Clown ‘economist’ Shamubeel Eaqub rides again, tilting at baby-boomer windmills, convinced of the damage they have done the economy. Unfortunately, Eaqub hasn’t a sidekick like Quixote’s faithful Sancho Panza to inform him of his folly so Shamubeel rides on, seated backwards in the saddle, and with no grasp on the reins of reality.
Mr ‘Tax-is-Love’, gazing earnestly at his navel, blames boomers now for not just high housing prices, but practically all New Zealand society’s maladies and ills. Yes, the fellow really is that stupid.
The bunny-economist has the demographic windmill Boomer in his short sights. He attributes to those people “run down social and physical infrastructure” and claims they “can-kicked big issues to accumulate massive problems for future generations.” There’s more: “they swept away the good with the bad during the reform with 1980s.” [sic] (At least his grammar is on par with his analysis: piss-poor.)
Asking the rhetorical question whether children of the immediate post-war double-decade-and-a-bit should be considered “Parasitic, sociopathic or nation builders” he bunny hops to his own conclusion: “They have two more elections to turn around a track record of malignant neglect.”
According to Bright-Eyes this group of wreckers and vandals came to be “the politically dominant force in the mid-1970’s”, a truly amazing achievement considering half of them were still too young to vote at the time.
And what tremendous power that cohort of 5-29 year-olds must have wielded by 1975. Those naughty boomers, some just having started school: they forced the UK into the EEC and cut off this country’s income and they forced the Arab cartels to retaliate against western supporters of Israel by cutting back oil production and sending the essential commodity’s price skyrocketing. They had been complacent in their nappies, knee-high’s and school-shorts of the 50’s and 60’s, living off post-war demand for mutton, wool and butter because they hadn’t planned far enough into the future. They dreamed of a milk and honey economy and gave money hither and thither, en-largessing a welfare state they couldn’t pay for so, to wall-paper over it, they just printed money. (This was a magnificent revelation, not to be missed!) They called it ‘inflation’, baby.
Gosh they were naughty. By the time 1984 rolled around the youngest of them was fourteen, the oldest thirty-eight and causing mayhem, chasing golden rainbows in the diluted-money economy. They fought with work-to-rule’s and strikes: 352 of them in 1984 – nearly one for every single day of the year – to keep pace with mistress inflation. Oh! How the government loved it, forcing low-waged into modest-waged tax bands prevailing at 35%, but still running out of money. Mental-midget Muldoon threw the masterpiece move of a tax-on-tax, a 10% surcharge on every dollar of tax! Hooray!
Funny thing is, I don’t remember a single boomer having a hand to the wheel during that particular train wreck, I only remember fogies with no idea what to do next in charge until gallant Mr Douglas put everything remaining in the bank on the long-odds, took a chance, and transformed this country’s economy.
But, by Mr Myxomatosis’ estimation, Douglas threw the good out with the bad; the ‘good’ – beautifully summed-up by the sub-standard economist and grammarian both in his nonsense diatribe “Boomers grew up in an era of very low-income inequality”
I think the fool means ‘low income-inequality’, but his butchered prose serves his message and ideals far, far, better; the Animal-Farm socialists like it when all the rabbits are equally miserable, and poor.
Don’t choke on your lettuce, Shamubeel.
