The Justice of the Peace
by Hilaire Belloc
Distinguish carefully between these two,
This thing is yours, that other thing is mine.
You have a shirt, a brimless hat, a shoe
And half a coat. I am the Lord benign
Of fifty hundred acres of fat land
To which I have a right. You understand?
I have a right because I have, because,
Because I have, because I have a right.
Now be quite calm and good, obey the laws,
Remember your low station, do not fight
Against the goad, because, you know, it pricks
Whenever the uncleanly demos kicks.
I do not envy you your hat, your shoe.
Why should you envy me my small estate?
It’s fearfully illogical of you
To fight with economic force and fate.
Moreover, I have got the upper hand,
And mean to keep it. Do you understand?
I think about this poem quite a lot; it's one of my favourites. It's only posted a few places online. And I can't really find any commentary of it, except for this one little blurb where someone said that they really liked it because it's a little sarcastic.
And - a little sarcastic? Yeah, just a little.
It's exactly this kind of thinking that people are protesting about at the moment: a complete and fervent belief that property rights are handed down from on high and that it's a natural right that the state will protect your possessions, let you keep your squillion dollars and your penthouse and your yacht.
And how dare anybody question your right to that squillion dollars, question your assertion that you earned it by working hard, as though the things that other people do to keep a roof over their head and food in their belly and shoes on their feet (and books on their shelves and wine in the fridge and the heating as high as they want and a trip to the beach in the summer if they feel like it) aren't hard work and don't have value.
We sneer at Working For Families and middle-class welfare and do not question the underlying reason behind it: that, actually, people who are on the average wage in New Zealand would have difficulty supporting a family on that and paying the usual rates of tax. We judge beneficiaries for still having cars; for having cellphones and computers in their home; for faithfully buying a lotto ticket once a week; for having a beer with dinner, or two, or three - as though our society thinks being poor should mean suffering all the time, not spending your money on anything you want, not having choices and not having the opportunity to make short-sighted ones from time to time because, fuck it, it's a lovely day - doesn't a glass of wine on the patio sound nice?
And we don't question that, that earning the minimum wage if you're working full-time in New Zealand means you probably can't afford to rent a whole house if you're living in a city, not without extra government assistance. We talk instead about how jobs might be lost, as though employers hire people out of the goodness of their hearts and would pay more if only they could afford to, by gum. We talk about that fucking microeconomic graph, the one that says that labour is price elastic and assumes that's true both ways or that it's in any way realistic to talk about a labour market as a whole, as though demand for checkout chicks at the local New World is in any way comparable with the hiring of neurosurgeons, as though the negotiating process works the same way when you're a sixteen year old girl as it does for a sixty-year old grey-haired businessman in a suit worth a month's wages.
We let the entire conversation be overtaken by smirking fools talking earnestly about how hard they worked to get where they are, and who let the subtext run through the conversation like a lead-weighted punch to the face: if you're poor it's because you deserve it. If you're breaking your back cleaning other people's floors and bagging their groceries and typing their memos and organising their offices and driving their taxis and educating their children and - and you're not wearing thousand-dollar shoes and driving a late-model import, it's because you don't deserve any better. Because of course New Zealand is a fucking meritocracy, of course we're a classless society, we left all that behind in England don't you know?
Or the other one: they've got it way worse in those third-world countries where people still die of cholera and little kiddies go hungry and hardly anyone can read. And here we are, in New Zealand, with our public healthcare system and our public education system and our welfare state; why would anyone complain? Nobody is truly poor here after all -- except maybe the people who live in overcrowded state houses or boarding houses with cockroach infestations and dodgy plumbing, the students who have food budgets of $25 a week and who get irate on messageboards when anyone suggests that maybe they should expect better.
Except that they of course are poor because they made poor choices, and they're staying poor because they -- because -- because New Zealand is a land of milk and honey and what's with all the pessimism anyway?
Can't we just all relax, take a chill-pill, get our knickers out of that bunch they're in and take the stick out of our asses.
Nothing to see here.
Did you hear the All Blacks have a game on tonight?
Showing posts with label beneficiary bashing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beneficiary bashing. Show all posts
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Hungry Hungry Kids
From tsmithfield at 12.55 pm in reply to The Standard's post "Too Many Hungry Kids":
I really really like people who use deductive logic; it pleases me greatly when people tease out their arguments. So even though I know T Smithfield not at all, I'm writing directly in response to his or her comment because I think it spells out the conservative viewpoint really nicely, and I'm posting it to my own blog because (a) the Standard isn't an especially welcoming forum, and (b) like everything I write, this is likely to be long.
I'm going to accept point 1 above very quickly: I think it clear that New Zealand is in a position to feed all her people; we're not in a famine.
I'm also going to accept point 3 as a point of general knowledge, and one that's being pretty widely discussed in the media at present.
For the purpose of this post, I'm going to extend "parent" to include anyone who has dependant children, because I don't see the purpose of excluding custody arrangements other than "mum and/or dad looking after kids".
There are two main reasons why I think the argument above doesn't work well in reality. One is internal to the logic, and one is external; I'm starting with the former.
I: Responsibility, availability, and The System
Let's start with the position that a parent deliberately withholding sufficient food from their child constitutes abuse, that abuse is a separate issue, and that here we're talking about parents who are, or who feel themselves, unable to provide sufficient food for their child.
An analogy:
Social assistance is a similarly large and complex bureaucracy. You don't just rock up to WINZ and ask for money. There's also Budget Advisory Services, various charities which provide emergency assistance, Citizen's Advice Bureau, Housing New Zealand, your children's schools, and so on. There are many different agencies, and they all have different people to talk to and different (sometimes contradictory) policies and aims.
People do not magically know the best way to approach a foodbank when their cupboards run bare. It is a learned skill. Not all parents who have hungry children will have learned that skill yet; they may have suffered a complete collapse in the family finances recently. Maybe up until now friends have helped them out. Maybe mum did have a job but has been laid off.
And—I'm a highly-educated, literate person and I still find forms really confusing. Admittedly I've never had impending hunger to spur me on, but I'm honestly not sure if I could manage to figure out all the help I could get if I found my funds weren't going far enough.
WINZ isn't in the habit of widely advertising everything a person can get access to; you sort of need to know what question to ask. As for the charities, they do exist but they don't advertise much either; they can't. When they do, literally hundreds of people turn up.
I'm really, really uncomfortable with the idea that not knowing how to get stuff automatically makes you irresponsible. There's probably a point where it does: if you know how to contact a charity and know that they can help you, but you don't because you can't be bothered, for example. Though that would fall towards the abuse end of the spectrum, for me. I'm not sure where I'd place "didn't contact them because I was embarrassed and ashamed of being unable to provide for my own kids", and that's probably a more realistic example.
Tied into this is the actual availability of assistance at any particular instance of food crisis.
WINZ has really strict guidelines on how often a beneficiary can get an emergency grant. I believe foodbanks (usually) put the same kind of boundaries on how much and how often they'll give assistance to an individual or family.*
So if you're a household that has had several food crises in a row, some of the help out there in the world may not actually be available to you, because you've already hit your limit for the year. Maybe you've made really bad spending choices, or maybe you've just had a series of really bad shit happen to you. Unexpected expenses can and do arise: the kids have lots of ear infections or respitory disease; the car breaks down and you have to fix it or else dad legit cannot get to work**. If there's not a lot of fat in your budget at the best of times, these unexpected expenses will be very difficult to deal with.
So the kids go hungry.
And that's shit. I don't want anyone reading this to get the impression that I think kids going hungry is somehow okay. It isn't.
But I think it's faulty logic to say that hungry kids implies without exception irresponsible parenting. The parents may well be acting the best they can, doing the best they can, and with every intention of giving their kids the best lifestyle they can - and still not do very well.
II: Where the harm lies.
My more serious objection to the standard conservative "irresponsible parents! don't encourage them!" line is that, you know, the problem that we are discussing here is one of HUNGRY CHILDREN.
The children have not gone and signed their mums up to the DPB.
They have not rocked up to the Sallies for a food parcel.
They didn't ask for mum to be laid off, or for nana to have gotten sick, or for their dad to be addicted to the pokies, or for whatever problem has occurred in their families that means they're now not getting enough to eat.
It isn't that I have some idealised view of children as little innocent lambikins who deserve nothing but cuddles and good times. It's that children aren't in a position to be able to determine their own fate. They don't decide who their guardians are.
Perhaps more crucially to this debate, they don't get to vote, or to determine public policy, or to have their opinions quoted in the newspapers, or to write blog posts. We decide what their needs are, and then we implement policies to achieve them. We seem to have decided that a need of children is that they not be hungry. Awesome!
Buuuuuut, like. If there are areas of New Zealand where lots of parents are not giving their kids breakfast or lunch (and there are areas!), whether that's because they're all irresponsible or because shit has gone wrong in their lives or because of a combination of things, the thing we should be focussing on is that THERE ARE AREAS OF NEW ZEALAND WHERE LOTS OF KIDS ARE GOING HUNGRY.
Talk all you like about personal responsibility: you're still not talking about the actual harm. Personal responsiblity does not here lie with the people who suffer the harm. Talk all you like about not encouraging people to remain dependant on the state, but don't fool yourself that you're helping the ACTUAL HUNGRY CHILDREN when you talk about "moving into work" and "bootstraps". I totally agree that full-time work does usually provide a better lifestyle than living on benefits! It still isn't the point!
Public policy should be firmly aimed at solving the specific identified problem, and not some other random thing that you've tacked on there for shits and ideology. The specific identified problem here is hungry children, not irresponsible parents, and the policy should therefore focus on said hungry children and not the sins of their fathers.
PS: Throwing Money At Problems Won't Help
AHAHAHAHA
Actually, throwing money at problems is the standard first step to resolving them. Labour and resources cost money if you don't have them already (unless you can barter for them or receive them as gifts).
People unable to access healthcare? We fund better access! The amount of money thrown at a problem may be proportionally very small or very large: at one end, redesigning a single form so that it makes more sense to the people using it; at the other, redesigning an entire computer system.
I don't purport to believe that throwing money is in and of itself a solution. Obviously there must be thought involved to determine what the best solution is and how to achieve it.
Where the problem is explicitly that some people lack resources, the solution is inevitably going to cost money (assuming that you agree that the problem is a problem and should be resolved). It doesn't necessarily have to cost a lot of money, and part of the decision-making process is figuring out what represents best value.
But an education program aimed at teaching budgeting skills costs money.
Raising wages costs money***.
Raising benefits costs money.
Foodbanks cost money. School breakfast schemes cost money. Putting the kids into CYFS custody costs money.
You know what, in this, doesn't cost a cent? Leaving the kids to go hungry.
* And there are good reasons for this, most fundamentally that their resources also are limited.
** Haaaaah, the public transport debate: You Don't Really Need A Car. See, public transport (plus the occasional taxi) works well for me, as a person who works Normal Office Hours and who lives in an inner suburb. It doesn't work for my dad, who works a night shift (the buses don't run that late!), or my mum (who does work Normal Office Hours, but whose job requires her to travel anywhere in the North Shore/Waitakere DHB area to visit clients). It would work well for one of my brothers, though he does have a car, but not for the other, due to his disabilities.
*** Though is WAY more complicated than that.
Anyway, do you agree that IF parents in NZ avail themselves of all the help available (WINZ, emergency grants, foodbanks, etc) there is no need for any children to go hungry in NZ. If so, the argument for why the fault is with parents not the government runs like this:
1. There is sufficient resources in the system to ensure that no children go hungry.
2. Responsible parents would ensure they availed themselves of all available resources to ensure their children didn’t go hungry.
3. Children are going hungry.
4. Therefore, the reason that children are going hungry is that not all parents are responsible.
I really really like people who use deductive logic; it pleases me greatly when people tease out their arguments. So even though I know T Smithfield not at all, I'm writing directly in response to his or her comment because I think it spells out the conservative viewpoint really nicely, and I'm posting it to my own blog because (a) the Standard isn't an especially welcoming forum, and (b) like everything I write, this is likely to be long.
I'm going to accept point 1 above very quickly: I think it clear that New Zealand is in a position to feed all her people; we're not in a famine.
I'm also going to accept point 3 as a point of general knowledge, and one that's being pretty widely discussed in the media at present.
For the purpose of this post, I'm going to extend "parent" to include anyone who has dependant children, because I don't see the purpose of excluding custody arrangements other than "mum and/or dad looking after kids".
There are two main reasons why I think the argument above doesn't work well in reality. One is internal to the logic, and one is external; I'm starting with the former.
I: Responsibility, availability, and The System
Let's start with the position that a parent deliberately withholding sufficient food from their child constitutes abuse, that abuse is a separate issue, and that here we're talking about parents who are, or who feel themselves, unable to provide sufficient food for their child.
An analogy:
My mother is an advocate for the elderly and the disabled. As such, she is very very familiar with the workings of WINZ, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education, and various social agencies. My grandfather, her father, has recently been diagnosed with dementia and is currently going through a slow and horrible decline (even from a distance, it's uncomfortable to watch: and we're not close). She doesn't live in the same city as her father, and her brother who does is acting as his welfare guardian as he's no longer able to make many decisions himself.
When things go wrong with the careworkers, as they often do (careworkers aren't brilliantly paid, for starters; also, the administrative skills required to organise a large number of staff over dozens of disparate locations are immense and time-consuming. Stuff gets missed), my mum gets called. Her brother finds dealing with the agencies really difficult and frustrating; my mother calls them and explains what she wants to happen and what their legal responsibilities are and then it gets fixed.
This isn't because she knows how to game the system; it's because learning how to get the most out of a large and complex bureaucracy is a learned skill. She's been working in the field for more than 10 years (and she got into it in the first place because my younger brother is disabled).
Social assistance is a similarly large and complex bureaucracy. You don't just rock up to WINZ and ask for money. There's also Budget Advisory Services, various charities which provide emergency assistance, Citizen's Advice Bureau, Housing New Zealand, your children's schools, and so on. There are many different agencies, and they all have different people to talk to and different (sometimes contradictory) policies and aims.
People do not magically know the best way to approach a foodbank when their cupboards run bare. It is a learned skill. Not all parents who have hungry children will have learned that skill yet; they may have suffered a complete collapse in the family finances recently. Maybe up until now friends have helped them out. Maybe mum did have a job but has been laid off.
And—I'm a highly-educated, literate person and I still find forms really confusing. Admittedly I've never had impending hunger to spur me on, but I'm honestly not sure if I could manage to figure out all the help I could get if I found my funds weren't going far enough.
WINZ isn't in the habit of widely advertising everything a person can get access to; you sort of need to know what question to ask. As for the charities, they do exist but they don't advertise much either; they can't. When they do, literally hundreds of people turn up.
I'm really, really uncomfortable with the idea that not knowing how to get stuff automatically makes you irresponsible. There's probably a point where it does: if you know how to contact a charity and know that they can help you, but you don't because you can't be bothered, for example. Though that would fall towards the abuse end of the spectrum, for me. I'm not sure where I'd place "didn't contact them because I was embarrassed and ashamed of being unable to provide for my own kids", and that's probably a more realistic example.
Tied into this is the actual availability of assistance at any particular instance of food crisis.
WINZ has really strict guidelines on how often a beneficiary can get an emergency grant. I believe foodbanks (usually) put the same kind of boundaries on how much and how often they'll give assistance to an individual or family.*
So if you're a household that has had several food crises in a row, some of the help out there in the world may not actually be available to you, because you've already hit your limit for the year. Maybe you've made really bad spending choices, or maybe you've just had a series of really bad shit happen to you. Unexpected expenses can and do arise: the kids have lots of ear infections or respitory disease; the car breaks down and you have to fix it or else dad legit cannot get to work**. If there's not a lot of fat in your budget at the best of times, these unexpected expenses will be very difficult to deal with.
So the kids go hungry.
And that's shit. I don't want anyone reading this to get the impression that I think kids going hungry is somehow okay. It isn't.
But I think it's faulty logic to say that hungry kids implies without exception irresponsible parenting. The parents may well be acting the best they can, doing the best they can, and with every intention of giving their kids the best lifestyle they can - and still not do very well.
II: Where the harm lies.
My more serious objection to the standard conservative "irresponsible parents! don't encourage them!" line is that, you know, the problem that we are discussing here is one of HUNGRY CHILDREN.
The children have not gone and signed their mums up to the DPB.
They have not rocked up to the Sallies for a food parcel.
They didn't ask for mum to be laid off, or for nana to have gotten sick, or for their dad to be addicted to the pokies, or for whatever problem has occurred in their families that means they're now not getting enough to eat.
It isn't that I have some idealised view of children as little innocent lambikins who deserve nothing but cuddles and good times. It's that children aren't in a position to be able to determine their own fate. They don't decide who their guardians are.
Perhaps more crucially to this debate, they don't get to vote, or to determine public policy, or to have their opinions quoted in the newspapers, or to write blog posts. We decide what their needs are, and then we implement policies to achieve them. We seem to have decided that a need of children is that they not be hungry. Awesome!
Buuuuuut, like. If there are areas of New Zealand where lots of parents are not giving their kids breakfast or lunch (and there are areas!), whether that's because they're all irresponsible or because shit has gone wrong in their lives or because of a combination of things, the thing we should be focussing on is that THERE ARE AREAS OF NEW ZEALAND WHERE LOTS OF KIDS ARE GOING HUNGRY.
Talk all you like about personal responsibility: you're still not talking about the actual harm. Personal responsiblity does not here lie with the people who suffer the harm. Talk all you like about not encouraging people to remain dependant on the state, but don't fool yourself that you're helping the ACTUAL HUNGRY CHILDREN when you talk about "moving into work" and "bootstraps". I totally agree that full-time work does usually provide a better lifestyle than living on benefits! It still isn't the point!
Public policy should be firmly aimed at solving the specific identified problem, and not some other random thing that you've tacked on there for shits and ideology. The specific identified problem here is hungry children, not irresponsible parents, and the policy should therefore focus on said hungry children and not the sins of their fathers.
PS: Throwing Money At Problems Won't Help
AHAHAHAHA
Actually, throwing money at problems is the standard first step to resolving them. Labour and resources cost money if you don't have them already (unless you can barter for them or receive them as gifts).
People unable to access healthcare? We fund better access! The amount of money thrown at a problem may be proportionally very small or very large: at one end, redesigning a single form so that it makes more sense to the people using it; at the other, redesigning an entire computer system.
I don't purport to believe that throwing money is in and of itself a solution. Obviously there must be thought involved to determine what the best solution is and how to achieve it.
Where the problem is explicitly that some people lack resources, the solution is inevitably going to cost money (assuming that you agree that the problem is a problem and should be resolved). It doesn't necessarily have to cost a lot of money, and part of the decision-making process is figuring out what represents best value.
But an education program aimed at teaching budgeting skills costs money.
Raising wages costs money***.
Raising benefits costs money.
Foodbanks cost money. School breakfast schemes cost money. Putting the kids into CYFS custody costs money.
You know what, in this, doesn't cost a cent? Leaving the kids to go hungry.
* And there are good reasons for this, most fundamentally that their resources also are limited.
** Haaaaah, the public transport debate: You Don't Really Need A Car. See, public transport (plus the occasional taxi) works well for me, as a person who works Normal Office Hours and who lives in an inner suburb. It doesn't work for my dad, who works a night shift (the buses don't run that late!), or my mum (who does work Normal Office Hours, but whose job requires her to travel anywhere in the North Shore/Waitakere DHB area to visit clients). It would work well for one of my brothers, though he does have a car, but not for the other, due to his disabilities.
*** Though is WAY more complicated than that.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Children: a lifestyle choice?
"Don't have children you can't afford."
Well, it's a bit bloody late after the kid has been born, isn't it?
*
"Don't have children you can't afford."
Let's start at the very beginning: people have children! We're a species that reproduces! That's how the species survives!
(Things I'm not addressing: whether the world is overpopulated. Whether people in rich countries have some kind of moral duty to not have children to make up for the exponential population growth in poorer countries. Immigration vs population growth through birth. Racism.)
Adults have children. Not all adults, obviously, but lots of us. Some of us do it because we really want children! Or we really want to be mums! Or we feel social pressure! Or it just happens! The contraception fails, and the pregnant woman doesn't want to have an abortion!
Some people will engage in a lot of pragmatic decision-making before they become pregnant or knock up their partner or whatever, and they'll have thought about things like "how are we going to fund this screaming poo factory?" and "will I go insane through lack of sleep?" and "is now really the right time?" Other people will not engage in those decisions—they'll certainly make a number of other decisions, though, like "where will baby sleep?" and "oooh, tiny red shoes or tiny green ones?" Some won't be making any sort of decision to get pregnant at all, but will still be happy when they find out they are.
But none of this is the point: the point is that people have children.
*
"Don't have children that you can't afford."
Most people will never be in a position to afford private school and horse-riding lessons. That's a reality of the New Zealand economy.
Leaving arguments about whether that's a good thing aside for the moment, there are serious questions to be discussed about what sort of lifestyle a New Zealand citizen should be able to enjoy as a minimum if they so desire.*
I'd place this minimum somewhere like:
- comfortable accommodation that doesn't have major structural issues and can be heated reasonably** cheaply
- reliable access to food of the kind the individuals can and like to eat
- ability to access (some) leisure activities
- ability to travel (at least around the country)
- ability to access education and healthcare
- some other stuff, like clothes
So what all parents should be able to provide for their children, at a minimum is a roof over their heads and food and clothing and some opportunity to do fun things and some opportunity to see the country.
If there are parents in New Zealand who can't do that, I'd argue that we're failing as a society.
*
"Don't have children that you can't afford."
It's time for a bit of a chat about Bad Financial Decisions. We all make them sometimes (well, at least everyone I know has made them sometimes). For instance, just last week I spent $90 at the pub at a friend's birthday party I'd had no real intention of drinking at! I reasonably regularly blow all my spending money for the fortnight on new shoes/clothes/bits of computer hardware!
I'm still: paying my rent and bills and buying breakfast and lunch most days and paying off my student loan and paying off my bank loan and saving up (very slowly) for a house deposit and—basically I am not living on Struggle Street. This is mainly because I am 26 and single and don't have dependants and I earn above the median national salary (for a person in full-time employment)!
There are people—lots of people—in this country who earn what I earn and support a family on it. The Bad Financial Decisions they are therefore able to make without their budget cascading into the shitter are smaller, because they have higher unavoidable expenses.
And, right, the size of the Bad Financial Decisions you can make without it ruining your budget gets smaller the poorer you are, so that a (very) wealthy person can invest $30K in a dodgy finance company and lose the lot without it bankrupting them, whereas a poorer person might have to legit decide whether rice or potatos are a more economical choice this week.
And everyone's going to stuff up sometimes. You're going to have weeks where you're like, FML, I just want to get drunk on the couch, so you buy a bottle of tequila and wake up the next morning smelling of alcohol and regret. You're going to spend more than you really should on shoes, or buy the slightly more expensive (but much nicer) loaf of bread, or whatever.
Statements like "people just need to budget better" a) place an unreasonably high expectation on people, and b) ignore reality. The reality is both that it can be extraordinarily challenging to survive on a low income (and people are, by doing so, regularly making very good budgeting decisions) and that people are people and human and make mistakes.
*
"Don't have children that you can't afford."
More than just individual Bad Financial Decisions, sometimes stuff goes wrong in people's lives: they get sick, or lose their job, or interest rates go up so their mortgage payment is higher than they budgeted for, or inflation is high, or we're in the middle of a global recession, or their relationship breaks down—
Sometimes those people have children!
Nobody deserves to become sick; very few people deserve to lose their jobs; interest rates and inflation and global financial crises are largely out of the control of Average Citizen Nancy; and relationship breakdowns are by definition the fault of the parties involved but, you know, shit happens.
Even the most careful budgeter in the world won’t think of everything that could possibly go wrong in their lives; none of us can predict the future.
*
“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”
Uh, yeah, but they’re here now. What are you proposing we do instead?
We’re ostensibly a civilised society.
Back in the day, unwanted children used to get left on hillsides or hit over the head with a rock; ritualised and common infanticide is found all over the world in ancient civilisations.
But we grew up as a species and produced surpluses and villages and towns and cities and city-states and nations and the UN; and now we have all these laws against leaving your children on hillsides or hitting them over the head with a rock. And it’s a good thing, too.
The effect of it is that people who produce children are expected to care for them, and if they don’t (or if they do, but they’re really crap at it), we take the kids from them and stick the parents in jail if it’s bad enough and shame everyone involved a lot.
At the same time, though, it’s not like there’s a drop-off centre where you can turn up with little Timmy, all “I’ve had him for a couple of years and he’s too expensive and ugh I really hate this parent lark, take him away.” I suspect, based totally on my own brain and not on any research or internet-based anecdotal evidence that any drop-off in levels of adoption in Western nations is connected to the availability of contraception and abortion, and also possibly to the ability of solo mothers to receive State support. But that’s an untested assumption! I also suspect that anyone who rocked up to Child, Youth and Family all “I’ve had enough of Little Timmy, take him away!” would a) not receive that much assistance, and b) be shamed for trying it.
So you’ve had a kid: you’re stuck with him or her (unless you’re going to be sufficiently abusive so as to have the kid forcibly removed from your household and/or be sent to jail, which I think we can all agree is not the sort of thing we want people to do ever.)
The moral of this section is: if society is going to require individuals to do something, and some of those individuals are going to have difficult doing that thing, society is obligated to help them.
To link all this together:
1. People have children!
2. Sometimes people with children face expenses they can’t reasonably anticipate.
3. Sometimes people’s income is inadequate for their needs.
4. Society expects people to care for their children, and makes it difficult to get rid of children (not that many people actually want to, I expect).
5. Points 1 to 4 mean together that society has some sort of obligation to make sure that people with children are able to maintain a reasonable lifestyle.
*
“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”
Complaints about the cost of living in New Zealand come, obviously, from people’s dissatisfaction with the cost of living in New Zealand. I don’t think a blanket reply of “well you shouldn’t have gotten knocked up then, should you?” is a very reasonable response to this.
I also think that if a large proportion of families in New Zealand genuinely feel as though they’re unable to easily maintain the lifestyles they want, we should be talking about that. We should be talking about what a reasonable lifestyle actually is: do we expect people to be able to pack the kids in the car and go to the beach for a holiday a couple of times a year? And—and we should also be having a conversation about whether people’s lifestyle desires are reasonably attainable. Like I said earlier, most people are never going to be able to send their kids to private school or give them horse-riding lessons, and maybe that’s okay.
But, uh, I think it’s totally reasonable for a family who earns the median wage (and I am here talking about a household with one working adult) to expect to be able to have a comfortable house and enough to eat and to be able to pay the bills and buy a few luxuries, and if that’s systemically unrealistic then I think we’ve got a bit of a problem.
*
“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”
Levelled, right, at single women who have children and who get their income from the state.
There’s, I don’t know, hundreds of years of history here about the purpose of marriage and the operation of wider family networks; about the Poor Laws of Elizabethan England (and similar laws worldwide); about the status of women in law (not good; let’s just take that as read); about the rise of the nuclear family and industrialisation and the effect that had on those wider family and community networks by virtue of requiring highly mobile labour; and about how we fixed some of what capitalism broke by introducing social welfare.
But for the purpose of this exercise:
1. Children are good; and
2. Parenthood is work; and
3. Children, while good, are expensive because they’re not productive and they need a lot of care.***
Parenthood is not paid work! That doesn’t make it not work! See also housework, and also the bit above about the societal obligation to do certain things.
Women who have children and who get their income from the state are doing work in raising the next generation. This is work that we should support. Do I think that living on the DPB gives people an enviable lifestyle which I would like to emulate? No. This is why accusations of teenage girls getting deliberately pregnant so they can live off the state for the rest of their lives (and so on) always makes me think that their lives must be utter shit if they possibly think that a total annual income somewhere around $24K with which they must support a child sounds like a good deal.
And even if they have gotten deliberately pregnant: uh, children are still good! Parenthood is still work!
*
“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”
Levelled at those poor people, who should clearly have got a better job before they started breeding.
I’m not going to lie, this sounds like eugenics. It also sounds like total bollocks.
The median wage/salary for those in full-time employment was, at July 2010 (according to Statistics New Zealand) $44,800. Full-time employment at minimum wage will get you $28,080 a year. There’s a lot more women in part-time employment than men, but I’ll leave that aside for the moment.
My statistical skills are a bit shite, but here goes: the median wage/salary figure is a lot higher than the median income from all sources (the latter gets skewed down by people who work part time or receive benefits).
But even assuming that only people who work full-time or who have a partner who works full-time should be able to have children, there’s still going to be an awful lot of households who have an income between $30K and $50K. The median household income from all sources (including benefits (including Working for Families)) was $64,272 per year as at June 2010. Half the households in the country have a combined income of less than that.
So is $64,272 per year enough to support a family on? What sort of lifestyle will it give? Is that lifestyle a reasonable one? What if the family is earning $44,272 per year – is that enough? Or $22,272? Remember the bit above about parenthood being work, and children being good.
Also think a little about whether you really believe that an adult’s right to choose to have a child should be in any way connected to the size of their bank balance, and then think: if this somehow became official policy, would you be in a position to determine what the magic figure was? And would you be over it?
* I'm totally down with people living off the grid if that's what they want, but I'd place a minimum standard somewhat higher.
** A note about how I use "reasonable": I'm a law student (and it's ruining my life AND my mind) so I tend to think of "reasonable" as meaning "what an ordinary person would think apt and fair in the circumstances". The effect of this is that it isn't a strict standard; to use the heating example, "reasonable" would be tied in to the person's income and the size of their dwelling.
*** I welcome any suggestions of reform of child labour laws. Seriously, drop that in any time you like.
Well, it's a bit bloody late after the kid has been born, isn't it?
*
"Don't have children you can't afford."
Let's start at the very beginning: people have children! We're a species that reproduces! That's how the species survives!
(Things I'm not addressing: whether the world is overpopulated. Whether people in rich countries have some kind of moral duty to not have children to make up for the exponential population growth in poorer countries. Immigration vs population growth through birth. Racism.)
Adults have children. Not all adults, obviously, but lots of us. Some of us do it because we really want children! Or we really want to be mums! Or we feel social pressure! Or it just happens! The contraception fails, and the pregnant woman doesn't want to have an abortion!
Some people will engage in a lot of pragmatic decision-making before they become pregnant or knock up their partner or whatever, and they'll have thought about things like "how are we going to fund this screaming poo factory?" and "will I go insane through lack of sleep?" and "is now really the right time?" Other people will not engage in those decisions—they'll certainly make a number of other decisions, though, like "where will baby sleep?" and "oooh, tiny red shoes or tiny green ones?" Some won't be making any sort of decision to get pregnant at all, but will still be happy when they find out they are.
But none of this is the point: the point is that people have children.
*
"Don't have children that you can't afford."
Most people will never be in a position to afford private school and horse-riding lessons. That's a reality of the New Zealand economy.
Leaving arguments about whether that's a good thing aside for the moment, there are serious questions to be discussed about what sort of lifestyle a New Zealand citizen should be able to enjoy as a minimum if they so desire.*
I'd place this minimum somewhere like:
- comfortable accommodation that doesn't have major structural issues and can be heated reasonably** cheaply
- reliable access to food of the kind the individuals can and like to eat
- ability to access (some) leisure activities
- ability to travel (at least around the country)
- ability to access education and healthcare
- some other stuff, like clothes
So what all parents should be able to provide for their children, at a minimum is a roof over their heads and food and clothing and some opportunity to do fun things and some opportunity to see the country.
If there are parents in New Zealand who can't do that, I'd argue that we're failing as a society.
*
"Don't have children that you can't afford."
It's time for a bit of a chat about Bad Financial Decisions. We all make them sometimes (well, at least everyone I know has made them sometimes). For instance, just last week I spent $90 at the pub at a friend's birthday party I'd had no real intention of drinking at! I reasonably regularly blow all my spending money for the fortnight on new shoes/clothes/bits of computer hardware!
I'm still: paying my rent and bills and buying breakfast and lunch most days and paying off my student loan and paying off my bank loan and saving up (very slowly) for a house deposit and—basically I am not living on Struggle Street. This is mainly because I am 26 and single and don't have dependants and I earn above the median national salary (for a person in full-time employment)!
There are people—lots of people—in this country who earn what I earn and support a family on it. The Bad Financial Decisions they are therefore able to make without their budget cascading into the shitter are smaller, because they have higher unavoidable expenses.
And, right, the size of the Bad Financial Decisions you can make without it ruining your budget gets smaller the poorer you are, so that a (very) wealthy person can invest $30K in a dodgy finance company and lose the lot without it bankrupting them, whereas a poorer person might have to legit decide whether rice or potatos are a more economical choice this week.
And everyone's going to stuff up sometimes. You're going to have weeks where you're like, FML, I just want to get drunk on the couch, so you buy a bottle of tequila and wake up the next morning smelling of alcohol and regret. You're going to spend more than you really should on shoes, or buy the slightly more expensive (but much nicer) loaf of bread, or whatever.
Statements like "people just need to budget better" a) place an unreasonably high expectation on people, and b) ignore reality. The reality is both that it can be extraordinarily challenging to survive on a low income (and people are, by doing so, regularly making very good budgeting decisions) and that people are people and human and make mistakes.
*
"Don't have children that you can't afford."
More than just individual Bad Financial Decisions, sometimes stuff goes wrong in people's lives: they get sick, or lose their job, or interest rates go up so their mortgage payment is higher than they budgeted for, or inflation is high, or we're in the middle of a global recession, or their relationship breaks down—
Sometimes those people have children!
Nobody deserves to become sick; very few people deserve to lose their jobs; interest rates and inflation and global financial crises are largely out of the control of Average Citizen Nancy; and relationship breakdowns are by definition the fault of the parties involved but, you know, shit happens.
Even the most careful budgeter in the world won’t think of everything that could possibly go wrong in their lives; none of us can predict the future.
*
“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”
Uh, yeah, but they’re here now. What are you proposing we do instead?
We’re ostensibly a civilised society.
Back in the day, unwanted children used to get left on hillsides or hit over the head with a rock; ritualised and common infanticide is found all over the world in ancient civilisations.
But we grew up as a species and produced surpluses and villages and towns and cities and city-states and nations and the UN; and now we have all these laws against leaving your children on hillsides or hitting them over the head with a rock. And it’s a good thing, too.
The effect of it is that people who produce children are expected to care for them, and if they don’t (or if they do, but they’re really crap at it), we take the kids from them and stick the parents in jail if it’s bad enough and shame everyone involved a lot.
At the same time, though, it’s not like there’s a drop-off centre where you can turn up with little Timmy, all “I’ve had him for a couple of years and he’s too expensive and ugh I really hate this parent lark, take him away.” I suspect, based totally on my own brain and not on any research or internet-based anecdotal evidence that any drop-off in levels of adoption in Western nations is connected to the availability of contraception and abortion, and also possibly to the ability of solo mothers to receive State support. But that’s an untested assumption! I also suspect that anyone who rocked up to Child, Youth and Family all “I’ve had enough of Little Timmy, take him away!” would a) not receive that much assistance, and b) be shamed for trying it.
So you’ve had a kid: you’re stuck with him or her (unless you’re going to be sufficiently abusive so as to have the kid forcibly removed from your household and/or be sent to jail, which I think we can all agree is not the sort of thing we want people to do ever.)
The moral of this section is: if society is going to require individuals to do something, and some of those individuals are going to have difficult doing that thing, society is obligated to help them.
To link all this together:
1. People have children!
2. Sometimes people with children face expenses they can’t reasonably anticipate.
3. Sometimes people’s income is inadequate for their needs.
4. Society expects people to care for their children, and makes it difficult to get rid of children (not that many people actually want to, I expect).
5. Points 1 to 4 mean together that society has some sort of obligation to make sure that people with children are able to maintain a reasonable lifestyle.
*
“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”
Complaints about the cost of living in New Zealand come, obviously, from people’s dissatisfaction with the cost of living in New Zealand. I don’t think a blanket reply of “well you shouldn’t have gotten knocked up then, should you?” is a very reasonable response to this.
I also think that if a large proportion of families in New Zealand genuinely feel as though they’re unable to easily maintain the lifestyles they want, we should be talking about that. We should be talking about what a reasonable lifestyle actually is: do we expect people to be able to pack the kids in the car and go to the beach for a holiday a couple of times a year? And—and we should also be having a conversation about whether people’s lifestyle desires are reasonably attainable. Like I said earlier, most people are never going to be able to send their kids to private school or give them horse-riding lessons, and maybe that’s okay.
But, uh, I think it’s totally reasonable for a family who earns the median wage (and I am here talking about a household with one working adult) to expect to be able to have a comfortable house and enough to eat and to be able to pay the bills and buy a few luxuries, and if that’s systemically unrealistic then I think we’ve got a bit of a problem.
*
“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”
Levelled, right, at single women who have children and who get their income from the state.
There’s, I don’t know, hundreds of years of history here about the purpose of marriage and the operation of wider family networks; about the Poor Laws of Elizabethan England (and similar laws worldwide); about the status of women in law (not good; let’s just take that as read); about the rise of the nuclear family and industrialisation and the effect that had on those wider family and community networks by virtue of requiring highly mobile labour; and about how we fixed some of what capitalism broke by introducing social welfare.
But for the purpose of this exercise:
1. Children are good; and
2. Parenthood is work; and
3. Children, while good, are expensive because they’re not productive and they need a lot of care.***
Parenthood is not paid work! That doesn’t make it not work! See also housework, and also the bit above about the societal obligation to do certain things.
Women who have children and who get their income from the state are doing work in raising the next generation. This is work that we should support. Do I think that living on the DPB gives people an enviable lifestyle which I would like to emulate? No. This is why accusations of teenage girls getting deliberately pregnant so they can live off the state for the rest of their lives (and so on) always makes me think that their lives must be utter shit if they possibly think that a total annual income somewhere around $24K with which they must support a child sounds like a good deal.
And even if they have gotten deliberately pregnant: uh, children are still good! Parenthood is still work!
*
“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”
Levelled at those poor people, who should clearly have got a better job before they started breeding.
I’m not going to lie, this sounds like eugenics. It also sounds like total bollocks.
The median wage/salary for those in full-time employment was, at July 2010 (according to Statistics New Zealand) $44,800. Full-time employment at minimum wage will get you $28,080 a year. There’s a lot more women in part-time employment than men, but I’ll leave that aside for the moment.
My statistical skills are a bit shite, but here goes: the median wage/salary figure is a lot higher than the median income from all sources (the latter gets skewed down by people who work part time or receive benefits).
But even assuming that only people who work full-time or who have a partner who works full-time should be able to have children, there’s still going to be an awful lot of households who have an income between $30K and $50K. The median household income from all sources (including benefits (including Working for Families)) was $64,272 per year as at June 2010. Half the households in the country have a combined income of less than that.
So is $64,272 per year enough to support a family on? What sort of lifestyle will it give? Is that lifestyle a reasonable one? What if the family is earning $44,272 per year – is that enough? Or $22,272? Remember the bit above about parenthood being work, and children being good.
Also think a little about whether you really believe that an adult’s right to choose to have a child should be in any way connected to the size of their bank balance, and then think: if this somehow became official policy, would you be in a position to determine what the magic figure was? And would you be over it?
* I'm totally down with people living off the grid if that's what they want, but I'd place a minimum standard somewhat higher.
** A note about how I use "reasonable": I'm a law student (and it's ruining my life AND my mind) so I tend to think of "reasonable" as meaning "what an ordinary person would think apt and fair in the circumstances". The effect of this is that it isn't a strict standard; to use the heating example, "reasonable" would be tied in to the person's income and the size of their dwelling.
*** I welcome any suggestions of reform of child labour laws. Seriously, drop that in any time you like.
Monday, May 9, 2011
this turned out rather angrier than i expected
I do not understand what the problem with lifestyle beneficiaries is.
I will define "lifestyle beneficiary" for the purposes of this post as a person who, for whatever reason, chooses not to seek paid employment in such a way as to cover all of his or her expenses, who does not have any personal relationships such as their expenses are paid for by an individual (or a group of individuals) and who therefore relies on the state for an income. The term obviously usually has negative connotations, but that's what I'm going to talk about. I'm not intending to import them as subtext to this post.
I don't know if there are any good stats to suggest what proportion of beneficiaries are lifestyle beneficiaries. I'd expect it to be small, mostly because the stats I have seen seem to suggest that most people move off the DPB and the dole fairly quickly, and invalid's benefit is of course a different matter.
Anyway, I really don't see the problem.
The government of New Zealand used to explicitly follow policy aimed at full employment. This was, up until the 1980s, a fairly bipartisan thing (as I understand it), and is presumably one of the things behind Think Big and all the other grand infrastructure works of the 60s and 70s. In the 1980s, things changed, and there's been for the last 30 years a fairly bipartisan approach of laisse fair economics.
Talk all you want about whether that was a good thing or not; I think it is genuinely up for debate, at least in some areas.
One of the inexonerable consequences of moving away from state intervention to create and sustain full employment into a situation where you let the market rise and fall as it wishes is that you will end up with people who are structurally un- or under-employed. This isn't, as far as I am concerned, up for debate (and if you are a right-wing economist, you'll probably argue that it isn't a bad thing. That's genuinely up for debate too).
The structural unemployment comes from the fact that sometimes the market will have a few less jobs than people, and sometimes the market will provide a lot less jobs than people. But there are incentives to always having fewer jobs than people: it keeps wages lower, it makes the market more flexible, and blah blah blah classical economics 101.
[Someday I will talk about why I think this is so utterly shit, but today is not that day. Today is about pragmatism.]
So you now have some people who, try as they might, are not going to get or keep a job that pays their expenses. This is a problem: having homeless people dying on the streets is pretty unpleasant plus it turns out that they are people too and not some alien species who don't warrant basic human decency or care!
As a sop to these radical notions of "not being total douches" and "caring about your fellow humankind", the state provides a minimum level of income at a level designed to prevent your unemployed people from dying unpleasantly on the streets. This is not generally a level which will allow them to go on extended trips to Europe, and maybe not even to the other end of whatever island they're on, but they're probably fed and housed and reasonably comfortable. Success!
But! It turns out that not having employment makes most people feel demoralised and shit, which gets compounded by unemployed people living on state funds being told constantly that they're bludging scum who don't deserve nice things. And if they're women: that they should keep their legs closed and not have kids they couldn't afford! Because everyone who doesn't plan and budget for their relationship breaking down has failed as a human being!
Nevertheless, some people who are structurally long-term unemployed manage to find other things to do with their time (whatever those things are), such as they're no longer that motivated to spend 40 hours a week in an environment they probably don't like that much all for a (few? lot?) more dollars in their pocket.
What the fuck is wrong with that?
If you're accepting of the basic bipartisan premise of NZ economic management: that there will be unemployed people; and especially if you're defending that policy on the grounds that it provides market incentives that you agree with --- if you're doing that, where's your problem with people who take themselves out of the market entirely, thus leaving jobs for people who DO want them? And who do so for what they get on the dole, which is effectively 4/5ths of fuck all?
Why do you want some people to be unhappy all the time?
I will define "lifestyle beneficiary" for the purposes of this post as a person who, for whatever reason, chooses not to seek paid employment in such a way as to cover all of his or her expenses, who does not have any personal relationships such as their expenses are paid for by an individual (or a group of individuals) and who therefore relies on the state for an income. The term obviously usually has negative connotations, but that's what I'm going to talk about. I'm not intending to import them as subtext to this post.
I don't know if there are any good stats to suggest what proportion of beneficiaries are lifestyle beneficiaries. I'd expect it to be small, mostly because the stats I have seen seem to suggest that most people move off the DPB and the dole fairly quickly, and invalid's benefit is of course a different matter.
Anyway, I really don't see the problem.
The government of New Zealand used to explicitly follow policy aimed at full employment. This was, up until the 1980s, a fairly bipartisan thing (as I understand it), and is presumably one of the things behind Think Big and all the other grand infrastructure works of the 60s and 70s. In the 1980s, things changed, and there's been for the last 30 years a fairly bipartisan approach of laisse fair economics.
Talk all you want about whether that was a good thing or not; I think it is genuinely up for debate, at least in some areas.
One of the inexonerable consequences of moving away from state intervention to create and sustain full employment into a situation where you let the market rise and fall as it wishes is that you will end up with people who are structurally un- or under-employed. This isn't, as far as I am concerned, up for debate (and if you are a right-wing economist, you'll probably argue that it isn't a bad thing. That's genuinely up for debate too).
The structural unemployment comes from the fact that sometimes the market will have a few less jobs than people, and sometimes the market will provide a lot less jobs than people. But there are incentives to always having fewer jobs than people: it keeps wages lower, it makes the market more flexible, and blah blah blah classical economics 101.
[Someday I will talk about why I think this is so utterly shit, but today is not that day. Today is about pragmatism.]
So you now have some people who, try as they might, are not going to get or keep a job that pays their expenses. This is a problem: having homeless people dying on the streets is pretty unpleasant plus it turns out that they are people too and not some alien species who don't warrant basic human decency or care!
As a sop to these radical notions of "not being total douches" and "caring about your fellow humankind", the state provides a minimum level of income at a level designed to prevent your unemployed people from dying unpleasantly on the streets. This is not generally a level which will allow them to go on extended trips to Europe, and maybe not even to the other end of whatever island they're on, but they're probably fed and housed and reasonably comfortable. Success!
But! It turns out that not having employment makes most people feel demoralised and shit, which gets compounded by unemployed people living on state funds being told constantly that they're bludging scum who don't deserve nice things. And if they're women: that they should keep their legs closed and not have kids they couldn't afford! Because everyone who doesn't plan and budget for their relationship breaking down has failed as a human being!
Nevertheless, some people who are structurally long-term unemployed manage to find other things to do with their time (whatever those things are), such as they're no longer that motivated to spend 40 hours a week in an environment they probably don't like that much all for a (few? lot?) more dollars in their pocket.
What the fuck is wrong with that?
If you're accepting of the basic bipartisan premise of NZ economic management: that there will be unemployed people; and especially if you're defending that policy on the grounds that it provides market incentives that you agree with --- if you're doing that, where's your problem with people who take themselves out of the market entirely, thus leaving jobs for people who DO want them? And who do so for what they get on the dole, which is effectively 4/5ths of fuck all?
Why do you want some people to be unhappy all the time?
Sunday, February 20, 2011
to the middle class (of which I am a member)
My father and I talk about politics. We do this instead of talking about anything else, really - it's very definitely a family trait to get angry instead of sad, and politics almost always provides something to get angry about. Today I rang him and after a couple of minutes of the regular pleasantries (how are you? What've you been up to?) there followed almost an hour of arguing back-and-forth about Where the Left Is and/or Should Be Going, and What's With The Lack of Fight? Good times, man.
And one of the things we've been chatting about a lot lately is how bad we are at selling our policies to the Average New Zealander, when this should be easy because the Average New Zealander would clearly be a lot better off if they got paid more and weren't in so much debt and weren't treated as disposable by their employer.
So we got onto unemployment, viz:
1. It's pretty high at the moment.
2. Youth unemployment is near 20%, which is an unmitigated social disaster.
3. The Government is talking about raising the pension age.
4. The Government is also talking about forcing solo parents back into work (as in, accept this job or your benefit gets cut)
... it doesn't seem logical to me to be forcing older people to stay in work for longer and/or forcing active parents into the workforce when you have real problems in that people are finding it really tough to enter the workforce at all for the first time in their life.
Also worth noting is that you can't receive the unemployment benefit if your partner is in work. So from the Government's point of view, a family that goes from two incomes down to one when one partner is made redundant doesn't matter - that person doesn't affect the unemployment stats. And if that person stays unemployed (maybe childcare costs are prohibitive, so the family makes the choice to have a stay-at-home parent for a few years), then if and when a job comes available and is taken up by a solo parent desperate for a job - any job - so the kids don't starve, the stats look even better.
Of course, yes, yay paid employment in most cases, though if you do basic reading on benefits and poverty you'll learn about the cost of working (economic and social) and - insert the complications I'm not talking about here.
But you can sell welfare policy as:
HAVE SOME BASIC COMPASSION FOR YOUR FELLOW HUMANS, DICKWAD!
or
IT'S A SAFETY NET WHICH IS THERE FOR YOU TOO. DICKWAD!
or
YEAH, SO I THINK YOU NEED A LESSON ON HOW INSURANCE WORKS. MORON.
and you can also sell it as:
- an acceptance that a glut of workers will drive wages down (as in, Economics 101!)
plus
- an acceptance that workers aren't really in a position to be able to bargain as well as employers can (as in, Reality 101!)
plus
- the creation of a situation where people are forced to take jobs they know aren't really suitable because otherwise they face starvation/having their kids taken away from them/homelessness/as you will
plus
- stay-at-home parents in 2-parent households not really figuring in official stats all that well (and there's a lot of women's issues stuff here, which I'll leave to people who talk WAY more eruditely on the subject than I)
creates a situation where the stay-at-home parent may find it really fucking hard to get a job as good (read: well-paid) as the one they had when they do reenter the workforce, and this has flow on effects which negatively impact the lives of the middle classes, like:
- not being able to pay off the mortgage
- not being able to look forward to a comfortable retirement
- not being able to pay the kid's uni fees
- not being able to go on that overseas holiday
And maybe the answer to that litany of woes should be: cry more! Other people have it worse off than you! But I don't think it's a particularly satisfactory one: I don't think paying off the mortage and travelling a bit et cetera should be outside the reach of the dreams of people who are supposedly relatively well-off in our society. I also think that it can be really hard to properly empathise with people, and sometimes it's easier to explain stuff by applying its effects to your own situation, even if that doesn't quite get across the full horror of having to go to the foodbank because you also had to buy your kid a pair of shoes that week.
The choice to not work for several years because you're raising children is not a bad one.* I think that people who make that choice should be able to do so comfortably. I don't think people who are raising kids should be forced to choose between losing their entire income in the form of government benefits or taking on a poorly paid, casual, and marginalised job that really doesn't provide them with financial security. Or, you know, forced to give up on economic aspirations, no matter how small or large or trivial or major, because you can't save for retirement and raise the next generation at the same time.
*By which I mean: raising children is a difficult thing to do, and it should be far more valued in society than it is - we should be applauding women for looking after small children, not insinuating (or saying outright) that they're all a bunch of bludging slappers who got wot they deserved.**
**Not to say that choosing to be in paid work isn't okay as well. Just. Fuck me, can't women make ANY choices without being dogpiled for it?
And one of the things we've been chatting about a lot lately is how bad we are at selling our policies to the Average New Zealander, when this should be easy because the Average New Zealander would clearly be a lot better off if they got paid more and weren't in so much debt and weren't treated as disposable by their employer.
So we got onto unemployment, viz:
1. It's pretty high at the moment.
2. Youth unemployment is near 20%, which is an unmitigated social disaster.
3. The Government is talking about raising the pension age.
4. The Government is also talking about forcing solo parents back into work (as in, accept this job or your benefit gets cut)
... it doesn't seem logical to me to be forcing older people to stay in work for longer and/or forcing active parents into the workforce when you have real problems in that people are finding it really tough to enter the workforce at all for the first time in their life.
Also worth noting is that you can't receive the unemployment benefit if your partner is in work. So from the Government's point of view, a family that goes from two incomes down to one when one partner is made redundant doesn't matter - that person doesn't affect the unemployment stats. And if that person stays unemployed (maybe childcare costs are prohibitive, so the family makes the choice to have a stay-at-home parent for a few years), then if and when a job comes available and is taken up by a solo parent desperate for a job - any job - so the kids don't starve, the stats look even better.
Of course, yes, yay paid employment in most cases, though if you do basic reading on benefits and poverty you'll learn about the cost of working (economic and social) and - insert the complications I'm not talking about here.
But you can sell welfare policy as:
HAVE SOME BASIC COMPASSION FOR YOUR FELLOW HUMANS, DICKWAD!
or
IT'S A SAFETY NET WHICH IS THERE FOR YOU TOO. DICKWAD!
or
YEAH, SO I THINK YOU NEED A LESSON ON HOW INSURANCE WORKS. MORON.
and you can also sell it as:
- an acceptance that a glut of workers will drive wages down (as in, Economics 101!)
plus
- an acceptance that workers aren't really in a position to be able to bargain as well as employers can (as in, Reality 101!)
plus
- the creation of a situation where people are forced to take jobs they know aren't really suitable because otherwise they face starvation/having their kids taken away from them/homelessness/as you will
plus
- stay-at-home parents in 2-parent households not really figuring in official stats all that well (and there's a lot of women's issues stuff here, which I'll leave to people who talk WAY more eruditely on the subject than I)
creates a situation where the stay-at-home parent may find it really fucking hard to get a job as good (read: well-paid) as the one they had when they do reenter the workforce, and this has flow on effects which negatively impact the lives of the middle classes, like:
- not being able to pay off the mortgage
- not being able to look forward to a comfortable retirement
- not being able to pay the kid's uni fees
- not being able to go on that overseas holiday
And maybe the answer to that litany of woes should be: cry more! Other people have it worse off than you! But I don't think it's a particularly satisfactory one: I don't think paying off the mortage and travelling a bit et cetera should be outside the reach of the dreams of people who are supposedly relatively well-off in our society. I also think that it can be really hard to properly empathise with people, and sometimes it's easier to explain stuff by applying its effects to your own situation, even if that doesn't quite get across the full horror of having to go to the foodbank because you also had to buy your kid a pair of shoes that week.
The choice to not work for several years because you're raising children is not a bad one.* I think that people who make that choice should be able to do so comfortably. I don't think people who are raising kids should be forced to choose between losing their entire income in the form of government benefits or taking on a poorly paid, casual, and marginalised job that really doesn't provide them with financial security. Or, you know, forced to give up on economic aspirations, no matter how small or large or trivial or major, because you can't save for retirement and raise the next generation at the same time.
*By which I mean: raising children is a difficult thing to do, and it should be far more valued in society than it is - we should be applauding women for looking after small children, not insinuating (or saying outright) that they're all a bunch of bludging slappers who got wot they deserved.**
**Not to say that choosing to be in paid work isn't okay as well. Just. Fuck me, can't women make ANY choices without being dogpiled for it?
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
stick it to the (wo)man
So, in brief lots and lots of words:
*As an aside: if your policy, personal or political, ever relies on people not fucking in situations where it is likely that people will want to fuck, your policy is stupid.
For this reason, the statement that people should not have children they cannot afford, aside from being an utterly disgusting statement of privilege and assumption, is just so mind-bogglingly stupid it blows my mind. Children are a logical consequence of sex, and if it ever gets to a point where heterosexual sex, sans totally effective contraception, does not reliably, across the species, result in offspring -- we are so totally -- I'm trying to think of an adjective here...
- the Government explicitly wants to get more beneficiaries in work. Don't get me wrong: this is a laudable aim. Most people who subsist on state benefits would like to have more money, and most of them would like to get it through paid employment.
- the Government wants to cut funding to education, including early childhood education. To some extent, I do sympathise with the view that early childhood education is basically daycare by another name. But whatever it's called, it's the place where a lot of kids go when their parents or guardians are at paid work, and where some kids go when their parents or guardians aren't at paid work.
- cutting funding to early childhood education will have the direct result of increasing the amount of money parents and guardians pay in hand to the centres. This is because the cost of running the centre doesn't suddenly decrease just because their income from one source has fallen.
- this will in turn decrease the marginal income of working parents and guardians. That is, the sum of "net income" minus "costs associated with working" will be a smaller figure.
- costs associated with working aren't, of course, limited to childcare. Other costs include transport, work-appropriate attire, and any work equipment. And I think these costs are reasonable enough, just as I think that parents paying part of the cost of their small children's daycare needs is fair enough.
- but childcare is a really, really high cost for a lot of people. Not everyone is in a position to rely on other family members to take on childcare so that they can enter paid employment. Not everyone has family. Not everyone has family in the same city. Not everyone has family who are appropriate carers for small children.
- and children are a social good. I mean, obviously they are also people -- and perhaps someday I will write about why I think people owe each other some care -- but they're an investment (trite, I know) into what this society will be able to support in 25 years.
- so the idea that parents should bear sole responsibility for raising and providing for their children doesn't really work for me. I'm going to personally benefit from there being qualified doctors in 40 years, so I should bear some responsibility for making sure that there are children to get there.*
- getting back to where I was going with this: it is contradictory to have an explicit policy to encourage people back into work and then create stumbling blocks that you know full well will make employment difficult in some cases and impossible in others.
*As an aside: if your policy, personal or political, ever relies on people not fucking in situations where it is likely that people will want to fuck, your policy is stupid.
For this reason, the statement that people should not have children they cannot afford, aside from being an utterly disgusting statement of privilege and assumption, is just so mind-bogglingly stupid it blows my mind. Children are a logical consequence of sex, and if it ever gets to a point where heterosexual sex, sans totally effective contraception, does not reliably, across the species, result in offspring -- we are so totally -- I'm trying to think of an adjective here...
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