Serious deficiencies in the social policy processes

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I have just listened to Julie Chapman, the Kids Can champion, explain what is unfolding this year with unprecedented demands and long waiting lists for their services. Listen and weep for evidence of how we have continued to fail our families.  

It’s not just those on benefits. Many low-income families doing the essential paid work that is servicing the NZ economy now find they can’t keep their heads above water.  Rents and the cost of living have eroded their food budgets, driving them to foodbanks and charities. Their New Year starts with accumulated debt levels, and  in many cases, they are only just holding on to a roof over their heads.

There are unconscionable delays in promised reviews of key social policies and a breakdown in a rational social policy reform process that includes the voice of the wider public in a meaningful way.

For instance, the development of a new social insurance policy has been largely in-house with a cabal of highly paid public employees keeping it all close to their chests. Nowhere has there been a clear setting out of the policy problem to be addressed and assessment of the equity and effectiveness of alternatives. A more open and transparent process would discuss the option of reforming the current welfare system.  It would be honest about the costs and pitfalls of imposing a new ACC style social insurance programme that excludes the very people who need help the most.

The diversion and huge commitment of time and resources to developing this clearly flawed and likely-to-be-ditched legacy project has left proper welfare reform high and dry. Five years on those living with disability, the chronically ill, couples on benefits and sole parents are still awaiting the promised welfare transformation. 

Our once-prized welfare system is not working, including sadly, the main income support system for children Working for Families (WFF). The review of WFF has been a very low priority for the government. After 5 years, all we have seen is some overdue inflation adjustment. Unprincipled tinkering by the state increased the clawback of WFF from a fixed abatement threshold and fixed tax thresholds helping to make things worse. 

As wages rise with inflation, families in low paid work are pushed further into the $48,000+ bracket where taxes are 30% and repayment of WFF is a punnitve27%. With student loan repayment and ACC there is an effective tax rate of over 70% on each extra dollar earned. Such families may forego KiwiSaver contributions and even cash their funds in under hardship provisons.  The highly punitive work disincentive for our most needed workers is a logical contradiction of the stated intention of WFF to ‘make work pay’. And the pitiable ‘In Work Tax Credit’(IWTC) is the worst designed ‘work incentive’ imaginable, trapping the most impoverished children in further unremitting hardship.

CPAG has highlighted what is needed:

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  1. Rename WFF to reflect the needs of children, not paid work.
  2. Decouple WFF from all paid work requirements and the source of parental income. Thus, the IWTC should be joined up to have just one WFF payment. This would mean at least $72.50 weekly more for one to three children, and more for extra children in the worst-off families in the benefit system.
  3. Index WFF to wages annually (and to inflation where it exceeds wage growth) as is the case for NZ Super. Also increase the threshold at which WFF starts to reduce to restore the real value last set in 2018. In 2022/23 it should be at least $50,000.
  4. Make work pay with a range of alternative measures. They include decreasing the WFF abatement to 20 percent to lower the effective marginal tax rates for low income working families and improve the returns from work; increasing the threshold for abatement of benefits to 10 hours at the minimum wage ($212 in 2022/3) and explore other more targeted ways to help with the costs of paid work such as child-care and transport subsidies. 

Here’s another example of a woeful policy process. We know that debt is a major driver of family poverty, yet the in-house review of debt by IRD and MSD begun a year ago is nowhere near arriving at solutions. We are told that instead of action, NGOs will be asked for yet more (unpaid) input into yet another consultative process in 2023. If it is like others, the efforts of NGOS will be followed by disdain and silence.

Income-based poverty line statistics do not show the extent to which debt is crippling a family: what may look like an adequate income, after loan repayments, can become seriously deficient. WFF is not the only reason for accumulated debt but the 2022 Annual Report of the IRD contains some alarming figures.

As at 30 June 2022, 55,888 parents who received Working for Families were in debt, which is an increase of $52.3 m or 27% from June 2021.  Looking back to 2018, WFF debt has grown 79% and there is every reason to expect that this debt continues to grow in the current uncertain financial year. If caught out in the expected recession, many low income families will find part of WFF tax credits  for their children disappears just when it is most needed because  of the requirement  to have paid work and not be on any benefit. Furthermore, they will have to repay any In Work Tax Credit they were not entitled to.

I am not optimistic. It has been one year since Government consulted on the purposes and principles of the Social Security Act and there is no feedback, openness or indication of progress. Until we get these foundations right we can expect ongoing, repetitious tinkering.

 In 2007 Labour passed the current flawed purposes and principles amendment to the Act, paving the way for National to return to draconian anti-welfare policies in 2008. The failure of Labour after five years to own the mistake of their 2007 amendment will again embolden National if the election goes their way. 



70 COMMENTS

      • You have a unique view of the concept of ‘sorted’ Dick.
        roger douglas has his fist so far up seymour you can read the time on his watch whenever seymour opens his brain-farting mouth. And just an FYI re roger. Nearly forty years of douglas still hasn’t totally broken AO/NZ. We’re still managing to trundle on despite parasitic ACT and its neoliberal infected natzos and the determinedly un clean Labor. ( Yes, you read that correct. l.a.b.o.r. )
        Behold an early, or prehistoric, neoliberal or traitor. King O’Malley.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_O%27Malley
        ” Some sources have attributed the official choice of “Labor” to influence from King O’Malley, who was born in the United States and was reputedly an advocate of spelling reform; the spelling without a u is the standard form in American English. ”
        There are “Serious deficiencies in the social policy processes” because it takes a lot of people living at the very edge of starvation to create just one of these multi billionaire creatures.
        $26tn of new wealth created since start of pandemic went to richest, Oxfam report reveals
        https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2023/jan/16/oxfam-calls-for-new-taxes-on-super-rich-pocket-dollar-26tn-start-of-pandemic-davos
        “Food and energy companies had more than doubled their profits in 2022, paying out $257bn to wealthy shareholders at a time when more than 800 million people were going hungry.
        Only 4 cents in every dollar of tax revenue came from wealth taxes, and half the world’s billionaires lived in countries with no inheritance tax on money they give to their children.
        A tax of up to 5% on the world’s multimillionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7tn a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty, and fund a global plan to end hunger.”
        Now, your little twerker buddy and his big daddy douglas threw working people under a greed-bus because that was the only way for multimillionaires to become multibillionaires. Otherwise, that would be quite the hourly rate charged by, say, panel beaters, aye Hart, who can smell the money ( of other’s)
        AO/NZ needs a very public commission of inquiry convened by a body of independent forensic accountants.
        Stuff
        ‘You can smell where the money is’: Graeme Hart and his innate sense of commerce. ‘
        https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/128825629/you-can-smell-where-the-money-is-graeme-hart-and-his-innate-sense-of-commerce?utm_source=pocket_reader
        What he’s really saying is he has an innate sense of how to grasp hold of other people’s money without actually going to prison for it. roger douglas and now ACT can also smell other people’s money. roger caught a whiff of how easy that was over the stench of his pig pens. ( Geoff Dale. Book titled ‘Press Pass’. Page 100-101. Weirdly, I can’t find any reference to Geoff Dale’s book on the interweb. )
        Vote ACT and you’ll get a Hellscape to show your kids. Vote LaboUr and you’ll have an opportunity to take control of a politic that you just might be able to reign in to make sure it works for you again. Not a rag doll to be ripped open by narcissistic sociopaths who get an erection for every dollar they get that was earned by someone else.) Sorted.

        • Quite correct Mark . This is why a party with such a low number can generate such a large donation. Not 100,000 small donation representing ordinary kiwis but a few of the wealthiest businessman.

      • Unfortunately that isn’t something that Labour is capable of, hence the need for a new Government. We will get this later in the year when ACT and National win the next election.

      • Susan+St+John – Disagree about no better alternative – vote Right once in a while, therefore forcing Labour to earn your vote…otherwise, they, Labour, will take your vote for granted, and do nothing!

      • progressive? They did a review into poverty but had handbrake winston to deal with so subsequently the 24 things that were found that needed fixed didnt get fixed.
        Labour in their second term with full control still nothing.
        I dont see any party really helping those down the bottom, The greens maybe but they just keep rolling over and doing what Labour tells them to.
        New Zealand doesnt have a real alternative to any that currently represent us, they’re all awful.

  1. The PM did an awesome job ignoring the last review from 2019 – the one that said increase benefits by x amount of dollars, something that they then took a few years to do. A trickle every year.
    This Labour party needs poor people, otherwise who would vote for them?

    • Who else would vote for LINO? Well how about bureaucrats? The PSA has a symbiotic relationship with LINO – it’s no coincidence that the present government has greatly swelled the ranks of the Wellington bureaucracy. Plus most academics are woke.

      • We all know the cost of poverty. We do. But to pretend that you can fix this inequality with a trickle of dollars while not doing the hard work is so ‘left’ thinking.
        You can not ‘benefit increase’ or ‘min wage increase’ out of high living costs without regulating rents/leases, the cost of energy – what good is your heat pump if you can’t afford to run it, food costs – and that be nutritional food costs, education costs, commuting costs, etc. And here our governemnt is just simply not even pretending to care.
        Never mind the old that have no family left, the single people that struggle to survive but on no to few benefits, the couple with an unemployed partner because one of the earns 3.50 NZD to much according to some bullshit threshold.
        I mean who many women and men in NZ are denied unemployment benefits because their partner has an income? Making these people depended on the good graces of their partner with not a dime to their name.
        Nah, Labour needs the poor people it helps create with their inaction. It needs them to pretend that they are an iota better then National, when both are woefully inadequate.
        Take emergency housing, National charged the cost of that housing to the beneficiaries as debt to be paid of 5 NZD a week, Labour charges 25% of ones benefit directly taken of the weekly pay. Can you feel the kindness and the want to reduce poverty, cause i really really can’t.

    • ” This Labour party needs poor people, otherwise who would vote for them? ”

      All the others they have made rich !

      They don’t believe serious poverty exists otherwise would they not do something about it ?

    • the middle admin classes put labour in power and this scheme is for their benifit…the poor tend not to vote.
      please try to drag yourself into the 20th century bratty

    • recently it was said by economists that we need a certain percentage unemployed to control inflation. So it appears they’re a needed part of society to keep things ticking along so why do they keep getting treated so poorly?

  2. This Government – same as the last government – does care a great deal about poverty but much more so for the over-65s. Working age poverty – not so much….

  3. Labour has ditched the poor – thrown them under the bus.

    The proposed social insurance policy for the already wealthy is a disgrace. It says that people like themselves, people with a voice, can’t be allowed to know the truth of WINZ even for a short period of transition. A period in which they already have relatively new appliances and healthy resources and would never come close to actual hardship.

    But the well-off can’t be allowed to experience even a hint of the sheer impossibility for their fellows. Can’t be allowed to intuit the vicious spiral that we throw our fellow citizens into. A vortex the sucks them ever downward. That rather than allowing life whether during a painful transition or when struck by misfortune or disability, it sucks life out. Creates life-long catastrophe. Hobbles children. Creates the very dysfunction that the comfortable can blame and beat the poor for.

    That we call this Labour -there are no words for this.

    • well said. It is scandalous hat so much money has been spent on social insurance with no bipartisan buy in and the vast majority of the public know nothing about it and understand it even less.

  4. Time and time again we see parents blamed for delinquent children and for youngsters running amok in stolen cars, ram raids, and beatings and bashings in public places, and sanctimonious preachings about home life. For the children of the poor, home life defies description, and it is the tragedy of our children that nobody in government has experienced the crippling deprivation of poverty, nor cares about anything beyond the time span of the next electoral cycle.

    Even where there are two parents, and two parents in paid work,it can be rare for both to be in the place called home at the same time, and when they are, they are frequently buggered. Routine cooking, and sit down meals are an unknown.

    Babies and toddlers are dumped in the care of paid strangers before they can walk, talk, hold a spoon, or fully comprehend that the parent will be coming back to collect them again. That’s cruel. Many pre-schoolers have less at-home time than free wheeling adolescents.

    I despise this government for its victimising of our most disadvantaged beautiful children and their verbal clap trap about how much better things may be in 2030 or 2040 and I am not prepared to give them a third chance. They feather their own nests pretty well, boast about making scones for millionaire pop singers, wave armfuls of ethnically correct chocolate around and appear to think that they’re acting for the common good when they are simply self-promoting. This is not what they’re there for.

    • I’m not quite at the point of despising them (yet). SOme of them have grown up knowing or experiencing anything else. They’ve become so out of touch though it isn’t funny. It could be funny if they didn’t believe in much it.
      They’ve bought the whole koolaid 3rdWay/Neoliberal bullshit, AND they’re happy with it. It’s now down to the branding, marketing and commodification of all and everything.
      Anything that gets in the way of that can’t be real.
      And they don’t just ‘mis-speak’, they outright lie when it suits. They, and their officials have lied. Given false assurances then gone back on their word. (Two examples immediately spring to mind. One re the Children’s Commissioner, another to supposedly ‘valued’ immigrants)
      Fuck ’em and all who sail in them. I suspect they’re in for a shock.

      • OnceWasTim Correction. I shouldn’t have said ‘despise’, wrong word. I don’t even hate, I just want to see them gone, especially a politician with the power to muzzle the press about Mallard, and no accountability.

    • Well said.
      I don’t think it is any coincidence that they wave their arms about ethnically correct chocolate. Divide and conquer. The most cynical of them know perfectly well, but there may be some in the government who just feel they have to wave about something as many of the poor are destroyed and it continues along the same neo-liberal track.

      The children of the poor – isn’t there a book with that title related to the establishment of the Labour Party? Yet the current so-called-Labour government doesn’t give a stuff.

      This government is doing terrible harm while looking after themselves and people who are like themselves.

      • what+now. “ The Children of the Poor “ by John A Lee, an autobiographical novel, but anything of his is well and truly worth reading. Unlike another allegedly poor boy John P Key who shrieked away about sending other people’s children off to war, Lee actually went to war, won the DCM with the NZDF in France, lost an arm, returned, served two periods as a Labour MP.

        He’s actually a good eminently readable writer, rare among politicians nowadays who have to have pr types to do their writing for them and, it would seem, their reading.

        It’s a story of cold Dunedin gutter life, infinitely worse than Key’s nice state house in leafy Bryndwr, Christchurch. Lee caught ducks on the river Leith for family to eat same spot one somebody else I knew did further along the track. He writes a universal story about poverty and social injustice, fell out with his own party over issues I’ve forgotten, but his story is one that lingers once one has read it, and John A Lee was the sort of decent honourable man so sorely needed in Parliament now.

          • what+now Yes, Nicky Hager’s writings should be compulsory reading too, starting with “ Dirty Politics.” The Hager/Stephenson Afghanistan report, “ Hit&Run “ was how I again learned that politicians don’t read, or don’t understand what they do read. I started it on the Thursday, reread it, finished on Saturday evening, shocked, went online and saw that silly little PM ( ‘all our young guys are workshy druggies’) Bill English had popped up to Auckland, courtesy of the tax payer, to an Adele concert blithely proclaiming, ‘ Nothing to see here’, and how very wrong PM English was subsequently proven to be.

            There’s a surprising amount of New Zealand writing available from participants in our past history rather than historians, and even bearing in mind the distorted perceptions of psychos like Harry Prince of England, it’s not a history we learn in schools, and never will now that education, such as it is, is being consciously shaped to create a certain narrative.

            This may be to counter ignorami like immigrant PM John P Key stating that New Zealand was settled peacefully, but it also means that we miss out on learning interesting and quite colourful history, like the profitable game of smuggling on the New Zealand coastline, and seeing an evolving process far too carelessly trashed by idiot politicians.

            The Irish experience here should also have been documented at other than at coffee table book level, especially Canterbury and West Coast hostile experiences, although my Southland Presbyterian husband threw stones at Catholic kids on his way to school, shouting, “ Catholic dogs, stink like frogs “ and I’ve previously recounted literary great Dan Davin being ejected from a Saturday night dance in Invercargill for being a Marist boy.

            Kids don’t read now. They watch Netflix or are sat down to be kept quiet watching Hollywood crap on their iPads, and that’s yet another diminishing of the potential of our most precious taonga.

      • what-now. “ Divide and conquer” is the whole essence of identity politics as pushed by the Greens and Labour, a global facet of neo- liberalism, and why these two parties must reform pronto, or sod off.

  5. The problem with the WFF tax credit and AS was that increase in payments often just lined the pockets of landlords (increased rents). The state of the housing market was obstructing efforts to reduce poverty through increased income.

    So government focused on increasing base benefits, the winter power bill income supplement (and improved rental standards to reduce heating costs) and food in schools.

    For mine they should have also frozen rents for 2 years beyond the one that expired in Sept 2020 (from March lockdown). It maybe too late now as rents may have peaked.

    • +1
      They could have frozen rent payments – or installed some sort of rent regulation that is meaning full. The same for energy costs, remove GST from food, free public transport etc. All that would have made people ‘richer’ then an extra 5NZD before income tax.

      • Reactionary Brat. Agree. The mean GST on food graphically illustrates govt antagonism to the poor, or their total ineptitude. If Australia and the UK can do this we can do this, but won’t.

  6. Labour needs to educate the poor, then we wouldn’t have the problem at all. But rather than do that, this government has overseen the accelerating decline in educational outcomes.

    • Andrew. Please don’t blame Labour for the deliberate pernicious dumbing down of the education system, they are simply a product of it, more’s the pity. I think you’d have to agree that Nat dimwits are no better, and the Greens inhabit their own little Disneyland.

      I don’t really know when it began, I was a long time away, but it is more than just further handicapping of the children or of the poor, and immigrants do still manage to excel where our own folk don’t. Again that is quite a complex area, involving a different ethos, and motivation. It’s quite interesting though, that reluctant as I am to critique teachers, quite suddenly the predominantly
      middleclass students who had no problem gaining entry to teachers’ colleges, became persona non grata, and the less I say about that the better. Consider though, Kelvin Davis, ex-school teacher, as a Minister for Children, and say a little prayer for the kiddies.

      • I think part of the problem with the education system was that it was put more into the hands of local boards as in the USA. If education is for absorbing lessons and skills using minds and hands; from the past, facts, and prepare for the future how could it be supposed to be better if put in the hands and minds of local bigwigs and self-satisfied university graduates, both lots having found a place of standing in society and feeling that they know all or best?

        A centrally government set curriculum ensuring well-informed and based young citizens, taught to think, debate, plan, question themselves and look for answers to the past and keep active minds, with room for addition and local needs and wants, would have been as near ideal as possible. And keep the open university tradition which has been so useful to many for people who are ready to concentrate and absorb learning through every pore and not be thinking about their new motors, or partners, party or socialising, or new levels of drunkenness or speed, would be practical.

        I think David Lange was keen on the local system – great ideology and theories, low practicality. Good man but too unaware of human f….g foibles trumping most idealistic policies.

    • Ironic isn’t it? A cynical strategy devised by highly educated professional students come politicians who became ministers. “Keep them stupid and they’ll need us forever.”

    • When and how? The poor don’t have time to become educated, the system sees to that. They work numerous jobs and then pull their eldest out of school to help with the food bill.

  7. A lot can be done with selective actions

    Those who cannot work because of either sickness (sometimes during cancer treatment) or disability – a move to 80% of work income or super level income support.

    The former cost would provide the (apparently necessary) incentive to provide people with the drug and health treatment required to make them work able (some just need the drugs Pharmac says they cannot afford).

    Also allowing those with disability to retain support payments after finding partners.

    And ending debt repayment to W and I for those on benefits (this delayed until they find work).

    And when people move onto a benefit (loss of a job or working partner) while supporting children, offer debt refinancing. And for those with mortgages offer support to retain home ownership (including buying out the partners share).

    • Mark Agree. That’s why I’m looking at TOP, which has high calibre candidates- or did – and Winston Peters, who will cull a lot of disillusioned oldies ‘s votes anyway, as the best of a bad bunch, but you’re right, although I think that Labour may now be quite a dodgy group. Kia kaha.

  8. We elected them with promises of reviews into poverty, that happened but then all 24 recommendations that review produced were forgotten.
    Disability got another layer of bureaucracy, a Ministry where they sit around having meetings all day, zero change on the front line.
    Medicinal cannabis where the whole industry is over regulated driving the price completely out of reach of those who need it.
    49% of kiwis who voted yes in the referendum the govt completely turned their back on. The regulations created were excessive and made alcohol look safer. They also allowed right wing religion to spread the disproven reefer madness misinformation freely without consequence.
    Covid hits and a gold plated benefit is created worth about twice as much as a standard benefit, the govt citing its so as not to impinge on their normal lifestyles too much. But its ok to treat regular beneficiaries this way?
    Oh and lets not forget all those business subsidies to keep them afloat over covid.
    Reserve bank floods the country with money but nothing is put in place to stop property investors who swooped in on the cheap money and now we’re all paying for that with inflation.
    Labour has done more to help the well off rather than the voter base who got them into power.

    • Those are good reasons for despair Mark but what next? Can you put your thinking cap on for ways forward, even working within their tiny minds! How can we who want a better fairer society for all that we can afford! – find how to manipulate their minds to produce a positive response for the people, by showing how they will benefit personally and not just through money?

      What accolades can we find for them – perhaps pick on some unlovely even vicious polly or cadmin. and show whether they have spoiled their image by doing something good. Then say – Now that wasn’t too bad was it! Try doing it again, get into practice, build your moral strength just like your abs.

      Getting mad at them doesn’t help, just increases their sense of strength – holding the bridge against the wanting wasters, the dissolute hordes sort of thing. And let’s not forget that there are such people amongst the needy; they never will be self-supporting and always inclined to leach, steal but can with assistance and some core security and care, do something useful in society. But the problem is that they are falsely held up to be the example of all among those in the social welfare class.

  9. Serious deficiencies in the social policy processes
    If ‘serious’ is replaced by ‘delirious’ as in bold below, with all its synonyms, then it is a precise description of our social services and policies situation expressed mildly as ‘serious’.
    Google says – Delirious:
    adjective: delirious – in an acutely disturbed state of mind characterized by restlessness, illusions, and incoherence; affected by delirium.
    “he became delirious and couldn’t recognize people”
    Similar: incoherent raving babbling irrational hysterical wild

    The people putting forward our present social policies and allowing them to be sadministered (sic) by people (and algorithms) who/which have no foresight or backsight, human sight or desire to advance to a better society, are under a wicked spell of backward ideology. This has lumps of religious judgment and condescending, haughty, class supremacy big enough to choke any person with aspirations to having real understanding humanity.

    So not working to help people to rise above social problems to a situation where individuals treat each other well and lives in a society enabling all people being integrated and productive in a positive state of mind with some happiness; that would be a good way of being for a human being. Why cannot we achieve this in the 21st century? I think it is because we seem to love kicking people when they are down. A nastiness that arises in us all often, in some way.

    I suggest that all who read this then find a couple of books by Catherine Cookson from her historical period around 1800s-1900s. She has got close to the lives of poor and middle class of that time as they scrabble around in their lives. She knew it personally and rose out of that morass and turned her hand to creating stories that are female-oriented but show how people were ground down in their own vices or devices. One can skip some paragraphs if wearying of the female side, but the books as a whole are descriptive of manners and conditions of that time. Why we would allow ourselves to retreat into such attitudes and conditions again beggars belief.

  10. Susan, although I agree with your angle on this problem (with solution being educating the middle class on social insurance), many NZers are using the ‘ditch the witch’ sloganeering suffered by Julia Gillard to diss the prime minister. That’s where political discourse has gone. Few people are looking to become informed on the issue you raise. Many are using the medieval word ‘evil’ to describe her. Astonishingly sad.

      • The trouble with our politicians is that they think bi-partisan is people transferring between sexes. If the PM needs a Sir Walter Raleigh or Lady-trans-in-waiting, she needs to toughen up or step down for someone with hairy muscular arms who has an agile brain, warmth about humanity, able to bluster past the naysayers.

        The problems we face need urgent exclusive attention and not dithering about what flavour milkshake you choose, or whether it should be in a plasticised tumbler or what? Just being green doesn’t solve our social problems. If we undertook sensible forward-looking people supportive policies, we would be in a better state to handle climate change,
        technological change, over population etc. But no time for that, where’s the profit and ‘We’re just waiting for some giant corpse to come with a panacea for all that ails us’. Bah humbug.

        People are dying of neglect and shrinking to the size of a 100 teardrops through the stress of living in a society that has a sham facade up to confuse spectators while behind they mine the small gains of the poor and tunnel into taxes that should support basic living standards and useful education leading to jobs with livable wages.

        That’s the recipe, no souffle’, just basic 3 vegs and protein, a secure dry light, airy place to live and slee. plus some pleasure and occasional joy; but that’s extravagant for the ‘feral’ in the minds of the sneering, deserving PMC. So what about being humane and accepting the great philosophies of enlightenment and respect for all classes and everyone having basic conditions, with the wealthy still able to pursue excess and fine style (ton in Regency days).
        A light ironic take on the above –
        Too Good for the Average Man – Rodgers and Hart
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBmOSMGRMOk

        about being humane and accepting the great philosophies of enlightenment and respect for all classes and everyone having basic conditions, with the wealthy pursuing excess and fine style (ton in Regency days).

  11. Supporting ‘charities’ that seem very self serving is part of the woke problem that use marketing and private practise firms to publicise poverty while significant amounts of funds are not going to the children they raise if for. Kidscan has been called out on this practise.

    Worldwide problem.

    Many Of The Largest Charities In America Are Giant Money Making Scams
    https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/many-of-the-largest-charities-in-america-are-giant-money-making-scams/

    Making money off poverty and charity has never been so profitable! Since media benefit from earning advertising they hardly ever report the negative findings of how much is actually going to the children.

    • as henning wehn said

      we don’t have charity in germany
      we pay our taxes
      and the government does it’s job

      we have so much ‘charity provision’ because we can’t grasp that basic concept.

      • Can’t!! Won’t…>>> Cheapskates and shysters have slithered their way to the top and brawny simpletons at the bottom. What space for people wanting to have a go at life in a country that is inclusive with the very highs and lows limited to miniscule fractions??

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