No sector of the government spends more of taxpayers money than the Department of Work and Pensions, and as the House of Lords debates the proposed changes to the Welfare Programme it’s important to make it clear that cuts are necessary and vital to not only our economy but to British Culture; benefits must become ‘a hand up, not a hand out’.
In terms of unemployment benefit the best proposal I’ve heard in a long time is the idea of an ‘allowance cap’ for families, so that total benefits would be limited to around £500 per week for families with children. It’s horrendous that there are families out there that can make vastly more than the average wage, (or in some cases more than a bloody good wage) just because they have 10 kids. Sorry but how many children you have is a choice; if you can’t afford them, stop having them! Vasectomies are free.
There are hundreds of families in the UK who earn over £60,000 in benefits without lifting a finger because they have so many kids (and for the rest of us that’s a wage of over £90,000 before tax!) Take the example of the Smiths (actual name, not a cover story), who earn around £95 grand a year for their 10 kids under 15 years old, live for free in a council house and even have their meals delivered to them. It’s a tough life when, as Mrs Smith put it ”we are so hard up that we can only afford one Nintendo Wii between all the kids”. The family receive benefits totaling £44,954 a year. They also have a £950-a-week bed-and-breakfast deal where the council pays for breakfasts delivered to their home. This comes to £49,400, making a grand total of £94,354 a year. All in all around 190 families like this cost the taxpayer over £11 million a year!
People have to take responsibility for their own lives, and if they are struggling but working hard to help themselves then they should get help. But if they choose to have 10 kids they should take responsibility for that choice and look after them, not expect everyone else to foot the bill! Families who have never worked a day in their lives having 4 or 5 kids and the rest of us having 1 or 2 means its not long before we’re drowning in a vast sea of unemployed wasters that we pay to keep! Iain Duncan Smith’s cap proposal is spot on!
First Published at www.politicsontoast.com
Seeing as you invite debate here and no-one else seems to be holding you to account, I figured I’d post it here:
Ben Bradley: yea but as much as you can make a moral argument against it ‘tax avoidance’ isn’t illegal and the government can’t reclaim that money… all they can do is try and close the loopholes, which is difficult because you don’t want to push big businesses elsewhere
Apple Mac An Bhreithiún: And making deals for large corporations to avoid paying tax which goes against the letter and spirit of the law? The two have been made intertwined by the Tory government’s attempts to portray the ‘underclass’ as responsible for the moral malaise and economic problems in this country. And to defend their class allies and indeed direct financial backers from paying for a crisis they caused, and neo liberal (thatcherite) belief system which they all backed and which anyone can see has led to moral malaise, if MPs, capitalists and bankers can fill their beaks why not proles goes their logic. You can’t seriously suggest that the conservative or indeed any of the other major parties is interested in closing loopholes or in enforcing the current legislation as is? The Labour government cut fundign for HMRC tax avoidance department and Cameron et al have only continued this, while raising funding for Benefit Fraud estimated at 3 billion maximum compared to 25billion plus conservatively for tax avoidance. Also your argument that this will drive business out is a good one if you accept that they are even any good for us, on the contrary since ‘market forces’ were unleashed in the late 70′s living standards and real term wages have either gone down or stayed the same for the majority of the population. The percentage share of wealth has flown to the top few percent. Ironically the underclass has footed the bill for this, the manual workers thrown on the scrap heap, whole swathes of the North’s manufacturing base destroyed by this quick and big profit culture in the 80′s was the starting point for many of your so called ‘wasters’.
If you are however worried about shifting business abroad why does the tory party resist any attempts to create europe wide and indeed international taxes and regulation to combat this facet of the dictatorship of capital? Even things like the transaction tax supported by the conservative parties of France, Spain and Germany? It’s because they are a naked class party at the end of the day who despite guising themselves in centre left buzzwords and a hugely expensive PR campaign, are still the party of at most 5 persent of Britain’s people, unfortunately those 5 can afford to buy the support of another 35 or so.ng
The premise that growth and business are the be all and end all of our society is long outdated and crass, if we had an open and realistic media then the public debate would have caught up with the academic world in recognising this.
Ben Bradley: can’t be arsed to read all that tbh… submit it to a website or something. this Facebook not an ideological textbook!
Posted by Alex | January 17, 2012, 6:01 pmHi Alex… I didn’t respond on Facebook because it’s Facebook… and nobody on there wants to read you and me having an ideological argument on my wall!!
I have no problem with your ideas, many of them are agreeable morally. Where I take issue is that they aren’t practical, pragmatic or feasible! I’m not going to go in to every detail you wrote above because frankly it’s irrelevant. It is your ideology that is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps Capitalism is wrong… but your suggestion that pushing big businesses out of the UK would be a positive thing is laughable and nobody would take that seriously. It is precisely that argument that is the reason nobody trusts Labour on the economy!
Perhaps the class divide is wrong but it’s here to stay. Politics is about working out how best to work around it. There is no changing it! If you don’t feel I am being held to account please feel free to comment on this post at http://politicsontoast.com/2012/01/17/give-us-the-benefits-cap-before-we-all-drown/ where more people will read it, but I don’ think you will find many agreeing with you!
Posted by bradders32 | January 17, 2012, 7:25 pmI for one am pleased that the House of Lords saw sense and blocked this clearly badly thought out, both in social and economic terms, bill that is clearly just pandering to populist opinion.
Economically the bill would have caused large amounts of damage to the recovery by vastly reducing aggregate demand. On top of this the increase in employment would probably be very small, if there was one at all due to the fact that current unemployment is clearly cyclical (there are simply less jobs than people). In fact the economic damage wreaked by the bill would probably have actually increased unemployment by decreasing the number of jobs!
Socially the bill would put many struggling families into difficult situations. Your article has singled out a family which probably is abusing the system. However is harming the thousands of other families who have been thrust into unemployment by the carelessness of hedge fund managers and mortgage lenders really the fairest way to deal with the problem?
Finally on the issue of children, maybe some people are having more children than they can afford, but it certainly isn’t fair to try and sort out that problem through punishing the children. There are other non-financial methods that could be used to incentivise people to have less children, such as through education and ensuring that people are aware of the free vasectomies suggested in your article. These are methods which, unlike your suggestions, won’t do any more damage to already disadvantaged children, but will still help to sort out the problem.
Posted by ruairidh64 | February 11, 2012, 8:59 pmRuairidh
For me the employment figures are irrelevant to this issue. Of course what you are saying may be true and it will have relatively little impact on the level of employment, but the point is that those who don’t work should never get more than those who do (barring the odd special case such as people with severe disabilities etc).
I appreciate what your are saying about the negative impact on people who have been made redundant etc, and that is the reason the amendments to the bill suggested that there be a 9 month grace period; in order for those people to either find employment or adapt their lifestyles accordingly. You cannot argue that £26,000 is not enough to live on, it is the average wage in this country and the equivalent to someone in employment earning £35,000 before tax; it’s decent money! Whilst it may well mean that such people have to adapt to live within their means it is not a pittance by any stretch. In fact there are polls that suggest almost 70% of people who earn less than £26,000 themselves support the cap!
Your argument about children is the one that puts most people off, and I agree that children should not be punished for the actions of their parents. But the government’s ideology (and mine) is one of social responsibility. If you are unemployed and you can’t afford to have 5 kids, then don’t! You have to take responsibility for your own actions and it is only you who has put yourself in that situation. It is not fair or credible to throw money at people purely because they have children. There are no doubt millions of couples in this country who would love to have kids but resolve to wait until they can save some money, or buy a house, or just make themselves more stable. That’s the kind of people who should be parents! You could call it ‘big stick’ methodology but for me, it needs doing!
Posted by bradders32 | February 14, 2012, 1:37 am