Breeding for Benefits

tightrs

skint-student-nurse wrote: »

the shocking thing i found that is although they have shaken up the benefits system, me and my OH will be better off living apart and i will be able to save £200 a month,i can only manage about £20 atm.

excuse me while i ditch my OH and sign-on, ive got my eye on a pair of nike trainers that i cant justify buying atm.

sadly this has been the case for me and my wife for many years and there are plenty of people taking advantage of this situation :mad:

SingleSue

kennyboy66 wrote: »

The reason you don't is because you have earned that money. You can estimate how many days of toil it has taken to take home £2k.

You might feel differently if someone just gave you the money - and also new that you would keep getting that money regularly.

Someone should do a study on similar families with similar net incomes, one working and one on benefits. My guess would be that the people on benefits would spend more on Xmas than the working family.

But not in all cases.

I certainly do not spend more on christmas than a working person, I have very strictly kept budgets per child and per relative.

I also know I have a responsibility to spend the money I receive in a sensible manner rather than wasting it on silly things.

As a little aside, I spend less (as lot less) than I did when I was in a two parent working family and even back then, we were a lot more strict on our present budget than others.

vivatifosi

kennyboy66 wrote: »

Its basics economics - people respond to incentives, and in this country the incentives are all wrong.

Extract is from a great post Kenny.

This is my issue with incentives. I grew up working class on a council estate. Not a bad council estate by any means, but my parents and my friends' parents were builders; factory workers; nurses; shop workers; truck drivers, etc. They may not have been the wealthiest but they instilled us with a sense that if we worked hard we could achieve something in life. There were big families too, but the kids shared bedrooms and their parents still worked. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of keeping up with the Joneses to get the latest car or telly, but people worked for them.

Now the same estate is one of the worst in the county. The pride and joie de vivre has been sucked out of many who live there and replaced by a sense of existing. Sure they can still compete with their neighbours for the newest telly, but every day merges into the next. There are no weekends to look forward to. Where in my parents day, shiny cars sat on the forecourts cleaned at weekends, now there are often half-rotten rusting shells of vehicles that sit like weird post-modern art forms because the house's occupants don't get round to repairing them and they are no longer seen as having any intrinsic value. The buses have stopped running at night because bricks were thrown through windows. Mothers often drop their kids off at school still wearing their pyjamas.

Who do I hold responsible? First the tories - not for selling off the council houses but doing so without offering money back to local authorities to replace them - in effect stopping all those others on lower incomes moving in and diluting the effect of this mess for they have a right to reasonable housing too. But more than anything I blame Labour, who after years in power have broadened the wealth gap. The same Labour who populated with wealthy do-gooders who have never lived a day of their lives on council estates thought it was right to provide such a luxuriant safety net for some that they have effectively dumbed-down my once proud class and I cannot forgive them for that.

SingleSue

Hehe, I won't even put the bins out in my night clothes, let alone do the school run in them!

vivatifosi

SingleSue wrote: »

Hehe, I won't even put the bins out in my night clothes, let alone do the school run in them!

I never for one minute thought you did! FWIW I think a lot of the people I've described do suffer from depression. But this is a lot about how we treat it. I think they've given up and get signed off and its cheaper (in NHS terms) to deal with them like that rather than getting to the root of the problem, supporting people, counselling them and getting them back into work: taking a more holistic approach. I know the job market isn't great, but unemployment around here has been low for years up until the last two or three and the people I'm describing aren't new to this way of life. The issue isn't people on benefits as a safety net, its people on benefits as a lifestyle choice.

My brother and cousin still live on the estate I've described, though not in the worst part, which is where I grew up. They bought houses there initially because they were cheap and affordable but now they have families they can't wait to get out because its so easy for their kids to fall in with the wrong crowd and end up in the police cells or on drugs.

JonnyBravo

vivatifosi wrote: »

Extract is from a great post Kenny.

This is my issue with incentives....(snip for convenience)..........and I cannot forgive them for that.

Superb post. I'd thank it twice if I could.

macaque_2

Originally Posted by dave4545454
there's only 1/2million job vacancies and over 8 million unemployed.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Rubbish.

There are 2.5 million unemployed.

The 8 million figure includes the "economically inactive", which includes an awful lot of people who don't want to work anymore but once might have, students, wives that don't need to work but do work occasionally, etc.....

I have to agree with Dave4545454 on this.

A person who rents out a London house to the local council for £2,000 a week is economically inactive as is someone retires from the city with large pot of money or a government employee who takes early retirement with an index linked pension. 8 million people are making little or no contribution to the economy. This lack of productivity is compounded by a large and wasteful government siphoning off money from a shrinking rump of wealth creators.

Don't you think that the 'benefits scroungers' would be happier with a well paid job in a chemical factory. What chance have they got when Pfizer, GSK, Astra Zeneca, Clariant and many others have announced plant closures in the UK? Can you blame unemployed people for staying at home given the options facing them.

New Labour created a dysfunctional economy with huge social costs. It was called the post industrial model. As a proxy for wealth creation, financial services became the new buzz word. Another word for 'financial services' is skimming. With both the government and the financial services industry sucking money out of the economy, the UK has become an unwelcome home for wealth creators.

To anyone with a grain of common sense, the New Labour model was no different to the old one. Once the country had maxed out on debt the train was bound to hit the buffers.

The only hope for the UK is to bring industry back. Labour costs in the UK are not the problem. A single plant operator on chemical can produce over £1m of products a year. The big costs for companies are corporation tax, employment taxes, red tape and the cost of land.

So what about the 'benefits scoungers'? Actually, very few of them are scroungers. Most are just people with zero career prospects. If you put people in kennels, they will behave like dogs. If the goverment want to repair the damage they must create an environment that motivates enterprise. That means lower taxes, less red tape and fewer busy bodies interfering with our lives and businesses.

SingleSue

vivatifosi wrote: »

I never for one minute thought you did! FWIW I think a lot of the people I've described do suffer from depression. But this is a lot about how we treat it. I think they've given up and get signed off and its cheaper (in NHS terms) to deal with them like that rather than getting to the root of the problem, supporting people, counselling them and getting them back into work: taking a more holistic approach. I know the job market isn't great, but unemployment around here has been low for years up until the last two or three and the people I'm describing aren't new to this way of life. The issue isn't people on benefits as a safety net, its people on benefits as a lifestyle choice.

My brother and cousin still live on the estate I've described, though not in the worst part, which is where I grew up. They bought houses there initially because they were cheap and affordable but now they have families they can't wait to get out because its so easy for their kids to fall in with the wrong crowd and end up in the police cells or on drugs.

Oh no, I didn't think you did, I just sat here and read it and thought "Blimey, I would be so embarrassed if people saw me in my night clothes".

I was the same when we used to go camping, so many would go over to the site toilets in their night clothes and there would be me, desperate for the loo but still taking the time to get fully dressed, even in the dead of night!

When I had my breakdown, because I just wanted to melt into the background, I would still get dressed properly...I didn't want anything that would mark me out as different, I just wanted to disappear.

I agree though re the estates, I am lucky in that the ex council now HA street I live in has a good mix of working, older and those not working. We all take pride in our properties and the surrounding areas, so it is neat and smart..but others are not so lucky. I think because of the ones that do work and the older people who obviously have worked in the past or served their country, it encourages the younger ones in the street to have aspirations...eldest was over the moon about half an hour ago because he had received a phone call in response to his CV dropping/asking around for part time work, he has got a job and starts in just over half an hour!

Lotus-eater

It's interesting to see other peoples views, I always take the rubbish out in my dressing gown and the neighbours always wave hello, god knows what they think of me. :shocked:

margaretclare

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8758592.stm

What's wrong with this picture?

Answers on a postcard....

The woman is committing a 'crime against fashion' - the way she's dressed?

Why are there such ugly clothes nowadays?