Violent protests against giving beneficiaries first increase in 43 years

This is the so called Auckland Action Against Poverty, in response to the first increase in real benefit rates in 43 years. Lovely people aren’t they.

Sure you may argue it should be more, but the way they are carrying on, you’d think the Government had cut benefits by $25 a week!

They’re part of the demented 1% who won’t be happy until we have the communist nirvana of surgeons being paid the same as McDonalds staff.

Spokeswoman Sue Bradford said if the government was serious about dealing with poverty, it would lift benefits now to the same levels as superannuation

Let’s look at what this would cost.

The standard benefit for a job seeker aged 25 is $210.13 a week.

The standard benefit for a someone on NZ Super living alone is $374.53

So Bradford is demanding a 78.2% increase in non NZ Super benefits. They currently cost around $7.3 billion. So the annual cost of what the AAAP are violently demanding is an extra $5.7 billion a year in welfare payments. In reality it would be far more than that, as many more people would go on welfare.

Now I doubt they want health and education cut by $5.7 billion a year, so I imagine their response would be sock it to the rich and make them pay. Stick up the top tax rate from 33%.

A 1% increase brings in around $210 million a year so they need a 27% increase, meaning the top tax rate would have to be 60 cents in the dollar. Yep anything you earn over $70,000 would go 60/40 to the Government.

And that is just to fund their one sole demand.

Of course in reality a top tax rate of 60% would not bring in even half that amount of money. People would simply leave.