I Need a Payrise to Become Poor

Well the budget has been handed down to almost universal disdain and apparently we're all doomed. Most particularly doomed are families earning a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year or more. From the response to the budget and various media reports one of the measures announced was the brutal savaging of those helpless, desperate souls just clinging to the breadline on a hundred and fifty grand per annum.

What is the government planning to do to this new underclass? Are they going to increase their tax rate? Confiscate their second car? Send teams around to kidnap their infant children and raise them as janissaries? (note to the government; not as silly as it sounds. Its about the only way you're going to have a voting base at all in fifteen years time). No, the government has simply stopped indexing the family tax benefit to CPI for those households earning a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year or more. Why families earning a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and up receive government benefits in the first place is something I'm a little less sure about.

For the record I don't thing a family income of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year makes the recipients obscenely wealthy. I don't envisage them smearing beluga caviar over their naked bodies or masturbating with gold bricks (at least I didn't until now. I must do something about my imagery). I am even prepared to admit that some of them will be in genuine financial difficulties for reasons that aren't their own stupid fault but seriously if these people are dependent on government handouts to survive then I think we can confidently state that the country is doomed.

The inherent unlikeliness of a hundred and fifty thousand a year being the new poverty line hasn't silenced the outrage of people who wish to emphasise the government's savage cruelty to that most vulnerable of society's downtrodden; the professional middle class. Strangely while railing against government cuts here they are also lambasting it for profligacy. Here they are on somewhat firmer ground. The one niggling problem I have with the governments attempt to rake back a few, surely ill spent, welfare dollars is my doubt that the government will do anything sensible (or even halfway sane) with the money thus saved.

One of the spending initiatives in the budget was an allocation of over three hundred million dollars to provide and install set top boxes for pensioners televisions to allow them to be converted to digital when the analog signal is cut off sometime between now and 2013. I am all in favour of pensioners receiving the free converters. If the elderly didn't have television we'd have to visit them more often. However the budgeting effectively allocates about four hundred dollars per pensioner. You can buy a set top box for about thirty dollars and probably pay another fifty to get it properly installed and tuned (unless you get one of the neighbourhood kids to do it for nothing). So why four hundred dollars a box? For that money I have a friend who will come around and paint a mural on your wall. Admittedly you can't change the channel but you will reduce your electricity bill.

One thing nobody objected to in the budget was the provision to make the unemployed do more work for the dole and measures to get teenage single mothers back into education or the workforce once their child turns one. Considering the outrage that has been raised over the family tax benefit freeze one might have thought that this would upset some people but apparently you have to be earning a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to be considered truly poor nowadays.