bradc wrote: Who's saying what now?

Ragnor is, isn't he? At least, it is implied.

bradc wrote: Ask yourself this though, if we have a system who's goal is to presumably make it easier on single mothers (and by extraction their kids) and our child poverty and abuse stats are going downhill, does this seem like an effective system to you?

Are you going to put the blame for that on the welfare system? As you can see above, there exist effective incentives to exit benefit into paid work. he minimum wage worker has a surplus of $404.20 after paying rent and childcare, the beneficiary has a surplus of $187.59 - however, a key part of getting people off DPB and into work was the ICM model of case management - which National has killed because it requires low caseloads for case managers, ergo, more case managers.

That's child poverty and some of the attempts of the welfare system to address it - as for child abuse, I have no idea about the causes of this. Economic stress is certainly causative, but not the sole cause, surely. And I don't see how the welfare system increases it - people who are welfare dependent with it would most likely be crime dependent without it.

A better angle Ragnor might be to ask: Does the current system sufficiently encourage jobless parents to take precautionary measures against having more kids they can't afford?

Once the kids exist though, they HAVE to have the support or else society pays more in the long run, there is really no argument there. Even if 25% of DPB mothers were abusing the money and not helping their children, at least the other 75% who are more wise would not contribute further to the social shit storm poorly raised children populate.

What percentage of beneficiaries are long term recipients?

Define long term.

Quote: Of the recipients of main benefits at the end of December 2011: two in five (38 percent) had received their current benefit for less than one year, and one in three (32 percent) had received their current benefit continuously for between one and four years 11 percent had been receiving their current benefit continuously for 10 years or more.

http://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/ab...s-11-dec-31.doc

More 'n' 10 years. I think it'd put a nail in the coffin of the "poor sloots are just getting knocked up so they never have to work because parenthood is easy"

Ah, DPB specific would be better then.

Quote: Caring for a dependent child aged 6 years or under 62.4% Caring for a dependent child aged 7–13 years 27.3% Caring for a dependent child aged 14 years or over 9.9% Caring for two or more dependent children 47.9%

Quote: Of the clients receiving a Domestic Purposes Benefit at the end of December 2011: one in four (25 percent) had received a Domestic Purposes Benefit continuously for less than one year two in five (41 percent) had received a Domestic Purposes Benefit continuously for between one and four years 10 percent had received a Domestic Purposes Benefit continuously for ten years or more.

Caveat: The first quote only focuses on DPB: Sole Parent, the latter quote includes all three DPB types - Sole Parent, Care of Sick or Infirm, Woman Alone, and the Emergency Maintenance Allowance.
All numbers from here: http://www.msd.govt.nz/about-msd-an...factsheets.html

Edward Diego wrote: Are you going to put the blame for that on the welfare system?

Not all of it no, but you seem to keep throwing out figures as if someone who becomes a teen mum, with minimal education and some pretty dire employment prospects and attitudes is an accountant who only acts in terms of what's the best net income generator for them.

Edward Diego wrote: And I don't see how the welfare system increases it - people who are welfare dependent with it would most likely be crime dependent without it.

There's correlation with poverty and crime for sure, but typically it's more property related and not just ALL crime, no? What I think is a likely contributor are elements like having non-blood related males in a house and a cavalier attitude towards kids. I don't think a system which encourages (again, assuming not everyone acts like an accountant) or certainly doesn't discourage multiple fatherless children or child rearing by young immature parents helps much in that realm.

bradc wrote: There's correlation with poverty and crime for sure, but typically it's more property related and not just ALL crime, no? What I think is a likely contributor are elements like having non-blood related males in a house and a cavalier attitude towards kids. I don't think a system which encourages (again, assuming not everyone acts like an accountant) or certainly doesn't discourage multiple fatherless children or child rearing by young immature parents helps much in that realm.

You've said yourself bradc, these people are not the sharpest tools in the shed, so do you think a system designed to discourage extra children would actually work?

That would depend entirely on how many of the parents rights you wanted to remove. Or you could target those at higher risk by paying them to use contraceptives.

Saw this interesting story in the latest edition of New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/...currentPage=all
Some highlights:

Quote: Paul is running for President again this year, in a field that many Republicans find disappointing. And yet, while Paul is doing better, state by state, than he did in 2008, he has conspicuously failed to establish himself as this year’s Tea Party candidate. Polls have shown that voters who support the Tea Party are actually less likely to support Paul—some have gone for Newt Gingrich, whose denunciations of Obama are pithier, or for Rick Santorum, who is more forthright in his defense of “traditional American values.” In South Carolina, where Paul received thirteen per cent of the vote, behind Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Santorum, he did his best among voters opposed to the Tea Party. The Ron Paul movement has grown, but the events of recent years—the rise of the Tea Party, the fights over corporate bailouts, the messy passage of Obama’s health-care reform bill—have done surprisingly little to raise Paul’s standing among Republicans. Last summer, Jon Stewart mocked cable news channels for “pretending Ron Paul doesn’t exist,” and asked, “How did libertarian Ron Paul become the thirteenth floor in a hotel?” The answer is embedded in the question. People don’t think of Paul as a top-tier Republican candidate partly because they think of him as a libertarian: anti-tax and anti-bailout, but also antiwar, anti-empire, and, sometimes, anti-Republican.

Quote: Even so, Paul hasn’t been able to leave behind the passions and controversies of earlier eras. For much of the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Paul published a newsletter, in which he shared investment advice and political analysis with paid subscribers. Four years ago, the journalist James Kirchick published excerpts in The New Republic, and the magazine recently uploaded more pages from the newsletter. The articles seemed designed to win readers by offering them content that other publications wouldn’t touch. There was a judgment that the civil-rights movement was “bad from the beginning,” and a statement that, “given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the ‘criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.” An essay from 1993 noted “the disappearing white majority” and the spread of “ghetto values,” and it ended with a suggestion: “Every home should be dedicated to Western standards of religion, music, values, education, dress, and manners.” The essay called for resistance through cultural revival. It concluded with a simple diagnosis: “We need a cultural remnant as much as a financial one.” When these and other quotes first surfaced, in the nineties, Paul claimed that the newsletter was being judged unfairly. In 2001, in a profile in Texas Monthly, he changed tactics, saying, “Those words weren’t really written by me,” and he has since stuck to that claim, while declining to explain who the words were written by, how they came to be published under his name, or why, if he finds them offensive, he didn’t disavow them, early and loudly. Now he says the contents shocked him. “I was devastated,” he said one morning, in the same matter-of-fact tone he uses to explain the looming financial apocalypse. He was sitting, braced by a pillow, on a couch in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Las Vegas, looking a bit smaller and softer than he does behind a podium. He had some time to talk before his next outing, a chartered-plane campaign swing through Elko and Reno. “As far as the newsletter goes, I maintain that they weren’t my positions,” he says. “I didn’t have to, sort of, reject it.” It’s easy enough to believe that Paul didn’t write everything in the newsletter, given his anti-inflammatory tendency to turn almost any question into a debate about the federal budget. But it’s impossible to believe that Paul didn’t know about these articles, especially since many of them were written in his voice, complete with references to his son in medical school and his former colleagues in the House. His own record on race is complicated: while avoiding provocation, he has nevertheless dissented, gently but firmly, from the civil-rights consensus.

Quote: In “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” (Oxford; 2012), the political scientists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson take the measure of the recent amorphous uprising. They find that, despite a focus on economics, Tea Party groups often entertain “socially conservative moral arguments” and don’t generally identify as libertarian. “The Tea Party came, during much of 2010, to be (misleadingly) portrayed as a formidable, independent political movement that threatened to overturn the two-party system,” they write. In fact, Tea Party supporters tended to be indistinguishable from conservative Republicans—the energy was new, but not the ideology. Individual Tea Partiers have become influential within the Republican Party, especially at the local level, but few people now view the movement as a threat to the political duopoly. This election season, no viable Tea Party Presidential candidate has emerged, and the Tea Party itself has been all but invisible, subsumed within the broader Republican electorate.