1. I 'know' about these people as I use the evidence of my eyes and ears and interact with some. There are people on my street, on my parents' street and in my brother's block of flats for example who I know have been on benefits for sometime and yet can afford to live a comparable or better lifestyle than us. Now if they are not getting this money from benefits are they all criminals?
I don't know and you don't know. That is the long and the short of it. If you were a high rate tax payer and those people are on benefits and living as well as you then either you dropped your money down a stank or you are wrong. Simple as that.
2. Why should you or I expect the state to pay our mortgage or rent indefinitely? And what are essentials? Is a car essential? SKY TV? I don't think they are. I lived without both while working full time so I'm not sure why they should be considered essental for an unemployed person.
So that people don't have to sleep on the street, I should imagine.
As to what is essential? Do you know how the rates of benefit were originally calculated? Do you know how they were implemented after that calculation? Do you know the history of cutting them thereafter? I get the impression you don't
3. I am fine with the idea of working in a call centre or making sandwiches and will no doubt do that at some point in the future if i fail to find a job more appropriate to my experience and qualifications within a reasonable time frame. However, it would be counterproductive for me to take such a job immediately as it would limit my ability to find a better job. I have actually considered doing exactly what you are suggesting here as it would be better than 65 pound a week. If I haven't got a job by the end of the year (giving 3 months of transition) then I absolutely will have to do something else.
Just like everybody else then? You will take a job if it brings in more money than your benefit when you judge that is in your interest? Would you take it if it brought in less? I understood you to say that your pride is worth a great deal of money and that a drop in income is well worth the increase in dignity. What will you work for, I wonder?
You see, your £65 per week is exactly what you say you want: it is the contributory benefit paid for those between jobs: and while you get it you are under far less pressure to take just anything: that is an accepted part of the system: you get that time to seek a job commensurate with your expectations for just the reasons you give. The game changes when that benefit runs out.
4. I expect anyone who is made unemployed to be supported in that transition from Job A to Job B. There would be no benefit to the country of making all our doctors, teachers, lawyers and accountants work picking asparagus on a farm immediately upon being made unemployed. If someone can reasonably be expected to find a new job within say 3 months in their field then why not support them while they make the transitition? Very different to offering the support in perpetuity.
See above.
What reasoning do people who have never worked or have been unemployed for 2 or 3 years have to say that taking a job in a call centre wouldn't be right for them?
Does not matter what they say: the rules matter and the rules forbid that. Of course there are ways around them: there are for any rules. But the idea that one can just decide to make a choice shows a complete failure to understand the benefits system in this country.
That they can stay home and sit on their backside and get the same money in handouts from the state so they don't need to work?
As has already been said: there is a benefits trap. Most people will not make the choice to take a significant drop in an already inadequate income in order to bask in the dignity of work. For most people that would entail impoverishing their dependents, and they don't have such a distorted sense of their own importance that they would do that to their children. Clearly your values differ. And from one perspective they may well be admirable: but I do not admire the idea that your children should suffer for your pride. Many people have to face that stark choice: it is one of the things which underlies the poor mental health outcomes which arise from unemployment, actually. And it is interesting to note that we do not see a choice to maximise income by, for example, setting your self up as non resident or non domiciled so that you can avoid tax, in the same way: that is not only legal, but it is seen as perfectly reasonable unless you want to be a government minister. Why do you expect the poor to be different from the rich? Oh that is right: they are not like us. Seems they are.
Incidentally I live in an area where a lot of people are on benefits and there is no shortage of parked cars, sky dishes, kids in designer clothes and plasma tvs. I laugh at your suggestion that a plasma TV and SKY HD are the cheapest way to keep your kids entertained - terrestrial telly on 20" CRT works just as well as does radio, books (from the library I pay for and nobody ever goes to!) and god forbid spending some of your free time with your children and entertaining them stimulating them yourself!!! As laughable as the people on TV who moan they can't afford to eat healthily that's why they take their kids to McDonalds!
You clearly haven't a clue. You don't even know what an area with a lot of people on benefits looks like: they don't have the kinds of adverts for staff in shop windows etc you described upthread. I have visited London and seen that: In times when we were having a boom I have even seen it here occasionally. But not often and not for long. What is the unemployment rate where you live?
Oh and good luck with keeping your forthcoming child happy with the radio.
Do give us your recipe for healthy eating on benefit: I know a lot of social workers and health visitors who need that information, so don't delay.
5. The system for sickness and invalidity is an inconsistent mess. Plenty examples of deserving cases who don't get what they should and plenty examples of undeserving cases who get everything they can. I have personal experience of several cases of people bragging about getting disability they don't deserve. Anecdotes yes, but your asking for my personal opinion and I can only base it on my personal experience. You seem to be denying that it happens.
No I am not denying it happens: I am asking what you actually know about how the system works. Do you know how you claim such benefits? Do you know how entitlement is assessed? Do you know how many claims are denied and how many are successful if they are appealed? Do you know how often the award is reviewed? Do you know how that process works? All of that information is freely available so it is not unreasonable to ask you to outline your understanding: and then tell me it is easy and show how, please
6. Given that I have already said 65 quid a week is too low for people to live on what exactly would be proved by me and my wife living on it for 3 months? How many households take home 65 quid a week in benefits incidentally?
Not what I suggested: you are in a peculiar position because you presumably signed up as a sponsor for your wife and she has not lived here legally as your spouse for 3 years yet and so cannot begin the process of naturalisation. If that is the case you fall under the "no recourse to public funds" provisions. The only other ways you can be in the situation you are in is if she is working: or if your savings are high enough to debar your from means tested benefits.
What i suggested was you try to live on the benefits you would get if you were not in that peculiar position. The benefits that millions of your fellows are living on (and managing to run cars and all of that on, according to you). Try it.
As for why benefits should be linked to prior earnings I would have thought that was obvious - higher earnings have higher outgoings for things that may not be able to be turned off quickly.
Tough: they should have thought of that. Why should I not expect high earners to make provision for that while they are in work? I read a statistic one time which I cannot now find: the majority of people, whatever their level of income, were 3 months wages away from destitution: that is the level of average cash savings and it did not vary with income except at the bottom and the very top. Funny that: the poor don't seem to be a different breed after all.
They have also contributed more to the pot in the first place.
Well they cannot tax what you do not earn, so that is inevitably true. So what?
It wouldn't make sense to force people to sell their house, car or whatever to survive for 2 months while they find a new job. Of course I am talking about using NI contributions as insurance - what I feel they should be - something to support your lifestyle during an employment transition for a short period (3-6 months maybe?). You seem to regard benefits as something that should be ongoing so we are coming at it from different angles.
No. Benefits are designed to smooth the transition between jobs and that is fine. If you cannot get a job in short space of time the game changes. It changes because of the views of people like you. So yes, we are coming at it from different angles. You think it is reasonable to force you sell your non-essentials because you are out of work for longer than a few months: I don't. Have you read about the means test in the 1930's? It seems that you wish to return to that system. If we get to that stage I will seek political asylum in a civilised country.
7. How does the welfare state compare in the US, Korea and China? Well from my perspective pretty well. I believe the system for unemployment in Korea for example is very close to the one I propose - a percentage of former salary for a maximum of 6 months.
And then?
As a foreigner in these countries I generally didn't contribute much and I didn't get much in return which seems fair.
How did you contribute anything? Were you not paying full uk tax or something? I had understood that most countries had double taxation agreements, and that is how non-domiciled and non resident people get out of contributing to this country. I am very willing to be enlightened about this aspect.
In Scandanavian and some other Euro countries it seems people contribute quite a lot and get a lot back which also seems fair. In the UK it seems we contribute reasonably highly and get back very little - that doesn't seem fair. I'd be all for spending loads of money on benefits, public services and everything else if we were getting a return and they were doing a good job...are they?
A less good than they were when we paid a reasonable amount in taxes. I said: you cannot have european level services and american style taxes.
Are benefits helping the poor and making their lives better?
They prevent starvation, yes. They prevent sleeping on the street, yes. They put shoes on people's feet, yes.
Do they allow of a life as opposed to an existence? Debatable
Or are they trapping people in unemployment, making the genuine poor suffer and encouraging wasters to milk the system?
Benefits do not trap people in unemployment: low wages do that.
As for wasters milking the system, now here I do agree with you. Sack every charlatan consultant with another super wheeze for getting people off sickness benefits: every one with a fraudulent way of measuring benefit fraud to sell, for a politicians comfort; stop all the rich landlords getting their income from multiple private lets funded by housing benefit and let us have proper council houses again. Etc. I am glad we have at least some points of agreement
Are schools educating our kids well and training them to be productive in the future or are they churning out illiterate antisocial yobs and media studies graduates?
They are educating our children, quite obviously. Why do you ask? Did you miss the improvement in standard exam passes year on year? Did you not notice that our class ridden society apparently has to make finer and finer distinctions between exam results so that we can continue to have an elite? Criterion referencing would never do, now would it?
You might also have missed the fact that this is achieved in difficult circumstances: schools which have set up breakfast clubs because the children don't get a breakfast before they arrive are an example: weans learn better when they are fed and the results are there for all to see.
Are the police reducing crimes or spending all their time catching speeders?
It is not the police's job to reduce crime, actually: that task falls to the street lighting agency and other such bodies. I noticed that a council proposed turning the lights off at midnight somewhere in england: that will help, no doubt. Don't think they implemented it: perhaps sanity prevailed.
No, they don't spend all their time catching speeders: though they do that too and it is very lucrative (you didn't know that income generation is important nowadays? tis another pretty prism from the private sector and another way of raising money from a population which will not pay tax) Like every other public servant nowadays what they do spend a lot of time doing is "accountability": and what that means is writing about doing their job instead of doing it. That is what we demanded and that is what we have got: it is now acknowledged by all parties: they all make noises about how bad it is: yet to see any actual reversal of this nonsense, however
Are taxes going to fund world class infrastructure or do our roads crumble, our trains run late, our electricity grid creak and communications network crawl?
We don't pay enough tax and we make the choices about how to spend the ones we do raise. Oddly enough those things are not a very high priority. We have a splendid army, however. And we have a really thriving banking sector able to pay millions in bonuses.
8. I don't have to imagine people are living high on the hog on benefits, I can look out the window and see it.
See above
Meanwhile, I have managed to get my weekly outgoings down to or below what I would be earning on the minimum wage as that's sustainable for me going forward with or without government support. It's called living within my means.
Interesting. How far below have you managed, so far? How many weeks? I assume you are saving something every week? Is it going to be enough to cover the increased heating costs in the winter? Clothes? Repairs to the boiler when it bursts? I am genuinely interested in how you are managing this: especially since you presumably "have higher outgoings for things that may not be able to be turned off quickly". Seems that turned out not to be true? I do agree that the minimum wage is a lot better than benefit if you have no children, and no special needs, however.
I'm not looking for anyone to give me handouts but I will take what's available and what the system says I am entitled to. When I do get back to work though it would be nice if they would stop taking from me to give to others and that instead I would maybe see some value for my taxes.
Just like all those people you so decry then? Seems you are no different from them. Again
