Posts by Alfie
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While we're talking about lies, David Farrar's obviously not the brightest button in the box. To reach his "$38 billion" cost, widely quoted by team Key, he multiplied the 3.49m people aged 18+ by $11k each.
While that does come to $38.4b, it assumes that once a UBI was introduced, every working person in New Zealand would immediately resign and opt to live on $211 a week for the rest of their lives. So far no-one in the MSM seems to have noticed this pretty obvious discrepancy. Seriously?
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Lewis Holden, the "lead campaigner" for the change group, is hosting a Change the Flag results party in central Auckland. Half an hour after kickoff only four people had turned up. Then during a Mediaworks live cross to the event, one of the two Kyle Lockwood flags fell down.
A suitable metaphor for the whole failed process, innit.
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Once again John Key's propensity to lie is amazing. Yesterday in the Herald he was quoted as saying...
Last year I think we collected about $29 billion in taxes anyway, so you would literally have to ramp up taxes enormously ...
Aktually John, the 2015/16 tax take is $76b. Or if you want to be pendantic and stick with the previous year, the actual figure there is $73.5974b. But why let facts get in the way of a deliberate lie which gives your media sycophants a juicy, albeit invented number to spin.
UBI seems like an idea worth investigating. The Greens adopted UBI as policy in 2014 and various countries have either experimented with the concept or plan to implement UDI in the near future.
Back in 1974 the Manitoba government trialed the Mincome project with some success. Mothers of newborns elected to spend more time with their children, hospital visits dropped 8.5%, more teenagers graduated from college and fewer mental illness consultations were reported. The scheme was canned by the incoming (and short-sighted) conservative government five years later.
Finland will launch their universal basic income experiment next year. There's a good analysis here.
Twenty cities across the Netherlands also have pilot UBI schemes in the pipeline, while Switzerland will hold a referendum on the subject on 5 June.
This is definitely a subject which deserves wide public debate.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
You’re damn tooting about that.
Why, oh why cannot Labour see this?
Seconded, or is that thirded? While Labour may envision a future where they govern alone, the impression they gave before the last election when they announced no deal with the Greens was that they couldn't play nicely with others.
An FPP mindset looks increasingly dated in an MMP world.
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Envirologue: 1080, "eco-terrorism" and agendas, in reply to izogi,
8.5 years prison.
Which seems light, given the gravity of the offence and the estimated $37m cost to the country. It makes you wonder what you'd have to do to receive the maximum 14 years the offence carries?
Phil Taylor has an in-depth review of the case in the Herald.
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Bradley Ambrose’s defamation case against the PM has been “settled”.
Are we to presume that Key has paid Ambrose to make this one go away? Or did the taxpayer generously fund this foolishness?
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Hard News: A cog in the Mediaworks machine, in reply to Sacha,
NZME launches their own online daily video bulletin, with ex-CampbellLiver Tristram Clayton one of their presenters.
Clayton's a decent journo, but Tony Veitch???
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I’ve heard MI6 (or is it the SAS?) go a few steps further and drop their HDD’s into a grinder.
It was the GCHQ with MI5 hovering in the background. Despite the Guardian informing the spooks that copies of the Snowden documents existed in multiple locations, including their US office and Brazil where Greenwald was living, Cameron insisted on London Guardian staff destroying a laptop and hard discs using dremels.
It was always going to be a pointless exercise – a symbolic display of petulance and stupidity by a pissed-off Tory government.
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The Herald has a (poorly edited) video of Nicky Hager speaking outside the Auckland Court yesterday. He describes the "surreal experience" of watching a police office hit the hard disc with a hammer "213 times" in a windowless, basement room.
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