Be Excellent To Each Other

Should the government cap the benefits at £26,000, or £500 a week post tax to 'encourage' those that can to go to work?

Or not?

There's an article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16812185

I don't think the beeb had foreseen how the comments section played out. I saw it earlier and was surprised that it took so long to lock it.

They can't seriously have put that up and not thought "we'll have a comments section lynch mob off the back of this". Perhaps it was a deliberate ploy to generate comments and page hits. Or it was a bet.

Weird.

I can't see how you can have a sensible debate on this issue without giving examples of the people it'll affect.

Mind you, I suppose the "article" has no other context than "Hey, come check out what this benefits scrounger is spending your money on."

It seems arbitrary and therefore probably stupid to have a cap on the overall amount of benefits paid out. Either claimants are entitled to each benefit or they aren't and the amounts for each benefit were presumably carefully calculated somehow.

I have no idea what this change will mean to people who get benefits, as I haven't seen anywhere that gives a breakdown like that article, but for a sympathetic case. What will it mean to the couples with 2 kids who don't smoke or drink, or have sky tv, who aren't on disability benefit for stress or a bad back, and are actively looking for work?
Show me a breakdown for them, and it'll give me a better idea as to what it will mean to people.

And it's very complicated as some benefits from different departments tend to overlap. DWP are currently working to simplify the system and create a so-called 'universal credit.' A bloke wot I worked with in Government Office is leading the team working on this, although I imagine he might be gibbering in a rubber room by now.

While my first reaction was 'that's more than I used to earn in the UK' - it doesn't really seem like much for a whole family to live on. Especially eight.

I think the bottom line is that 8 children is taking the piss.

Pretty sure that the BBC wanted to create a storm with this, but the breakdown of what this guy spent some of his 30K from the state on took the piss.

1. 200 Cigarettes a week (£60 minimum)
2. Large pack of tobacco a week (£12)
3. 24 cans of larger a week (let’s assume its Tesco own brand piss at 50p a can so (£12)
4. SKY £15 a week =£60 a month so not really skimping on the packages here!
5. Mobile Phone £32 a week= £120 a month, no doubt both on IPhones.

Loved the guys quote at the end, “I see eight people here having to choose between eating or heating."

I can see 2 adults stopping smoking and drinking and SKY and getting 2 cheap pay as you phones.

Those people didn't exist.

Whilst it is easy to focus on the fags and booze, it is wrong (in my view) to say that these two adults can't have any pleasure in life, even if they are struggling to manage, so the 'luxury' items can't be taken out of that calculation in full to say that they can survive.

However - I see the fags and booze, and see no toys for the kids. Thats a shame. When my parents were struggling they gave up smoking when my mum refused to buy me a comic in the shop as she had no money after buying 60 fags and drew the conclusion that this was wrong.

£32 a week on phones? What the eff?

OK but spending £15 on SKY must be just about the maxium package they do. Also £32 a week on phones? That would buy you two top end mobiles such as IPhones.

(from another forum)

Your life:


Their life:

haven't read the article, but is that £30k tax free, what is the equivalent salary to earn that if so?

Those luxury items should not be available, benefits should not be cash to that amount, they should be a system to allow people to exist at a decent standard. Eg vouchers which are only eligible for certain items. Eg fruit and veg and stuff, not £32/week (really??) mobile phones. I spend £21/month on my mobile and think that is excessive, how can someone with no job think £32/week is fine.

Someone worked it out at being between £41-45k.

That’s the core issue really; nobody is going to pay a guy that money when he has been out of work 10 years. So you could tell him to get a job at Tesco etc paying 10-12K a year then deducted this from his benefits. Problem here is that there are plenty of people who earn that money with less help from the state so that’s not fair on them. I would like to see that the able long term unemployed does some sort of community type work for the tax payer, not 40 hours a week but it wouldn’t kill any of them to do 1-2 days a week.

Problem is many people on benefits don't shop at big supermarkets; the local (and expensive) shop near me is always full of people on low incomes doing their shopping.

(I'm assuming that the people I see are on low incomes as many of them have some sort of prepay card for gas and electric? Maybe this is a bit of an assumption?)

So some sort of managed shopping would be hard to do, I think food stamps were stopped as they were deemed to be humiliating, but this could be managed by prepared debit\credit cards that DHS could load money onto. Things like cigarettes could then be blocked, you could also track what was been purchased and feed this info back to provide diet and health advice. No doubt this would not be allowed under privacy laws.

I'd sooner support a few scroungers than inflict that sort of misery on every poor bastard who finds themself out of work. It seems especially cuntish to be painting every dole claimant as a worthless scrounger at a time when unemployment is fairly high anyway.

What mark said. I bet if you look at the numbers, the example above is the rarest of rare cases.

As a software engineer, what got me is that he claims his "expertise" is unnecessary so he can't work. Either he's a software engineer so can relatively easily adapt to a different language and market, or he was never a real software developer at all. Software brains just don't work that way.

That and "so get a menial job at least, you fuck." "Not being able to get a job in whatever weird narrow market you've defined for yourself" is not the same as "unable to work." Having said that, it did take me 10 months to get a new software job within 30 miles of Liverpool, with flexibility demonstrated on my CV. But I could afford to, without benefits beyond contribution-based JSA (£57/wk for 6 months), and had no dependents.

We had a good laugh about it in the office yesterday - there's no way that's real, surely.

Agree that the BBC has picked this guy to create the most fuss, but I don't belive he is the only case.

I agree, and for personal reasons, too, which I've spoken about here before so shan't go on about it here again. But one thing does concern me. Retrospectively putting these measures in years after some of these big families are born means that you you could be punishing kids for being part of a big family.

It's already a difficult life for many kids of large, poor families as they don't get the attention they deserve anyway, so cutting the money that goes to a family of 12 kids (I know one) affects the food and clothing for the children.

So it's better a measure brought in for new families. But then you're essentially saying that poor people can't have more than X number of kids, and that's getting a little close to the Chinese population stability system (though, the population growth is a crisis within itself).

Also, unless contraception becomes 100% reliable, you'd be punishing those who, having reached that X number of children threshold, have a contraceptive failure. And so you then have the worry that you are monetarily punishing a couple for not choosing an abortion.

It's something that needs looking at, but it's wrought with problems.

We are looking at starting a family and we are looking closely at the financial impact as we both work. We are very lucky in that my wife we get a year off work and get full pay for 8 months of it. Never the less whilst I don’t need her salary to pay the bills if she gave up work it would wipe out most of the extras and luxury’s we enjoy right now.

Having 8 children is irresponsible if you just expect the state to pay the bills

FTFY.

If he got a job, what benefits would he lose? I don't know enough about benefits to answer this and the websites I just glanced at make it seem somewhat complicated. By way of example, would he lose the child tax credits if he worked over 16 hours or does that mean he goes on working tax credits? And if he does, what's the difference in cash money terms?

Obviously what I'm getting at is whether he is any worse off if he gets a job or what level of salary does he need to cover those benefits he'd lose. Presumably he'll still keep some benefits regardless of whether he gets a job.

The current number of available jobs is 400,000. The current number of people out of work is somewhere above 2.5 million. Lets say, for sake of argument, one unemployed = one job. Again, lets exaggerate wildly and say that 50% of unemployed people are feckless scroungers who don't want a job.

That still leaves one million people who are stigmatised and punished for not being able to find a job that doesn't exist and therefore have no choice but to "live off the State". They can't move to find work (how they hell can they buy a house? And public transport charges a fucking fortune). They are neatly trapped in a spiral and then piled on, generally by politicians and newspaper columnists who have never done a proper job in their lives. This is really important and shouldn't be forgotten.

One thing to be careful of is what the odious Melanie Phillips did on QT (without once being pulled up on it) which is deliberately conflate the £26,000 cap for an entire household with the £26,000 average wage for a single person. It is mendacious as fuck and it infuriates me that people are getting away with it.

Yet there's strong financial and material incentives to having children if you have no intention of ever working for a living.

I'd like to agree with the "the percentage of folk taking the piss like this must be vanishingly small" but we've probably all encountered people like that. Depending where you live it can seem like the majority, even. And rapidly increasing, given the point above

Yet the State encourages people to procreate. It has a vested interest in doing so.

You'll never stop people having as many children as they feel like having. You'll never force people to spend the money you give them in socially appropriate ways (and indeed, the idea of doing so is somewhat frightening). As a result, if you cap benefits you put the kids at risk.

One of the people I know, is now having their 4th kid. After moaning how skint they are with 3...

The mind boggles.

Yeah, that's working out really well for it!

"Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.

"Plenty of prisons," said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?"

"They are. Still," returned the gentleman, "I wish I could say they were not."

"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?" said Scrooge.

"Both very busy, sir."

"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course," said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to hear it."

Well, not saying these people in particular don't have jobs. But when there is nothing else to do all day, a fuck is all that is left.

One has a job, not highly paid I grant you.


He has a an xbox!

I can understand having kids, but not then you can't afford them, then moan when the council won't give them a better house.

I never for one second suggested it wasn't. My first words were 'I agree'.

But how do you punish the parents for their decision without directly punishing the kids? If it is in any way the kids' fault that they were born into a big family I don't see it.

If you think it's any fun being part of a large family in a council flat, it's not. I only lived with my mother for just over a year, but being told to make sure that you have as much filling food for your free school meal as you can because there's no money for tea, having nothing but toast to eat all weekend and going a whole winter with never having the heating on once in that time is not fair on the children. Mother never drank or smoked, never had Sky or a car, and I remember my sister going to school in mis-matched shoes because the right one of one pair was broken and the left of the other had split.

Cramped, poor and can't even afford food. Yes, it's irresponsible to have six kids, but my half brothers and sisters were the ones that suffered from that. I was lucky in a way, my grandparents raised me because I wasn't wanted at home from the time I was a baby. But you punish the adults and kids like those are the ones that suffer, really. It's really bloody tough being in that environment, with people in their middle class lifestyles looking down at you all the time, even when you're a few years old, because you're poor and live on an inner city estate, making assumptions of your mother and/or father because of this image of people on benefits as that fat, grease-stained man with a can of lager slumped in front of the TV like someone pictured up-thread.

As a result, you're judged. By people in the street, by other kids and teachers, when you're no more than six or seven years old. You're judged because you can't afford to replace your shoes, because you're on free school dinners, because you don't have what the other kids have. And then you go home, don't eat and you're cold.

This case in the thread is a stand-out case, but if you start punishing people for being poor and having big families, you'll hit the already struggling families far more than this story if this seemingly comfortable couple (though three teenage sons in a single room doesn't sound much fun for the kids, still).

To be fair to them they as a couple didn't actually pump out all these kids, they're the kids from their two previous relationships. Presumably those two relationships went south and so when they got together as a couple they suddenly ended up with two families worth of kids. Which then begs the question of whether their previous partners are pitching in financially, which isn't mentioned in their breakdown, or even whether they could take some of the kids on a permanent basis to mitigate the over-crowding in this one house; but all that depends on the specific circumstances of the various relationships involved of course so may not be a viable solution.

As Mimi says though, there's no real solution to this. Your only choices are to either somehow legally limit the amount of kids that someone has or the state just refuses to pay child benefit past a certain point. In the former case you've got all sorts of civil rights issues (and good luck enforcing it, how would that even work?) and in the latter you're essentially financially punishing an innocent child and their siblings. Neither seems workable to me.

And the estimated number of households that would hit the proposed benefits cap is somewhere around 100. It's ridiculous that this is even a conversation someone thinks is worth having. It's even more ridiculous when the BBC uses an example of 1 in 25,000 claimants to illustrate the article. This entire policy would probably save about £100k PA - and they've already spent that just talking about it.

I really don't think that there is an answer or a solution to this that is fair and equitable for all.

But those 100 people are actually evil and if we could just focus the attention on them we'll ignore all the other problems !

Earning that much after tax would require a gross income of almost exactly £41k, if you were to get no benefits at all. Not unreasonable for a software engineer, but it's pretty unlikely that someone with no experience for 10 years is going to get hired at that level today.

How much money would that family lose if he did get a job? As far as I can see he'd keep the child benefit and ( I think ) child tax credit, but presumably lose much of the rest. You've got a family in a situation where the father getting an entry level job would actually cost them money, and so the chances of him getting a good job decrease over time.

I can't emphasise this enough. Life on benefits isn't a picnic. It never was and it never will be.

Is that actually right? Huh. We shouldn't fall for it then. Thanks Craster. Thraster.

A robust economy where everyone who wants a job can get one, and with the prospect of earning more than they could claim on benefits, and rather than continuing to raises taxes at the point money is earned, and then also prices at purchase time (i'm looking at you VAT and Fuel Duty), how about lowering the purchase point taxes and duties so peoples benefits go further and they don't need as much money given to them and you don't need to raise as much from income tax.

Benefit scroungers are the price society pays for being successful and supporting people when they are in need, and i'm fine with that. Lets not waste a disproportionate amount of effort on trying to fix it, lets try and make the economy better for everyone instead.

Commie.

Capitalist.

Come on, lets use the correct term at least.

Champagne Socialist!

Reminds me. I saw something that showed that someone on minimum wage pays 333% more tax than Tony Blair.