said.
"Welfare campaigners this week lobbied the government to lift unemployment benefits, after the OECD revealed that more than half the jobless households in Australia are ‘poor’: with incomes less than half of the median.
But acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard did not take the bait, standing by the government’s decision not to increase unemployment benefits and payments for sole parents in this year’s budget.
Gillard was right to stay firm. More work, not more welfare, is what these families need to improve their economic situation and the well-being of their children.
One in eight kids now lives in a jobless household. Most of us instinctively appreciate that the striking disadvantage they face extends well beyond the purely economic.
Fairfax’s Adele Horin reported yesterday on new research from the Youth in Focus study released at the Australian Conference of Economists this week. It highlights just how destructive welfare and parental joblessness is for these kids.
If welfare rights campaigners who this week attacked the government really want to improve the lives of those they claim to help, they could start by recognising that making welfare more attractive will only intensify their problems."
