Actually, that’s an improvement

We all know unemployment is bad. But how bad is it?

One of the big themes of National’s New Zealand is the lack of jobs. There’s another example of this in theManawatu Standardtoday:…

not exactly desirable work, and yet it has six times as many applications as there are positions.

Actually, if Idiot were following the news, this is an improvement.

Nearly 2000 people have applied for about 100 jobs at the soon-to-be-opened Bunnings Warehouse in Dunedin.

That was 2 years ago – 20x more applications than positions. Sort of makes 6x look pretty good. (I’d also suggest that carting around heavy, rough sawn timber is a lot worse for your health than pushing a trolley of lettuce.) A few months earlier an Auckland supermarket received 2500 applications for 150 jobs.

So I call that as an improvement.

And yet National still slanders the unemployed as lazy

I’ve never heard anyone in the National party say the unemployed are, as a group, uniformly lazy. I have heard them say that they need more motivation, which is only too true (and here I am speaking from personal experience).

Funny thing is that since Idiot hadn’t even provided a link to his own rantings, let alone an external source, I thought I’d do a google search.

I think the results speak for themselves.

While I’m at it:

1. I hate tobacco with a passion. I think anyone who smokes is an idiot, and the tobacco companies deserve to be driven out of that business. But the fact is that every packaged product has the packaging as part of it’s marketing, so by definition when you remove all other advertising the packet is all that’s left. To say so is common sense, not an indication of some sort of conspiracy to circumvent the law.

2. Idiot claims (once again) that austerity is bad for the economy. Possibly, in the short term. But in the long term, the austerity of the 90s in this country set us up for the undeniable prosperity of the 2000s. In the meantime, the US have racked up eye-popping amounts of debt that will burden their government for generations, and have nothing to show for it except an unprecedented growth in conservative activism.

3. Just because Len Brown accepted a modest (and declared) donation, doesn’t mean jack. He’s simply opposing an idiotic motion by people who think politics is about posturing and pretending. When he  actually does something to support the proposal when there actually is a proposal, call me.