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Colin Espiner blogs on Restart (redundancy package unveiled by National) and how those over $25,000 income will miss out, and this potentially could be what hurts the economy the most, when the middle-class lose their jobs and their lose their homes in the long-term:

The problem is that the redundancies are not going to be just at the bottom end of the income scale. Lots of middle managers, office clerks, retail workers, and skilled manufacturing staff earning a reasonable whack are going to lose their jobs too.

And chances are that they will either receive a payout above the threshold for getting Restart ($25,000), particularly if they have been there a while, or will not be eligible because when they were working, they were managing to look after themselves and their families without recourse to government assistance.

It seems perverse in a way that those who managed to avoid being a drain on the public purse when they were in work are denied help at the very time they need it, even though their tax dollars have paid for the maintenance of the welfare system for others.

It seems to me that those who will suffer most will be the ones with mortgages they can no longer support and end up losing their houses as a result. That is likely to create a much bigger political problem for the Government, since these are the mortgage belt households who voted National at the last election.

Tags: Colin Espiner, National, Restart

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 11:05 am and is filed under Economy, National. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.