I disagree on the fact that 39% of my income is “a small part”. I have no children, private health insurance, few if any claims on the State. My direct taxes equate to at least two people on the minimum annual income. How much more do you want? Why is it my problem that people on low incomes feel they have a right to children and a house? I don’t even have a house.

How if I leave the country? Will that make you feel better?

I’ve paid my own way, paid my own student loan back, paid my share of tax – what do I get out of Labour? Fuck all mate, a shit health sytem, no investment in infrastructure for a decade until it starts to fall down, schools being closed, train system being fuckedup, and now a bunch of freakin right on academic socialists telling me I should be thankful for getting screwed.

I don’t know where you live matey but 60k in Auckland with a mortgage and kids is minimum wage.

Think about the guys you were labouring with who had to support a family – they dont know that x% wage increas was actually 2/5ths of fuck all real increase given the cost of housing and basic living under labour.

When I first started working I was earning $109/week and the dole at that time was $90/week. For my extra $19/week I had to pay $9/week on public transport, $1.50 on compulsory union fees and I had to have a completely different wardrobe than if I had been on the dole. If you were thinking I wouldn’t have a lot remaining to save for house then you would be correct.

At that time people were saying that welfare compared to trainee/apprentice incomes was too high, and/or wages were too low, and that such comfortable welfare provided little incentive to work.

Would you get out of bed at 6:00am catch a train, a bus and work 8 hours then catch a bus and a train 5 days a week for such a slim margin over the dole while incurring additional costs to do so?

So how much has really changed? Here on this blog you bang on about the need to lift wages, as I did then and as I do now. It was a Labour govt then, it’s a Labour govt now and still nothing changes.

Vote for a change, stop being suckered by this “we look after the workers” bullshit from Labour, the Labour pollies look after themselves and the workers get shafted – welcome to Labour govt.

Why don’t you, Tane and a few other anon bloggers here at the Standard start a new workers party, I’d vote for it if it puts it’s own beliefs into it’s policies and stopped being apologists for a bunch of self serving poll driven redistribution junkies.

Interesting graph, it shows very clearly just how powerful a zero rated tax threshold of circa $20K would be in delivering more money to the pockets of the most needy.

I think I can see why Dr. Cullen isn’t a fan of a zero rated threshold, that being that if he isn’t taxing low earners he’s not able to play fairy god mother with their own money to buy their support.

Imagine what a different debate this would be if all tax payers (not just targeted groups which were shown by internal polling to be non Labour voters) below the “minimum wage” threshold were not paying tax so that it could be redistributed to people earning more than them.

I tried to give you a look into what life is like for the bulk of the population who have incomes around that level and all you can do is talk about when you were a kid peeling potatoes.

I mean no disrespect to those on low incomes with families, however if you wanted to show the picture of family despair then more carefully chosen facts might do a better job. Quite obviously family incomes are significantly higher than individual incomes.

I don’t need a lecture on poverty though. I know exactly what it is.

“I tried to give you a look into what life is like for the bulk of the population who have incomes around that level and all you can do is talk about when you were a kid peeling potatoes. ”

“tried” being the operative word, I now see where you’re coming from but this was not obvious from the original post or the graph used to back it up.

Your lumping everything into one graph, it really makes the graph meaningless.

“See that line that says minimum wage? Nearly half of kiwis earn less than that.” … again is this bad? is this good? is this on par with other countries? This statement it not useful if you lump everyone on a graph.

If a solo mum with 3 kids is earning less than minimum wage then that’s bad.

If a stay-at-home-mum who is supported by her husband earning $150k is earning less than minimum wage, big deal.

I’m not disagreeing with the spirit of your post, just the graph that doesn’t follow.

You can slice and dice the figures anyway to make them look how you want – like when Farrar tried to pretend incomes went up faster under National but looking solely at the average ordinary time full-time wage – that’s why it’s best to stick with the full picture when the question at hand is ‘what is the distribution of income among kiwis?’

Well I’m sorry but I think that the figures presented don’t really tell much of a story. There are too many factors included for a savvy person to be able to distill anything useful. Also, if you lump in all the different types of individual income then you can not really talk about supporting dependents – as they might be in the graph too. That’s where household income would be applicable.

I understand your dilemma of trying to show a broad picture without using too many (complicated) facts and figures – but this could have been done better.

Incidentally, since you mentioned the numbers came from Treasury I looked over there for the numbers. Didn’t find (no worry), but what I did notice was this:

Average family gross income: ($)
- couple with children 92,882

Wow! If that’s true then it is bloody fantastic. I guess WFF has boosted that number.

I tried to give you a look into what life is like for the bulk of the population who have incomes around that level and all you can do is talk about when you were a kid peeling potatoes.

Try to imagine, working for minimum wage in a soulless job for a greedy boss who regards you as disposable. Imagine trying to get by and raise your kids on $25,000 a year. And then, imagine that just 8 years ago, under National you were getting just $14,500 a year, and you know that if they come into power again, there will be no more pay-rises for you, even as inflation eats away at what you do get.

I wonder if you can.

It’s not such a big deal when you’re looking at one snapshot in time and a very low unemployment period when benefit levels are stable but we’ve done a whole bunch of graphs on incomes and we always use medians and all incomes because otherwise you miss out major effects like changes in employment levels and benefit levels and how those impact on real people.

You can slice and dice the figures anyway to make them look how you want – like when Farrar tried to pretend incomes went up faster under National but looking solely at the average ordinary time full-time wage – that’s why it’s best to stick with the full picture when the question at hand is ‘what is the distribution of income among kiwis?’

we don’t have an infinite number of catagories (we do of tags) so I chose the catagory most aligned with the topic.

You make a good point too. I can’t see what benefit there is comparing the after-school income of my 15 year old self, with my income now as a full-time professional with nearly 20 years of experience.

At 15 I probably thought 5 dollars an hour for slicing potatoes was pretty good. They gave me some free 20c pieces for the games machines! And I didn’t have a mortgage or any dependents either.

captcha: “Prentice rescued”.