A $45,000 warning

Going, going, gone - a New Zealand teenager has auctioned off her virginity to a stranger for over $45,000 to fund her university tuition fees.

A $45,000 warning. What could that be? That the experience with the inexperienced might be a let down? That she might be a porker telling porkies?

No.

Fellas. I made a comment over on Kiwiblog and thought it worth repeating here. You can laugh all you like about men who pay for sex with virgins or otherwise. But the last laugh may be on you.

By delightful coincidence the average child support bill is around $45,000.

Don't get caught. And don't let your sons.

State school funding

A comment on the last post made me think I shouldn't assume people understand the way schools are currently funded. Schools are classified into deciles explained here.

According to the Ministry of Education Resourcing Handbook, in 2009 all state schools received $707.83 funding per Y1 to Y6 pupil .

A decile one (poorest) school receives an additional $804.07 per pupil called Targeted Funding for Educational Achievement and decile ten (the wealthiest) receives nothing. All other schools are somewhere in between.

Hence many schools now charge rather hefty fees which are wrongly, in my view, called 'donations.'

National Standards

As a parent of a primary school student I suppose I should have an opinion about the introduction of National Standards. Firstly there are schools, and there are schools. My firsthand experience extends only to my child's school which is a decile 10 school. I have anecdotal knowledge of other schools but it is very limited. For instance a friend had sent his children to a decile 1 school because he was in the zone. Eventually he pulled his children from the school because they were spending too much time trying to help non-English speaking children to learn. He had wanted to support the local school but the cost was too high. There is a great deal of difference between decile 10 and decile one schools.

When we visit the teacher at our school we are given information about how our child is performing relative to her age. This is based on testing. I had a look at the school's targets and performance to find out what the tests are called and discovered a range depending on what year is involved. Evaluations include national end-of-year NumPA benchmark norms, PAT maths test and IKAN and NZ English Curriculum Benchmarks, etc.

Our school compares itself performance-wise to other decile ten schools. Which is meaningful and fair. In its own assessment of how the school is achieving the board notes;

We note that these types of assessments and the use of results is aligned with the expectations of the National Standards programme that all schools will have to deliver by 2010.

I don't know how the staff or board feel about the introduction of national standards but it would seem to me superfluous.

It looks like those schools that are not producing children meeting satisfactory levels of literacy and numeracy are responsible for the imposition of unnecessary universal policy.

But that is the story of New Zealand isn't it? Forever introducing rules and regulations to try and fix problems that are not universal.

In depth analysis of child abuse

The fourth study into the incidence of child abuse in the US has just been released. A study has been conducted each decade from the 1970s. It collects data from 126 counties.

There is no NZ equivalent. We have statistics (bits here and bits there) but no comprehensive analysis of other factors like socio economic background, family structure, educational enrolment, relationship of perpetrator to child, involvement of drugs and alcohol etc. It seems to me that we could learn a lot from their findings. Certainly the findings put to bed the sorts of claims commonly heard like, "child abuse and domestic violence happens right across society".

The report is 455 pages. I have only skimmed through it and lifted a dew points of interest

Background;

The NIS–4 measures the total number of children who are abused or neglected in the United States and indicates the degree to which this number has changed since the earlier cycles collected similar data (the NIS–1 in 1979, the NIS–2 in 1986, and the NIS–3 in 1993).

Some findings;

Compared to children with employed parents, those with no parent in the labor force had 2 to 3 times the rate of maltreatment overall, about 2 times the rate of abuse, and 3 or more times the rate of neglect. Children with unemployed parents had 2 to 3 times higher rates of neglect than those with employed parents.

Children in low socioeconomic status households had significantly higher rates of maltreatment in all categories and across both definitional standards. They experienced some type of maltreatment at more than 5 times the rate of other children; they were more than 3 times as likely to be abused and about 7 times as likely to be neglected.

Children living with their married biological parents universally had the lowest rate, whereas those living with a single parent who had a cohabiting partner in the household had the highest rate in all maltreatment categories. Compared to children living with married biological parents, those whose single parent had a live-in partner had more than 8 times the rate of maltreatment overall, over 10 times the rate of abuse, and nearly 8 times the rate of neglect.

Which again brings me back to why marriage makes a difference to children. In a nutshell the state has discouraged marriage through the welfare system and legislation. Today it is frantically running around trying to mop up the mess.

(Hat tip to Crusader Rabbit for alerting me to the report.)

ACT forgets its "great purpose"

It must be personally satisfying for an MP to enter parliament and achieve something for some people. That is the way of modern politics. Nearly every MP is after taxpayer funding, or legislation that will enhance the interests of some people.

And as such Heather Roy will be pleased with her group of students going into independent schools on the back of tax-payer funded scholarships.

But a speech given by Muriel Newman in 2007 captures exactly why this is exactly not what ACT should be doing.

Muriel said, "The great purpose of ACT was to attack privilege in New Zealand."

It's a hard message to sell. It should have been the opposite but unfortunately too many noses and too many troughs .....

With this policy ACT has wimped out and taken the line of least resistance. I know I am out on a limb on this one but it is quite antithetical to what ACT stands or stood for.

When he's 64

Kiwiblog linked to a Treasury paper within which is this little gem. It's a wonderful depiction of the ageing population. I mentally plotted the line that would represent my first born across it. He will enter the grey zone in 2059 when there will be, well, one heck of a lot more oldies than there are now. What do you reckon will have happened to Super by then?

My guess is that the country will still be arguing over means-testing, surcharges, universality etc, as it did all through the 20th century; the eligibility age will be 70 and the payment rate will be a lower percentage of the average wage than it is now.

New data on ex-nuptial births

I blogged last week about why marriage makes a difference to the security and stability of children.

The latest ex-nuptial (unmarried) birth data has just been released.

Last year 30,533 births out of 62,964 were ex-nuptial or 48.5 percent. That is up from 47.7 percent in 2008 and 47.2 percent in 2007.

In 1964, the earliest data provided, 9.9 percent of all births were ex-nuptial. The fastest rate of change happened during the eighties. The ten years to 2008 showed a slower rate of change than the previous decades. But there has never been a year when the percentage didn't rise.

Misa misfires

Tapu Misa has written her usual denunciation of growing inequality. This time she launches from a report about income inequality in Britain;

The report, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in Britain, says the gap between rich and poor is greater than at any time since World War II, despite 13 years of Labour rule and the billions which Labour has poured into initiatives to try to close the chasm.

By some measures it's harder for a child born into poverty today to rise up the social ladder than at any time since the 1950s.

The fact that the inequalities opened up in the 1980s under Friedmanite Margaret Thatcher, and were held back, if not significantly narrowed, by Labour policies, is little consolation...

The parallels with New Zealand are striking.

But are they?

In fact the growth in income inequality in Great Britain is much lower than in NZ as shown here. The growth in income inequality in GB is half of the OECD average.



It would be much more accurate to claim the parallels between NZ and Finland are "striking" when measuring income inequality growth.

Misa has written about Finland before;

There are no private schools in Finland and education is free all the way through university. But Finnish 15-year-olds top the OECD in educational achievement, as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)...

We could learn a lot from Finland, not just in the way it treats its teachers but in the way it reformed its education system from the late 1960s.

Could we replicate their success? Naysayers often point to the fact that Finland's population is more homogenous than ours, but Massey High's principal, Bruce Ritchie, who visited Finland on a study tour, points out that it was a more monocultural society 40 years ago, when its education system had similar problems to ours.

Bugger. For someone who strongly believes public education will solve the problem of inequality, that throws a bit of a spanner in the works.

I am sympathetic to her desire to see the incomes of the 'poor' rise. But as I wrote on Friday, that cannot be achieved through taxation and redistribution.

Dogism

Along with all the other evangelic crusades of the new century - anti-alcohol, anti-drugs, anti-obesity, anti-hooliganism, anti-prostitution (mostly mirroring those of early last century) comes the anti-dog campaign.

It is understandable that people with children are cautious about dogs but having both children and dogs gives perhaps a more balanced perspective.

The NZ Herald editorial today has made the re-ignited issue about Rodney Hide and his attempts to bring some deeper thinking to the debate over freedom and restriction. It quotes Hide;

"I am not sure that people with an irrational fear, however real, of dogs have a right to require the physical restraint of all dogs in public places," he said when announcing the review last October.

Setting aside the question of how a fear can be irrational and real at the same time, it is worth pointing out the size of the margin by which Hide misses the point.

There is no "question" about a fear being both real and irrational. Plenty of people harbour fears that are irrational. Extreme cases are called phobia. But that sentence captures the fault-finding mood of the writer.

All dogs should be leashed all of the time. That seems to be the position taken.

All dogs pose a problem or a potential problem. Perhaps a potential problem is a problem of itself. Ergo all dogs are a problem.

In reality, some dog owners and some dogs are the problem. The attitude taken by the Herald would be bizarre and repulsive if it was applied to people. Some people are criminals, or potential criminals but it doesn't follow that everybody's freedom should be restricted - although that is the path we are going down with the likes of surveillance cameras. Pursuing this line of thought the Herald would have us all in monitoring anklets.

A new term should be coined. Dogism. Like feminism and racism it describes an attitude that treats all individuals as one based on some attribute beyond the control of the bearer.

Dogism is growing thanks, in part, to the media. It is itself irrational. It forgets that domesticated dogs have shared our society forever. That they fulfil many functions no other animal or person can; leading the blind; assisting the disabled; tracking offenders; protecting property; herding farmstock; hunting or retrieving; supporting racing and showing industries; visiting terminally ill people or dysfunctional children; saving lives. But above all they are companions and for some, provide a purpose for living.

So I am not about to become an apologist for dogs. And it makes a change to see a politician bring some broader thinking to the issue of dangerous dogs beyond the reactionary and emotional dogist response.

Maximum rent

Stephen Franks is musing about the proposed property tax and its effect on the rental market/ housing availability. Which prompted this comment from me (I risk broadcasting the idea to deter National, not to encourage the statists);

I have also pondered this in a vague sort of way. A great deal of rent is currently paid for with the accommodation supplement ( $1 billion annually). If rents rise as a result of a property tax, under this government's approach of compensating the 'poor' for any rise in their living costs, the accommodation supplement will also have to go up. How much of the extra revenue raised will be offset by the extra expenditure?

The Left puts up two irreconcilable demands. As you put it "soak the rich", and subsidise the poor. But while the landlord has freedom of pricing, nothing has been achieved except more cash transfer. The same happens with employment. While on one hand the Left wants workers topped up by the state, they also rail against subsidising the employer. Hence a minimum wage is legislated.

So don't be surprised if the Left start talking about a maximum rent. If National go down this road they will have to contend with this demand, and as Mr Key has already fiercely asserted that the 'poor' will be compensated for any rise in GST, he will be in a very weak defensive position.

More is broken than just the tax system

Writing in today's NZ Herald, Susan St John succeeds in showing how complex and counter-productive the state's attempts to redistribute wealth have become. But because the writer believes in the notion of state responsibility for income equality she is merely hoping that the government can come up with a better design on the back of "an adequate and comprehensive review."

Perhaps, instead, it is time to examine the beliefs behind government-mandated redistribution - or put more crudely, robbing Peter to pay Paul.

There are two broad ways that wealth gets redistributed. Through taxation and transfers, or through work and shared profit. Over the past 40 years the trend has been towards the first method. State cash transfers have grown steadily. That growth has brought with it more and more complexity as more and more people want a piece of the pie. It is undeniable that whenever a new 'benefit' is introduced it isn't long before there are calls to extend it, either by generosity or by eligibility. A recent example is Paid Parental Leave. Not happy with the current status, lobbyists want 52 weeks instead of 14 and fathers to be paid as well. (Notice here that the prime lobbyist, the Families Commission, is also, after a fashion, a recipient of cash transfers.)

So why is it that government continues to increase the rate of transfer - from the frugal 19th century beginnings of welfare through to the recent Working For Families - yet inequality, according to St John, keeps growing? It is now apparently at an unacceptable level.

The problem lies in the method. When people work for their income there is a return to both employer and employee. The sum of wealth is added to. When people do not work but receive income from the state, the sum of wealth is diminished. This means there is a very obvious limit on how much the state can transfer.

Add to this the disincentive factor. It is reflected in the vast number of people now receiving some form of welfare. If the state is offering cash, the need and desire to work is reduced.

Which is how we have arrived at the current "mess", to use Ms St Johns description. But the only question being asked is, how can the state keep giving people money and keep them working? Trying to solve that conundrum has resulted in the very complicated interface between the cash transfer and taxation system.

Somehow NZ has to pull back from the current pathway and fiddling with the tax system isn't the answer. Taking money off people just to give it back (and more) is patently silly and inefficient. Paying people benefits from a very young age thus locking them into the cash transfer system for years is socially and economically counter-productive.

There are better ways to organise a society. Better economic brains than mine have put up ideas worth exploring. Flat tax, tax-free income thresholds, negative income tax, private social security provision, individualised social security accounts, etc.

But underlying all of these ideas is a philosophy of minimal government intervention. If simplicity and equity are paramount we need less taxation, less taxation machinery, less churning and less transfer - not more.

Goff's speech - warning

Don't waste your time reading it.

Spun to be something it wasn't.

In a nutshell;

The recovery. All should share in it. Every NZer wants to work and should be paid at least $15 an hour. State sector chiefs shouldn't be paid more than $400,000 though. Rich bankers and CEOs of finance companies should be dealt with. The rich should pay their way and benefit fraudsters should be cracked down on (so National can't use them to cut social services.) No child should be left behind because all parents want the best for their children. But the community is responsible for stepping in where parents fail. Three strikes sucks and a promise to address Maori and Pacific educational failure. Tax reform must be fair. Beat the R&D funding drum.

Stephen Franks was wrong. More's the pity.

Grassroots Labour's Kaine Thompson says Labour lost the last election because voters became bored with them. Nothing in this speech is going to change that. If this is his best, Phil Goff should pursue a new direction in life.

Lord, I am tired of vapid politicians.

Goff to define a 'welfare rort'

It is very hard to read this and remain composed;

Labour leader Phil Goff is expected to ramp up his rhetoric against welfare rorts and vested interests in a speech in which he needs to put Labour back on the front foot after a year in the poll doldrums.

....He is expected to return to his theme of personal responsibility – taking aim at those who "rip off" the system, rich or poor. Among those in his sights will be wealthy Kiwis exposed by a tax working group last week to be hiding income to qualify for benefits.

It will be fascinating to hear how Goff defines a "welfare rort". He can hardly use the high profile examples National has been parading, when the whole point of this 'state of the nation' speech is to differentiate the party he leads.

Make no mistake. It is Labour that has time and time again given society programmes that are open to exploitation. They are warned of the unintended consequences but always press ahead in the interests of 'social justice' and vote-buying. They gave us Working For Families and now he is going to rail at the matter of it being ripped off.

And "personal responsibility"? It is a long, long time since Labour philosophy and policy has been synonymous with personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is only for the suckers who keep the show on the road in spite of extensive government efforts to demoralise and disincentivise the lot of us.

Another sickening animal story

An aggrieved neighbour takes the law into his own hands and slaughters 33 dogs. This is exactly the reason why the idea of vigilantism sparks deep reservations within me.

If there was a problem with these dogs (as yet unproven) they should have been destroyed humanely.

The whole story is utterly sickening and sad. The owner is clearly something of an eccentric man who has chosen a lifestyle most people wouldn't understand. But apart from not registering his dogs, which would have been financially beyond him, what harm was he doing anybody else?

The guy that committed this atrocity is the headcase. He may well have been heartbroken over the loss of his pet but as such should have understood something of the way Mr Hargraves might have felt about his own animals.

Benefits by region

My analysis of the latest benefit data;






Things to note;

1/ The DPB has the highest numbers in all bar two regions.
2/ The Canterbury and Southern regions have disproportionately high numbers on invalid benefits (and high ratios due to psychological and psychiatric reasons). These are the only regions where there are more people on IB than DPB.
3/ Auckland is the only region that has more sickness beneficiaries than invalid beneficiaries.
4/ The growth in sickness benefits has been very high over the past year averaging 16 percent nationally, compared to 4 percent in the previous year. It is highest in the Waikato which also features the highest DPB growth.
5/ Wellington, home of government, has the lowest unemployment benefit growth; Canterbury the highest.

You may notice and want to comment on other aspects of the data. But the graphs do not paint a very bright picture.

Abdominal abomination

The call for publicly-funded stomach stapling is just abominable. Not that it doesn't already go on to a degree but talking it up as an 'entitlement' is just a green light to get fat and then take the easy way out. And 2 National MPs have backed up the call. Obviously individual responsibility doesn't apply to what you choose to put away on a daily basis. But then it doesn't apply to much else with this particular version of a National government.

Yesterday I blogged about just how tight the health budget is. There are many people who are going to be living in pain because they have degenerative unavoidable conditions. MacDoctor told us last week that he is having a devil of a time getting patients in to see a hospital specialist.

But that is the economic ethics of publicly funded health. If you are old you are a burden. If you are young you are an investment. No matter if you failed to control the behaviour that caused the need for a $28,000 operation.

Turia says;

"We already pay billions of dollars for the care of diabetics ... All of that is huge money that the state has to pay."

Here's a radical idea. Avoid the frigging diabetes in the first place or pay for the op yourself.

Unspeakably horrible stories of cruelty

The story of the man feeding kittens to his pitbull has been widely canvassed but I only just came across this one. It's chilling.

I saw and heard the sister of the man who fed kittens to his pitbull saying he was just being stupid. She valued their lives just about as much as he did. A certain type of people don't care about themselves (except in the most base way) and don't care about others - human or otherwise. Quite commonly, they are parents.

Health spending - the rationing can only increase

It would be possible to embark on a similar exercise using NZ statistics but let's just rely on the work the Australian Treasury has already done. According to the Age;

FEDERAL Government spending per person on health will rise in real terms from $2290 today to $7210 in 2050, with state governments at risk of being overwhelmed by rising costs, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has said.

Treasury projects that, on present trends, the total health spending of all states will exceed all of their tax revenues, excluding the GST, by 2045-46, and possibly earlier in some states.

Our government spending is currently $2876 per person. This cannot be compared directly because in Australia the states spend individually on top of the federal government. But it is the projected increase that is important.

In the mix are new technology, price inflation and, most importantly, the ageing population. If a much bigger chunk of the population is 'old' the average spend increases. This is progressively happening against a backdrop of recession or the lag from it.

I understand that our DHBs have been told that they are only getting a little over 1 percent of increased funding this year. It is already very tight. And it's going to get much tighter.

So it is no surprise that the government is going to fight the Human Right's ruling regarding payment for the care of disabled adult children by their parents or that some DHBs are looking for other sources of revenue.

Just as an aside looking at the health spending projections there is no allowance for an increase ($13.4 billion in 2010 to ...$13.4 billion in 2015). On the other hand social security and welfare spending equivalent figures are $21.1 billion to 24.6. Why the big difference? Yes some of the welfare increase is Super but that means the country is forecasting for old-age pensions but not the healthcare needs of the pensioners. That's a worry. I would prefer to see budget limitations being put on Work and Income. When is that going to happen?

Well said Muriel

Beautifully put;

There are around 340,000 private rental dwellings in New Zealand, many owned by mum and dad investors who have put their savings into rental property as part of their retirement plan. Any decision by John Key and National to punitively punish these people – because the government can’t get its own spending under control – is contemptible. As is any further attempt to politically portray them as pariahs.

From Muriel Newman's weekly column.

Marriage makes a difference

What is it about marriage? Social liberals don't much care for the state-sanctioned traditional custom. Modernists wanted to dispense with 'the piece of paper'. Helen Clark apparently loathed the idea of marriage.

Marriage is a very public promise. You hear folk say it means nothing these days. People don't expect it to last. But on an individual basis, I am certain many do. De facto relationships have their place, especially for the young, but they aren't really about commitment (I generalise).

I am a big fan of the institution of marriage but stop short of saying the government should get involved in promoting it. It is government involvement in the private lives of people that has played a significant part in undermining marriage.

Crusader Rabbit drew my attention to this news out of the UK, a similar society to NZ. Only 3 percent of unmarried couples stayed together until their child was 16.

The only similar NZ information I have ever come across is;

According to Jan Pryor, director of the Roy McKenzie Centre for the Study of Families (and now Chief Families Commissioner) only about 12 to 13 percent of kids’ parents live together but aren’t married.

Mr and Mrs Average, Dominion Post, July 26, 2008

The divergence of percentages may be explained by a lack of age specification.

So why does any of this matter?

When starchy phrases like out-of-wedlock birth or illegitimacy rates or even unmarried parenthood are used, lots of folk get up in arms. They claim that the terms are irrelevant because many children are born to unmarried parents who are nevertheless in stable and committed relationships. This research turns that on its head.

NZ is approaching an unmarried birth percentage of 50. It isn't uncommon for parents to marry after the birth of their children but neither is it uncommon for them to split when the going gets tough. That is a sad development. It is an emotionally and financially costly business. And the costs are socialised.

Sure, married parents split up to, but less frequently. So marriage makes a difference.