Posts on the economy, work, business, income, and labour
Written By: - Date published: 11:41 am, August 25th, 2010 - 26 comments
Can income splitting be made to work? Funding people to stay at home with children isn’t such a bad idea…
Written By: - Date published: 9:21 am, August 25th, 2010 - 7 comments
Prime Minister John Key has credited his government’s economic policies for the price of fruit and vegetables falling by 6.5%. It’s clearly because of all those fruit and vegetable price reduction policies the government has introduced. In fact, the fruit price index is really only down 3.9% since November 2008 and vegetables are actually up 14.4%. But who are you going to believe?
Written By: - Date published: 2:28 pm, August 24th, 2010 - 17 comments
Contrary to the sunny prognostications of Nice Mr Key, job queues are getting longer. How much more great economic management from John and Bill can the country stand?
Written By: - Date published: 1:19 pm, August 24th, 2010 - 2 comments
Average number of people on the dole in the 21 months before Paula Bennett came to office – 22600
Average number of people on the dole in the 21 months since Paula Bennett came to office – 52200
Fiscal cost of extra people on the dole (welfare payments and lost tax) – approximately $1 billion
Money in this year’s budget for jobs initiatives – $31 million
Written By: - Date published: 10:57 am, August 24th, 2010 - 21 comments
It was only at the protest on the weekend that I learned about the Nats’ plan to make us get sick notes if we take a day off work for ourselves or to look after a sick family member. This would be an insult to workers and a huge waste of medical resources from a government that has no understanding of efficient use of scarce resources and thinks that workers are all scumbags who need a good kicking.
Written By: - Date published: 9:40 am, August 23rd, 2010 - 25 comments
White collar crime is on the increase in NZ. The government talks tough and postures about crime in its other forms, how will it respond to white collar crime?
Written By: - Date published: 5:27 pm, August 21st, 2010 - 26 comments
Thousands of Kiwis turned out to protest National’s new labour legislation, a unjustified, spiteful attack on our work rights, which is simply designed to lower labour costs. The CTU has announced a campaign leading to national day of action on Oct 20th. Kiwi workers won’t take this lying down. We are fighting back.
Written By: - Date published: 7:37 am, August 21st, 2010 - 33 comments
There are a bunch of interesting little stories floating around this week that we didn’t get round to writing full posts on or that we wrote drafts for but never finished. So here’s a new, possibly weekly feature – Quick Bites:
NZ Institute: ‘Nats have no plan’
Suicide funding cut
Nats’ interesting donors
Workers’ rights under attack
One foot out of Iraq
Vultures
Party on Garth
Written By: - Date published: 1:54 pm, August 20th, 2010 - 56 comments
Workers are getting together to oppose the government’s changes to employment law with rallies in the four main centres this weekend. Join your rally.
The Saturday rallies against National’s anti-work rights bill assemble at:
Auckland, QE2 Square, bottom of Queen St – 1pm
Wellington, Civic Square – 1pm
Christchurch, Catherdal Square – 1pm
and on Sunday:
Dunedin, Dental School, Great King St – 11am
Written By: - Date published: 11:23 am, August 20th, 2010 - 27 comments
Bill English thinks he has proven that wages grew just 3% under Labour and grew 15.5% under National in the 1990s. How’s he done it? By taking a ridiculous definition of wages and a very convenient timeframe. Bill, this is getting old. Your distortions are transparent and exposing you is too easy. How about, rather than fudging historic numbers, you get on with your job of building a better future?
Written By: - Date published: 7:52 am, August 19th, 2010 - 28 comments
John Key said yesterday: “the gap with Australia is definitely closing … If [Phil Goff] wants to pop up for a coffee I will take him through the numbers, and I can take him through a few others.” I say go for it, Phil. I’m dying to see what numbers Key is talking about. Because the reality is that we are falling behind Australia on every measure, while Key just smiles and waves.
Written By: - Date published: 12:29 pm, August 18th, 2010 - 74 comments
There really isn’t any doubt about this any more, the free-market ideology put forward by the Chicago School of Economics (and the Austrian school) and slavishly followed by National, Act and Labour is predicted on fully informed individuals making rational choices. But individuals just don’t have enough knowledge to know what is best and the market as a whole is irrational as a result.
Written By: - Date published: 8:20 am, August 18th, 2010 - 28 comments
Parliament erupted in laughter yesterday as Bill English made up more ‘facts’ to attack Labour’s economic performance. Even if his accusations against Labour’s record were true, he doesn’t have any solutions himself. Indeed, the reason he is spending so much time trying to smear Labour’s record is he is desperate to make is own record look less appalling by comparison.
Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, August 17th, 2010 - 9 comments
When John Steinbeck said “No one wants advice – only corroboration†he could well have been describing the numerous working groups the Government has established in many areas of significant economic and social policy. Too lazy to spend its nine years in opposition developing a detailed policy prescription, National now picks groups to tell it what it wants to hear.
Written By: - Date published: 1:40 pm, August 17th, 2010 - 25 comments
In the last seven days a triple-conjunction of political portents has publicly demonstrated just how bankrupt of imagination and policy this current government truly is. The lack of direction and paucity of creative ideas is breath-taking. A “caretaker-government” would be a polite euphemism in this context.
Written By: - Date published: 9:28 am, August 17th, 2010 - 41 comments
Peter Dunne admits that income splitting will be available to only 310,000 families. The other 1.3 million will get nothing and be left to pick up the bill. Even of the lucky 19%, only a fraction will get big tax cuts. Most will get squat but a few families with big disparities between the partners’ incomes win big. Key has voted himself $22K of tax cuts so far, this would be another $9K. Will he be tempted?
Written By: - Date published: 6:37 pm, August 16th, 2010 - 68 comments
Key said put up or shut up.
The CTU and some gutsy workers are putting up.
Will Key have the guts to answer them?
Written By: - Date published: 10:07 am, August 16th, 2010 - 18 comments
Odd to see in the Sunday-Star Times that the Government is looking at introducing compulsory superannuation savings. After all, this is the same government that gutted Kiwisaver and the Cullen Fund just a year ago. Hmm, have they seen the light? Somehow I doubt it. The Nats see compulsory super savings as a replacement for the universal superannuation we have now.
Written By: - Date published: 11:21 am, August 15th, 2010 - 22 comments
More often than not we discuss politics and the economy only within the boundaries of current political structures.
But these structures can only offer limited democratic participation.
Perhaps the answer for the left is to embrace movement politics.
Written By: - Date published: 2:23 pm, August 14th, 2010 - 38 comments
Some within Labour believe that the tide of popularity is beginning to go out on the National government. Commentators seem to be waking up too. John Armstrong takes the Nats to task for their scare-mongering on benefits. And Fran O’Sullivan, cuts to the chase – it’s the economy stupid.
Written By: - Date published: 12:03 pm, August 14th, 2010 - 21 comments
Britain’s turfing 75% of people off their long-term sickness benefit on an arbitrary test. Let’s hope the Welfare Working Group doesn’t get ideas.
Written By: - Date published: 10:13 am, August 14th, 2010 - 42 comments
The Government is set to announce income splitting. Effectively, it allows a taxpayer to assign part of their income for taxation purposes to their partner on a lower income, the transferred income will be taxed at a lower rate. This will benefit a select group: wealthy nuclear families, especially those with a stay at home parent. An unaffordable, unfair, unnecessary policy.
Written By: - Date published: 8:47 am, August 14th, 2010 - 55 comments
In his ‘Key Notes’ this week, John Key claims that sending a handful of the business elite overseas to get MBAs will boost the economy. Seriously, 350,000 jobless Kiwis and the plan Key is bragging about is a million dollars worth of subsidies for the business elite as the solution to our woes? What a sick joke this government is. And it’s being played by the rich on the rest of us.
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, August 13th, 2010 - 23 comments
So, it looks like we’re heading back into recession. We’re going to have to get used to the idea that we can’t depend on perpetual economic growth to deliver rising living standards to all. We could make nearly everyone wealthier with a fairer distribution of wealth but the opposite is happening. This is simply class war; a battle over shares of a diminishing prize. And we’re letting the rich win.
Written By: - Date published: 9:57 am, August 13th, 2010 - 21 comments
Climate change, peak oil, resource exhaustion, and over-population are combing to cause a new food crisis. Grains supply half the calories we consume directly and feed much of our live-stock. The prices of those are skyrocketing because supply can’t match demand. Starting with Russia, major exporters are limiting the amount they send abroad to keep what they have for their own people.
Written By: - Date published: 7:09 am, August 13th, 2010 - 144 comments
John Key challenged the unions to “put up or shut up”. So they’re going to put up. The CTU has launched a campaign to name and shame businesses that are abusing the fire at will (90 day probation) bill. It’s a campaign based around personal stories. Heather Smith tells the first of many…
Written By: - Date published: 3:36 pm, August 12th, 2010 - 3 comments
A quick vid from The Equality Trust
Written By: - Date published: 9:24 am, August 12th, 2010 - 42 comments
Attacking beneficiaries won’t solve the real problems. There aren’t enough jobs, the recession is not really over. Rather than dealing with that, this government is carving off an ever large slice of our shrinking national wealth for their rich buddies. The poor and the jobless are turned into figures of public spite by a government of the rich which will cut to their meagre benefits will be pay for tax cuts for the rich.
Written By: - Date published: 11:54 am, August 11th, 2010 - 38 comments
In his own surreal and ultra-privileged way Paul Holmes has discovered the recession. And it seems to have shaken him up a bit. Paul cuts loose with some Holmes truths about the useless Nat government. But in claiming that there is no alternative Holmes reveals nothing but his own lack of vision…
Written By: - Date published: 11:47 am, August 10th, 2010 - 43 comments
The benefit system is not unaffordable, the best way to lower its cost is to create jobs. But it is clear that is not on the Welfare Workings Group’s agenda. Their job is to paint beneficiaries as bludgers, the welfare system as broken and expensive. Their job is to pave the way for welfare cuts to pay for tax cuts that will leave the poorest Kiwi families more impoverished. They’ve made a good start.
Written By: - Date published: 7:30 am, August 10th, 2010 - 100 comments
If the political world can be split into Left and Right, is there any issue which is better at dividing us than welfare? Inevitably, the Tory attack on welfare has begun. The Rebstock report “dutifully deliver[s] the findings the government wants to hear”.
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