Written By: lprent - Date published: 7:32 am, December 2nd, 2014 - 26 comments
The economic news is depressing for NZ at present. After riding a dairy commodity boom for the last few years, the payout for farmers looks like it will drop from a high of $8.50/kg last season to $4.85/kg this coming season. Meanwhile National has neglected our most sustainable resource – people. So expect a busted economy for the next few years.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 4:31 pm, February 12th, 2012 - 36 comments
vto made a comment that he thought that the number of comments was diminishing at kiwiblog. Now I have no idea because I usually avoid the sewer section there. However it did remind me that I should have a look here. It feels like it has been getting more popular, but intuition is a poor substitute for actually looking at the numbers.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:37 am, March 15th, 2011 - 32 comments
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 7:50 am, January 28th, 2011 - 171 comments
John Key, very optimistically, reckons he can raise $10 billion by selling our assets. Key’s Government gave massive tax cuts, averaging $16,000 each, to the richest 1% of taxpayers that they’ll get year after year. The present value of those tax cuts for the richest 1% is over $10 billion. He’s selling our assets to pay for tax cuts for the richest 1%.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 8:42 am, December 12th, 2010 - 92 comments
Deborah Coddington, trying to justify leaving solo mums and their kids with no state support, says: “I’m nearly 60 and my generation were at it like rabbits when we were teenagers but there weren’t masses of teenage pregnancies because there was no DPB. You couldn’t raise a child on your own, therefore few women got pregnant.” A quick fact check.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:02 am, October 2nd, 2010 - 51 comments
The crime stats are not good news. Homicides are up, violent offences are up, sex offences are up, harassment and related offences are up, drug offences are up, public order offences are up. Oddly, though, the total number of offences is down (by 0.1%). The decrease is all down to a 25.6% decrease in recorded fraud offences. What’s up with that?
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:16 pm, September 6th, 2010 - 15 comments
It’s been nearly two years now of Paula Bennett declaring that the unemployment crisis is over. Yesterday, she put out a press release titled ‘More than 6,000 beneficiaries find jobs in August‘. Wow, 6,000 in a month, pretty good. But Bennett must have been hoping we wouldn’t read beyond the title. The fact is that 900 more people went on the dole than came off it. The total number of beneficiaries just keeps climbing.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:07 am, August 26th, 2010 - 22 comments
Yesterday, Key was boasting that his goverment had brought down robberies and burglaries in Manukau. But it’s just more numbers games. In reality, the crime rate in Counties Manukau rose 6.9% in 2009. That’s twice the already awful 3.5% nationwide increase. I’m not against the government saying it has brought down crime. I just wish that it was true.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 1:08 pm, August 25th, 2010 - 16 comments
Bill English is going to play more number games today to claim wages are rising. Actually they’re falling, they’re going to keep falling, and there are 100,000 extra jobless. We deserve a Finance Minister who does his job, not one occupying himself with statistical chicanery.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:23 am, August 20th, 2010 - 27 comments
Bill English thinks he has proven that wages grew just 3% under Labour and grew 15.5% under National in the 1990s. How’s he done it? By taking a ridiculous definition of wages and a very convenient timeframe. Bill, this is getting old. Your distortions are transparent and exposing you is too easy. How about, rather than fudging historic numbers, you get on with your job of building a better future?
Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:38 am, March 26th, 2010 - 25 comments
We’ve now done 5000 posts. Number 4000 was at the end of October, so it took a bit less than 5 months (even with the dropoff during the summer break). The comments are sitting just less than 155k which is less than our long-term average. It is probably more a reflection of the kiwi’s disappearing […]
Written By: Steve Pierson - Date published: 12:23 pm, June 27th, 2008 - 37 comments
As expected, the economy contracted 0.3% in the March quarter. The drought brought activity in the agricultural sector down after a recent strong run, the housing sector continued to slow off the back of the boom, oil prices are dragging on the economy in general, and mining was down after a surge in the December […]
Written By: all_your_base - Date published: 10:11 am, May 2nd, 2008 - 16 comments
Never one to miss an opportunity to stir up fear over crime, Simon Power now wants us to believe that we’re less safe because of the rise of “violent offenders” being granted home detention. As is increasingly common inside his caucus, he’s hoping that we’ll overlook the detail. The background is that in the last […]
The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
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