Today's Labour Party boasts their credentials by raising beneficiary incomes. It's so important to them, that a requirement to report regularly on benefit incomes was instigated on advice from the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (headed by Cindy Kiro who was duly rewarded).
Here is a chart from the latest report. It shows that the average benefit income for a couple with two or more children is now $1212 weekly or $5,252 monthly. This is net. For more detail read the report.
This leaves a question I don't think the left has ever addressed apart from inciting Marxist class warfare whereby beneficiaries and low-paid workers are persuaded to unite in a relentless 'them' and 'us' struggle.
That might succeed so long as a margin between income from work and income from a benefit remains.
What happens when that disappears? What happens when benefits pay more than jobs?
Here's one result
Labour's worst nightmare.
Lindsay Mitchell blogs here
Meant to end in tears and fears. State backed programs have been running for 80 years to create a public that can be milked for tears. The Leviathan state needs mass consumption people to feed and be fed by the bureaucratic industrial complex. At this state crony capitalism and the bureaucratic leviathan are indistinguishable.
Housing is a massive issue intertwined with this. Urban planning fads dominating Councils are responsible for distorting property markets in exactly the same way that the British Town and Country Planning system distorted things there, starting a few decades earlier.
The result in Britain was that by 1979 nearly 50% of the population lived in "social housing" (with far less floor space than the 50% who lived in privately owned property) and yet there was still waiting lists for social housing with millions of people on them.
Without going into the complex reasons of how "save the planet" urban planning fads distort property markets, the result is that in the "still private" part of the market, there will always be…
As someone wise once said, Democracy fails when people discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public purse.
Elections then become a contest won by whoever offers the most promises and bribes paid for by someone else.
Wage and salary workers have been the big losers. The purchasing power of their incomes has decreased for about 40 years.
Their time is taxed before they are paid.
Their after tax income is taxed again by GST.
The tax paid by business owners is included in the prices consumers pay.
The Labour party is supposed to represent workers but the current elites don't care about them.
They prefer to create dependent and obedient beneficiaries.
The socialists called the state only…
WEF think tank commitee meeting 6 years ago:
OK wise ones, we need to find a country- not too big, and preferably a bit isolated which we can use to test our theories, and eventually take over. It needs to be a country with huge natural resources, the people need to be submissive, and easily led. It needs to be not too populated, about 5 million should do the trick, and the population need to be reasonably intelligent and peaceful. Preferably the military should be weak- don't need the complication of a likely junta, the police need to be powerful, compliant but ineffective, and he icing on the cake is we need to find some source of friction- preferably raci…
Maori Paati income and wealth taxes would reduce the income of me and my wife to about that of a couple on a benefit, before paying rates and insurance..