Millennials Of The World Unite! Act Leader, David Seymour, has issued yet another call for the Millennials to take up arms against the rapacity of the Baby Boomer Generation. As if all the young people of today will not themselves grow old and be succeeded by a new generation of New Zealanders. As if the whole experience of human existence is not a constant process of paying forward and paying back.
THAT DAVID SEYMOUR’S latest effusion of political bile is
being hosted by The Spinoff is entirely fitting. The ACT leader and his hipster
enablers cannot wait to get into the political engine-room, and their chosen
path to the centre of power is via fomenting an intergenerational war. The
headline attached to Seymour’s piece says it all: “NZ Baby Boomers are Building
a Banana Republic, and No One Gives a Shit.”
Except that “banana republics” are characterised by obscene
extremes of wealth and poverty, authoritarian modes of governance, ruinous
levels of corruption, and the irretrievable loss of national sovereignty. In
other words, states that have dispensed altogether with democratic politics.
That this continues to be Act’s and Seymour’s endgame should surprise no one.
But for those who still regard The Spinoff as a platform for serious
journalism, its tacit support for Seymour’s plans to incite young citizens to
use their votes as weapons against the old may come as a bit of a shock.
Seymour’s latest excuse for fanning the flames of Millennial
discontent is the Treasury’s most recent Long-Term Fiscal Outlook (LTFO). And,
when the Treasury boffins say “long-term” they’re not kidding. Their latest
LTFO purports to describe the fiscal position of the New Zealand government in
2056!
To put their heroic prognostications into some sort of
perspective, ask yourself how much luck someone living in 1916 would have had
describing the world of 1956. As Peter Drucker quipped: “Trying to predict the
future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights
while looking out the back window.” Which is why the only way to produce a
half-way credible LTFO is to proceed on the assumption that current government
policy settings remain unchanged for 40 years. If you’re thinking that this
reduces the LTFO to a simple exercise in linear extrapolation, then take a bow.
That’s pretty much all it is.
So, what are the fiscal implications of the current policy
settings remaining unchanged for 40 years? Well, not surprisingly, they’re
pretty dire. As Seymour, rather breathlessly, puts it:
“If no policy changes are made, by 2060, when current
students reach retirement age, government debt will be 206 per cent of GDP. In
other words national debt will equal two years’ income, worse than the current
debt of countries world famous for being fiscally screwed such as Zimbabwe (203
per cent) Greece (179 per cent), Italy (133 per cent) and Portugal (121 per
cent). No matter how well you prepare for retirement, you’ll be living in a
banana republic.”
Unless, of course, we, the voters of New Zealand, taking
serious and principled thought for our nation’s future, decide to change the
current policy settings.
The most obvious way pay for the dramatic increase in human
longevity would be to restore a much larger degree of progressivity to New
Zealand’s taxation system. Additional measures to improve our future fiscal
position might include re-starting government contributions to the Superannuation
Fund and making Kiwisaver compulsory. Getting rid of the commercial imperatives
currently driving New Zealand’s universities and research institutes into the
ground would also help. Neoliberalism is deadening our national imagination.
That’s why a thorough-going “deliberalisation” of the whole
of New Zealand society would be so helpful. Modelled on the “denazification” of
post-war Germany, such an exercise would unleash precisely the sort of pent-up
social energy and creativity that the LTFO itself identifies as a the best way
of avoiding the long-term fiscal difficulties it is projecting.
Not that David Seymour wants a bar of anything even remotely
resembling these solutions. He dismisses the option of raising taxes with
characteristic venom by presenting it as yet another dastardly imposition by
the Baby Boom Generation:
“The first way of absorbing [the projected demographic
changes] is to raise taxes by about a quarter, so GST becomes nearly 20 per
cent and the top tax rate goes over 40 per cent, along with every other rate
being increased by the same proportion. People embarking on their careers now
would pay a 25 per cent extra “boomer tax” for being born at the wrong time.”
As if all the young people of today will not themselves grow
old and be succeeded by a new generation of New Zealanders. As if the whole
experience of human existence is not a constant process of paying forward and
paying back.
Utterly dependent when we are born; utterly dependent as we
drift inexorably toward death. Isn’t this the universal fate of humanity? As
applicable to the richest people in the world as it is to the poorest – and
just as inescapable? The true measure of our equality.
And isn’t this the dreadful reality that all the
pathologically ambitious are running from: that not all the power in the world,
nor all the money, can save them from the grave? And isn’t it the true measure
of wisdom that, in the end, we come to recognise that we are defined by what
makes our fellow human beings’ similar to ourselves – not by what makes them
different?
As President John F. Kennedy told the students of
Washington’s American University in his celebrated commencement address of June
1963 – delivered just six months before his assassination in Dallas:
“For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is
that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all
cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 29 November 2016.
