Aslaug's Axe Shed

Regarding the money-thing and the unemployment benefits-messup, I promised an update. I’m sorry it hasn’t come before, but I needed some level of certainty before posting anything and politics SURE has been “fun” to follow in Denmark over the last week and a half.

You know, as Hamlet said … something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.

Boy was he right.

Let me give you a bit more information, because this has spread beyond unemployment benefits.

It’s also going to crush a large number of families with more than two children. The more children, the worse, in fact. Allow me to explain.

In Denmark, you get an amount of money every three months to help pay the expenses associated with having children. This may seem like hardcore socialism to some people, and I suppose it may be, but in a small country with a declining birthrate, it’s one of the ways that people can be encouraged to have more kids. At the moment, Danish women get under two children on average, and it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize winner to figure out that this means we can’t maintain our population-levels. In my opinion, that’s not necessarily purely a bad thing, since the world is grotesquely overpopulated as it is, but it DOES leave some very serious problems for the future. You see, after World War II, there were a number of years where people bred like -rabbits-! Those huge generations are now on the verge of retirement age … we grow older and older, the average age for men and women being about 78 and 81 respectively … and there are simply not enough people at employment age around to pay what it’ll cost to keep these huge groups of senior citizens with healthcare, pensions and so on, unless we start having more kids.

So, of course, our government has CONSISTENTLY called for women to consider having more children. It’s been rather tasteless at times, but now that we suddenly need to save a lot of money, who do they target?

You guessed it … families with children.

The amount of money a family gets to help with the extra costs, called the “Children’s Cheque”, is really not a lot. It won’t even cover the costs of daycare, let alone food, clothing and some fun and games. It’s not that the state pays the cost of having kids … just that it helps. Earlier, the amount of money you got was the same for every child, regardless of whether you had two or twelve.

Not anymore. Overnight, the law would change so that you would no longer get ANYTHING WHATSOEVER for any children past the first two. Families with five or six kids would lose over forty thousand kroner a year from this. One family with eight children was in the newspapers, saying “Look, all we did was get more kids like the politicians asked us to. Now they take away 70.000 kroner from our budget every year. We’re officially bankrupt. There’s no way we can manage now.”

Of course, there was a massive, public outcry against this. Many people expressed an understanding of SOME kind of cutback on this, but to simply ruin thousands of families overnight was considered not only extreme and cruel, but it led to the first opinion poll in decades showing that the political left had a majority … without any center parties at -all-. I don’t think that’s happened -ever-, in fact. The government is in more than dire straits. It’s in for the cataclysm of a political lifetime. Of course, this frightened the living daylights out of our right wing politicians who IMMEDIATELY ammended the proposed cutbacks, so that now instead of people getting a maximum of 30.000 kroner a year, they are now up for a maximum of 35.000 kroner a year (queue unenthusiastic cheering … five thousand won’t make much of a difference AT ALL), and ALL children’s cheque’s will be cut by five percent. Not just for the third child onwards, but all children.

At the same time, politicians were suggested to cut down their pay by five percent as well, but the conservatives and half the liberal democrats nearly threw a hissyfit and flatly refused. Why should -they- cut down on their income, after all …? It’s only the poor and needy who needs to pay. Not the rich.

The sooner they’re gone the better.

But as for the unemployment benefits-thing, there’s still some muddled waters. I am, however, NOT getting kicked onto welfare. Since I’m already “in the system”, I’ll continue as hitherto. What is uncertain is whether I now need to get 12 months of actual, paid work in two years to get a new unemployment benefits period, or if I’ll still only need six months, and then once I’m in a new unemployment period, THEN it’ll be 12 months.

Oh, they also made cutbacks on the deductability on union and unemployment agency fees, so I’ll be punked for the same money every month, but it won’t be tax deductible anymore. Every single initiative they’ve made sans one has been aimed straight at the unemployed, the poor and those who are already in tough spots. The ONE thing they did to target the wealthy was to postpone some taxcuts by a couple of years.

Postponing. Not cancelling.

The rich will get their tax cuts anyway, while the rest of us have to pay for it. Tax cuts that are, may I add, unfinanced and have been unfinanced since the day they were proposed.

But according to Liberal Democratic/Conservative dogma, tax cuts to the richest will benefit -ALL- of society because of the following belief:

Take the ten percent poorest people in any given country and give them a tax cut of two percent. And then take the two percent richest people and give them the same tax cut. The rich people make more money put together than the ten percent poorest by FAR, so the net result will be a greater tax-cut if you give it to the rich. This, in right wing ideology, means that rich people will have more money to spend, typically on investment which will then again lead to increased industry which will lead to more jobs for those who are already poor.

This is not unsound thinking, except for ONE … LITTLE … DETAIL!

We do not live in the days of Adam Smith, where each country would try to be self-sustaining to the greatest extent possible. We do not live in a world without globalization. Rich danes do not invest their money exclusively in Denmark, but instead, they place their money in large foreign corporations which benefits NO ONE in Denmark except themselves. Over the last twenty years, we’ve seen more and more companies branch out and eventually MOVE out, with rich folks setting up companies in Bangladesh or Africa, where wages are a fraction of what they are here, leading to more unemployed and more poverty. Giving the rich more money in their hands will speed this up, NOT slow it down. It has NEVER slowed it down. This is Reagan economics, and if there’s one thing Ronald Reagan was responsible for, it was a national deficit so massive it beggars the imagination. The socalled “fiscal conservatives” say they are fiscally “responsible” by doing this, but in the long run, they are both fiscally and socially DEEPLY irresponsible, causing harm to so many innocent people it’s not even funny.

Election please!

NOW!