The US president’s pension apparently came about after Truman left office and fell into financial difficulty.

According to that article, it seems pretty rare around the rest of the world.

I guess it comes down to 1. What is it trying to achieve? and 2. Does it achieve it, or meaningfully move things towards that goal?

And to be honest, I don’t think I’ve found any info to answer either of those questions 🤷

I wish I could get a job that kept giving me perks after I’d left/been sacked

I don’t know what they get, and I’m sure I’d be upset if I did know so I’m not looking it up.

With that said, a job like Prime Minister is a role you work your whole life for (not the current PM, but a normal one) and then you get 3, 6 years, maybe 9 in the role then you are out forever. Your career is over. The only way to keep having a job is to go be a consultant or give some talks. If you’re left wing maybe you can do a Helen Clark or Jacinda Ardern and get paid to work towards a better world. If you’re right wing you’ve already given up that path so all you can do is go work for one of your lobbyists.

I guess the idea is to give politicians an alternative to selling out?

Awesome, thanks!

Does it? I guess I don’t know much about how public transport is funded.

Is there any more info about that? I wasn’t able to search up anything relevant.

I guess we have public transport for many reasons, which save money in other ways so it isn’t really about the money (fewer roads to build, better air quality which means fewer hospital visits and deaths, fewer road accidents, etc).

I’m still keen on knowing if it’s true that it’s 90% subsidised, you’re right why not 100%.

Yeah for sure. Every $6B road could be 30 years of free public transport 😟

This is one of those times when my response is “you’re telling me we could have had this all along for only $65M a year?”

Sorry, 1800s was a bit vague. 1879 apparently.

I would be so excited if a wealth tax was properly implemented, but given those with wealth are the ones that fund political parties I’m not keeping my hopes up.

One of the ideas mentioned in this video is one from the 1800s saying that taxing income disincentivises productive work, and that we should only have a land tax (and no land improvement tax) since land itself doesn’t change and can’t hop on a plane and head to Australia.

I haven’t heard of this guy before, and a top result when searching for his name is how he plagiarised the NYT… (not this video, a different one)

Interesting part in the middle of the video where it’s mentioned that globalisation caused everything to decrease in price, so central banks could just keep cutting interest rates without having to worry about inflation. Now that goods can’t really get any cheaper, it no longer works, and now inflation is rising and there’s no clear path to solving it other than increase interest rates and cause house prices to fall - which is political suicide.

The whole concept that rising house prices are bad for almost everyone is so easy to demonstrate, but virtually everyone is happy when their house value goes up for some reason.

So organisations like the Taxpayers Union already register as a political organisation so they can run election ads and that sort of thing. I wonder if declaring who they represent would work, I suspect they would just say they represent the average tax payer even though that’s not true at all.

Are there other countries that have properly solved this problem? I suspect not since (before this government) we were ranked high on the low corruption list, and we have this problem.

It’s a hard problem to solve. People don’t have enough money, but if you give them money then they just have to pass that money on to people who already have plenty. A realistic solution is to tax existing wealth and then pass that money back to people, but the people with the substantial share of the wealth stand a lot to lose so they lobby like crazy to stop it happening. And much of it is never declared, e.g. donations to the Taxpayers Union, NZ Initiative, etc.

It’s hard to argue with the aesthetics of people living on the street. I love to look out the window at poverty.

In surprising news, government that significantly cut access to social housing has caused highest level of homelessness in history.

Edmonds is Labour’s finance spokesperson and mentions standing up each week to talk to her so I’m guessing the implication was obvious to those in the room since it’s probably the only regular person she has to speak to in the house like that.

I suspect it’s not a religious thing. I think it’s honestly just that they don’t like certain people. See also the citizenship tests (prove you have our values/culture) and making English an official language (they are scared people who speak other languages might make them change language or something).

It’s just a general intolerance (and I would say fear) of people who are different to themselves.

Yeah it’s called “The Trading Game”. There are some things I liked about it and some things I didn’t, but I think overall it was a good book.

Thanks for posting! I read his book recently, it’s an easy read and he talks about this stuff in a lot more detail (it’s basically an autobiography of his life so far mixed in with how fucked up everything is).

I think you posted another video with him a while back? I think that’s how I found out about his channel/book so thanks!

It’s an election year, so it will be interesting to see if they feel this is wanted by their voter base (or more importantly, swing voters).

It doesn’t seem like it would be popular, but they must think it will be because they are doing it in the lead up to an election.

The long term interests of conservative governments’ donors is a less educated workforce

That’s what makes it such a great quote, it works on so many levels. It’s so honest and so dishonest at the same time!

That aside; they’ll just say “good decisions that benefit [voters]” about anything they do

Yeah that’s true, but I’m still going to enjoy the humour of the situation!

I liked this bit:

good Budget policy decisions that further the immediate and long-term interests of New Zealanders

The long term interests of NZ are served by reducing access to education, somehow.