Oct
16th
2018
Wholesome Rage: Centrelink, and the purpose of Welfare in Neoliberalism · 4:11pm Oct 16th, 2018
Special thanks to Ghost of Heraclitus for some of the quotes I use in this
This one's going to be the first work of mine that gets officially endorsed by the groups I'm working with, which is pretty exciting. It's the difference between being an all-the-time political blogger to being a full-time political writer!
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MrNumbers · 508 views
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#Wholesome Rage
#Some Marxist Bullshit
#Welfare
#Centrelink
#Australia
Ah, government and capitalism at their finest. And people wonder why the rates of depression and suicide keep going up.
Neoliberalism and bureaucraticism together is a match made in hell. Very informative and definitely filled me with rage-- though I'm not sure it was of a wholesome variety.
Modern Liberalism seems to be held to the opinion that government screws up everything it touches, so the only answer is to allow it to control everything so nothing will interfere and everything will then work perfectly. The rest of us have our hands up and are saying, "Um, that's not how that works. If you have a few minutes, we can list out a lot of examples..."
4953979
Ah, what's that got to do with what I actually say in the article?
4954003 I'm working on it. Seriously, it's very good, and I'm taking notes. The Liberal/Conservative split over on this side of the pond has some *really* odd balancing issues with Federal vs State aid, which can make the levers inside the massive machine of governmental assistance shift dramatically with just a few dollars. Since there are cutoffs, restrictions, and tapering off as the income level rises, there are a number of times when a recipient of certain assistance can *lose* thousands of dollars a year in payments if they accidentally go a dollar over the threshold. The Conservative view tends toward "Well, they should get a full time job and get all the way out of the assistance swamp" while the Liberal view tends toward "We should give them more money." (Which is a little unfair for the Libs, because that's their answer to everything) I've stepped on a couple of these land mines during my long path through life. For example, when farm incomes dipped dramatically in the late 70s, our family farm hit negative net income for several years in a row (it wasn't all that good normally). All of the sudden, I was eligible for reduced price lunches and Upward Bound, a federally funded program to help poor inner city kids go to college. Admittedly, I never would have gone to college without their assistance, so +1 for that side (and there's about an hour's worth of stories there). But then when farm income (in theory) rebounded in the early 80's, all of my college financial assistance dried up cold, so I wound up washing dishes all the rest of the way through until graduation plus a year. And every year of that, the college financial aid system assumed my (supposedly rich) parents were sending me ten thousand dollars a year, which was about ten thousand dollars less than reality.
If I have any nit to pick about the article, it is my absence of knowledge about the AU welfare system. For example, here in the US, we have Section 8 housing, food stamps, transportation programs, AFDC (aid to families with dependent children), CHIPS (Children Healthcare something something), Medicaid/Medicare and many more in a mix of Federal/State/Local programs, all of which have overlap (which can cause the income 'stepping' issues above) Then there are issues caused when (for example) a young one-income married couple with a child collect *far* less than an unmarried couple with a child, making it highly expensive for the struggling couple to stay married.
4954021
Our system just being Federal helps a lot in that regard. Way fewer things covering a lot more bases with just lump sums of money, which should be the way to go. All those extra flak-option support networks largely are there to either win over key consituencies (bribery) or just the usual of marketing it in such a way that the 'undeserving' aren't getting taxpayer money.
So instead of a Katamari ball you can pick up in the US, we have a much more streamlined system which... fucks you efficiently, and more directly, but extremely consistently. And as you outlined, inconsistency can hurt you way harder than anything else in a lot of ways.
The underlying principle is still the same. It just makes figuring out the Guilotine Equilibrium, as Ghost contributed helpfully, weirder to calculate.
I think in theory there should be some means-testing, but the amount you guys have is crazy. The worst thing is, I guarantee it costs the government so much more money to means-test than it saves by kicking people off the rolls. That job placement counselor's salary costs the taxpayer's a lot more than however many people he manages to kick off the rolls every year.
4954064
My point here is more; Show my a neoliberal country that doesn't do this.
4954040 Yeah, there's a good article published by Howard Baetjer about the welfare cliff that has taken a bit of flack for the actual numbers being distorted, but the basic idea is still valid. They really like using the "Single mother of two" in their examples because that's where the numbers get bent the worst, so for you single females out there, make *sure* to get love, marriage, and children in that order.
http://www.learnliberty.org/blog/the-welfare-cliff-and-why-many-low-income-workers-will-never-overcome-poverty/
Until July this year, I was earning $800 a week at my (admittedly pretty awesome) job as well as receiving an amount close to $1350 a fortnight via the single parent pension for my children on top of a family tax benefit payment. Comparatively, my girlfriend was earning just under $300 a fortnight while looking for work, which was based on how much her parents earned even though she no longer lived with her parents.
However since we declared our partnership living as a "de facto" couple to Centrelink, which we are required by law to do if living together, my government benefit has shrunk significantly to under $820 a fortnight. To make things worse, she is now getting nothing at all, because in their eyes, my combined earnings of what amounts to about $63k per year is enough to provide for our entire "family".
So the system has effectively made me the sole breadwinner by default and made her feel like straight trash, a parasite clinging to me for life. Like a third child instead of a partner, more than willing but completely unable to contribute financially to our relationship. Being a couple has cost us over $400 a week.
The whole thing is messed up.
Looking at both the US and the UK systems, those which I've been in the same country as, my observations have been that the Right desires that no-one should ever receive anything more than they deserve, and they should deserve as little as possible; and the Left doesn't have that problem, but does insist that whatever they give out only be used in the most painfully socially correct ways possible, because, y'know, the little people and especially the poor obviously can't be trusted to decide anything for themselves.
Mix and match these two kinds of paternalist idiocy, and you have food stamps and housing vouchers and assistance that can only be received or maintained by carefully avoiding any kind of useful activity or self-improvement and the entire ridiculously humiliating grovel-quisition before some salaried minion with a Napoleon complex in order to make use of any of it.
('Fraid I got a little ranty there, but this is no way to treat any people at all.)
My inner libertarian-capitalist is all about the Universal Basic Income and just sending everyone a decent-sized check (i.e. very much not the current pittances) every month, 'cause the authoritarian-greasing clusterfuck of every current welfare system I'm familiar with does not satisfy my values in any way whatsoever.
I came to the conclusion a long while ago that the way Centrelink works was deliberately engineered by shitty conservative governments to make it as unnavigable and unusable as possible so they can point at it and say 'looked at how fucked this thing is' and deliver a shittonne of cuts.
Look at how ridiculous and bureaucratic it all is, and how anti-human the hoops and bullshit you have to go through are to get a cent out of them. It's infuriating. Also, work for the dole is a load of rubbish that should be canned.
Someday, some government will finally be the one to say fuck it and fully implement the GBI, and this will go away as an issue.
Until then, condolences for being fucked by rich assholes