Realist,

The purpose of land rents is to shift investment from land speculation
to buildings, services and goods. The real cost of actually building a
house has been stable for the past fifty years; the rising cost is in
land prices, which is largely dependent on surrounding infrastructure.

Shifting the tax burden from productive to unproductive investment means more jobs, more goods and services, better buildings and *less* tax. This is the considered advice of the world's best economists - and with bodies like the Housing Industry Association consistently providing empirical advice on the matter.

(There's some good material with an Australian context: http://www.lvrg.org.au/)

Fencepost,

The author's main point is simply that we should ditch relative poverty for evaluation and use absolute poverty instead. In other words, the barest minimum required to maintain life, which is probably less than 50 cents a day. I don't know about you, but I prefer a standard a little higher - the minimum amount required for a person to participate in society with dignity. On that basis the relative poverty model; 50% of average earnings - has been used in Australia for many decades. I don't think we should compete with Ethopia on how we define poverty.

Chris

While the methodology and definition of (un)employed may not have changed in a long time, it may be instructive to compare the proportions of full-time, part-time and casual workers over the period since 1960.

If, for example, the proportion of people employed for just a few hours a week has increased over the years then the use of a single figure for unemployment is not very helpful to our understanding of changes in the workforce and the consequent social impact.

(Incidentally your link isn't connecting.)

dnicholson.

Thank you for correcting my sloppy choice of average instead of median. I think I intended to argue something like there will always be 10% of the population in the bottom decile of income.

Fencepost.

Chris C

The method of measuring unemployment may not have changed but the nature of employment certainly has, and the way it is measured needs to be updated to reflect this change.

If a person worked one hour in 1960 there was a very high chance it meant they had a full time job. Today the measure means nothing. You could work one hour or you could work one hundred hours, both extremes are undesirable and not at all uncommon.

The government should not be allowed to milk these figures as they do and imply that most people have a job and work the hours they want to when this is clearly not the case.

Saunders' articles uses a lot of words simply to argue that:

1. working people should not be paying taxes to support people on welfare,

2. poverty should be defined in absolute term and not relative terms, and

3. that people who are temporarily on lower incomes don't suffer.

In regard to the $70 billion annual welfare bill, Saunders fails to ask how much of this money actaully reaches welfare recipients. I think both Saunders and Yabby should take account of this and the other massive inffeciencies in the largely privatised social welfare and job placement network before they attempt to fan the flames of resentment from taxpayers towards welfare recipients.

As one example, the rental supplement is, in fact, a subsidy to landlords and a factor which fuels Australia's runaway housing inflation. Had the original public housing arrangments been maintained, the costs to the taxpayer would have been considerabley less.

Much of the money is spent on bureacratic harassment of welfare recipients. An opinion put to me by one person who ran the job interview and resume writing training programs is that they were useless and simply intended to further deter people from applying for welfare payments it the first place.

Personally speaking, this has all had the desired effect. On at least two occasions in my life when I badly needed welfare payments, I instead did without, instead running down my own hard-earned savings, such was my dread of dealing with Centrelink.

---

My above point about the right wing think tanks is because I have noticed throughout the years how Saunders seems to give a very convincing impression of having the best interests of the poor at heart when he advocates measures which any intelligent person would have to know would be harmful to them:

* throwing people off welfare after six months, and

* the abolition of minimum wages

Clearly many, who should know better, have gained this impression, and even I can remember, myself, having fleetingly given him the benefit of the doubt in regard to his motivations on past occastions.

Yabby, cutting welfare to those earning less than $14000 (including nothing) is not to make any noticeable difference to how much tax those that do earn around $14000/yr will have to pay in order to keep the budget in balance. I really hope that is not your argument.

Yes, there are dole bludgers, and they'll always be with us. But better that than having them homeless, turning to crime or becoming a drain on the health system after winding up in hosptial suffering from malnutrition. After all, do you have any idea what tiny percentage of your own taxes goes towards supporting genuine serial employment-avoiders?
And for every dole bludger, there's almost certainly others on welfare who desperately want to break out of the poverty trap, but whose money, time and energy is completely used up just treading water. Cutting welfare payments is clearly not going to do them any good.