Be Excellent To Each Other

I think asylum seekers got/get food vouchers however they cannot get change from them.

It was tongue in cheek to see how much of a fight I could start, obv.

Yeah, sorry, I assume we're all massively into eugenics and stuff, obv.




Hello? Hello? /taps phone receiver

I totally agree with that, I think tokens are the perfect solution.

The only problem I can foresee with a voucher system is going to be some kind of gaming or abuse. Logical controls for these kinds of things never seem to work, usually because the attempt to limit it to a household/individual isn't enforced by a decent IT system, or worse, they create an IT system specifically for it and it costs a billion pounds, takes 4 years, and ends up being shit or never delivered. That seems to happen with pretty much every government IT project ever. I'm looking at you BBC Trust/NHS.

Really, if the government would stop engaging giant brand software companies where software development apparently does cost hundreds of millions with absolutely no safeguards written into contracts, that would help. Engage a small IT company with 10-20 staff to work on the project and I bet you they'd come up with something in a couple of years that works really well and would cost a few hundred grand, and even that is possibly overkill.

Regarding token schemes, there is a risk that users might feel stigmatised and ashamed to use them in public. I think the asylum seeker vouchers were replaced by a card system to help curb this (Azure or something).

Yeah, I'm sure there are ways around this as you mention, Kern. Surely more important than people's sensibilities etc. though, is making sure all our kids eat well, healthily, are well clothed and warm, have a good basic standard of nursery care and so on, and whatever system is used, it cannot be bartered for 20 B&H and a 4-pack of Eight Ace or whatever.

I promise I'm still a liberal at heart but my concern right now based off what I see in my area is that there is a section of society who are chronically unemployed and who literally plan to have kids straight from school in order to get a house and more money who think that working as a cleaner or behind the counter in McDonalds is more embarrassing and shameful than living off of benefits.

We stayed in Chester at the weekend and every member of cleaning staff at the hotel I encountered was eastern European, as well as the people who were clearing tables in a couple of the restaurants we visited. I bet there are local people sitting in their houses playing Xbox and claming job seekers allowance. Now I'm not naïve or disillusioned enough to feel like that's the majority or anything but there are people who just won't work. Or they believe they can't get a job because they don't try and refuse to do some jobs. I've been unemployed, it sucked. So I worked anywhere I had to to get by. I've worked as a cleaner, a maid, in a bar, serving tables in a restaurant, as a kitchen porter, in a call centre, in a shop, in McDonalds...I've done load of crap jobs. It infuriates me when I see people unemployed and there are jobs available.

"corporeal punishment"

Lol

I totally agree Gilly, I've worked in a factory (on £35/week), a garage (on £2/hour) and other stuff besides to get by. Trouble is, these days people dare not even say stuff like you've said, for fear of being labelled a heartless Thatcher-loving c***, a xenophobe or worse, even though we all know it happens, and we most of us really know what's what regardless of all the bullshit that gets banded about (it's hardly bloody rocket science anyway). Or, we get told there are no generations-jobless families being put up in brand new social/affordable housing with all mod cons, spanking new kitchens and the rest, even when we routinely see it for ourselves first hand, repeatedly, with our own eyes - but no, it's all apparently Daily Mail make believe, "it doesn't happen". Doublethink and crass denial, basically, real head-in-bucket singing 'la la la' type stuff.

I salute your work ethic and pride, basically; if more people were like this, then scant resources could be allocated fully to those in genuine need and we wouldn't need to put them - and all the others - through demeaning assessments or whatever.

H
They used to do 'milk vouchers' when I was a little'un. Everyone knew which local and corner shops would accept them for whatever you wanted: people would exchange them for cigarettes, booze, all kinds of things. The shopkeeper didn't care as he was getting his money and an increased trade from the people who sought out his shop because he'd take the tokens as payment for anything.

Scummy practice.

I'm not sure that quite sums it up fairly. Going to the numbers, unemployment has come down, but the latest figure I can find (quickly) is 1.8 million. For jobs, 500,000. So that's 1.3 million people who might claim benefits. The figures can shift, of course, but any idea that the more people chase jobs and work and release money, the more jobs are created is true but not something that continues forever. Underpinning all of this is the fact that even if we got to full employment you'd still need a percentage of people unemployed, otherwise inflation goes haywire - and if that happened, then keeping interest rates low to prevent people being turfed out of their overpriced houses as their mortgages escalated would look insane, but letting them rise would create its own homelessness problem.

So given all that, there will always be a large number of unemployed people. It isn't so hard to see how some people see chronic un or under employment as being part of their lot. Call them the underclass, if you like. Some might even enjoy it, though it seems unlikely. The economic system, though, is the problem - that an underclass has developed (and been well-predicted in literature for years - dystopian science fiction anyone?) isn't because people are feckless, but because it is an unavoidable consequence of capitalism. Unavoidable and inevitable. Sure, capitalism is the best economic system we've come up with so far, but it has less and less to offer in building a society as time goes by and the rewards are shared around less generously.

I'm sure we can make the welfare system work better, but even if it was as full of incentive as possible and efficiently gave just enough for people to live on, you'd still be left with lots of unemployed people (3-4% unemployed in full employment, from memory). Any fixes are going to create problems elsewhere - like a barrel with four holes and only two bungs, you can plug any hole you like, but the others will keep leaking.

I could comment extensively, JBR, but suffice to say I don't agree with a single one of your various (IMO outlandish in some cases) assertions including in economic/consequential terms, nor your extreme pessimism.

The Left really does like to come up with these frankly implausible, hugely complex, counter-reality Heath Robinson intellectual constructs for what is, ultimately, a much simpler problem than you seem to imagine. I'm sorry, but Gilly is right.

Increasingly though, people are seeing things for how they actually are, and are equally increasingly impatient with the same old (bizarre) excuses.

Yeah absolutely Meems, this would deffo need to be sorted first and foremost. Hopefully these days we have the tech to do stuff like that, though I do take EBG's point about public IT contracts...

you know most Gov It projects fail, due to every changing requirements, not due to the It companies.. just saying

Except that's not the problem either. Benefits are a pretty small wedge of the spending (15%, if I remember the budget right), and the bogus / unneeded claims are a minuscule portion of that. The fact that most people seem to think that the fraudsters are the main cause of our money woes is pretty bizarre - pensions are by far the biggest cost.

No-one is talking about benefit fraud though? We're referring to those (legitimately claimed) benefits specifically about to be capped/cut in the first instance, and more latterly Gilly's point about widely available unskilled jobs that anyone could do going unfilled and being very widely undertaken by migrant workers, for whatever reason(s) despite this large 'bank' of long term unemployed etc.

As regards 'pensions costs', though, I think there needs to be some differentiation between basic State pension entitlement and the vastly more opulent final salary public sector type schemes that we, in the private sector, can only dream about. It might be BS, but I'm sure I read somewhere that a primary school teacher who's done 30-odd years service will have accrued a pension pot equivalent to £600,000 (i.e. the amount needed to pay into a private pension scheme providing the same benefits). If so, that's just bloody ridiculous and more importantly, unsustainable. The young shouldn't be the only ones feeling the pinch, here.

Edit: £600,000 looks like DM bullshit, but the actual figure is still likely to be around ~£300,000, which is obviously much more than average.

would it not be better going after the big tax avoiders, i thought that was a bigger chunk of missing cash, compared to benefit fraud.

would it not be better going after the big tax avoiders, i thought that was a bigger chunk of missing cash, compared to benefit fraud.

Doesn't that just lead onto the fact that there are far more unemployed people than there are jobs, and that a large wedge of the benefits bill actually goes towards people who are in paid employment anyway?

Anyone who thinks Osborne's 'living wage' pledge (which IIRC won't even top out until 2020 at a rather miserly £9 per hour) is going to plug the gap in benefits/tax credits cuts is deluding themselves.

There are many families working very hard that need benefits/tax credits just to get by, whatever the myths of crap like Benefits Street or what it was called like to peddle.

We should do both? £1.5 trillion has to be paid for somehow.

Well that's all very civilised, I like it. And I did ramble on. But still, I can't remember a time when the number of people without work didn't dwarf the jobs available. Never mind where that goes or why it is, but that's a great problem to the idea that there are jobs there for all - in any dynamic economy there will always be jobs available. There will never be enough.

Edit - and therefore you'll have people on benefits, some of whom will be lazy. In the grand scheme of things, they cost so little that that can't be where the problems in the economy lie, unless they poison everyone into thinking that a life of laziness (with very little money) is lovely.

Consistently not taking a job when you could (and continuing to claim benefits) counts as fraud in my book, to be honest.


I think that's under the "benefit" heading for money spent. I might well be wrong, though.

BS or not, you don't have to pay 600K into a private pension fund to have a 600K pot. Compound interest is a massive factor in pension schemes. And that's where government-backed pensions fell down. The state should have been investing those funds as if it were a private scheme, at which point interest would have picked up a massive chunk of the bill. Instead they spent the money and made it future government's problem. Half the state-backed investment funds going tits up didn't help either, of course.

Personally I'm glad the governments spent the (albeit derisory, far from commensurate) staff contributions (if any) at the time rather than 'investing' it - you'll know far better than I do, Cras, about what has happened to your average pension fund investment over the last 8 years. My wife's is worth perhaps one-tenth what it was, which is why I've never bothered with one in the first place.

Except that they're still paying it. So instead of having to put their hands in their pockets at the time for 300K of contributions over 25 years and allowing investment capital growth to make up the difference, they're putting their hands in their pockets right now to the tune of 600K.

Sorry, I think you missed my point. That "capital growth" you speak of was, in this case, actually a decimation of at least 80% of the whole fund from memory, could be more. There are many other similar examples as you yourself allude to in your earlier post.

(Oh, and this is a static fund as accrued over 20-odd years of (now completed) service, so no-one's paying anything into it).

Whichever way you care to slice it, there's good reason why final salary pensions are non-existent anywhere now, in the commercial world.

Hard hitting interview by Kay Burley!
http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/k ... 1evSUtX8Xl

Re: Corbyn, I think he's practically the only option if Labour want to do any actual opposition. They likely could have rallied to defeat the welfare bill, but decided to not bother.

Like a tweet I read earlier, this is the Jedi deciding that instead of fighting they will just accept lots of dark side policies to appear as a realistic alternative to Darth Vader.

There's a decent argument that Labour lost the election by straying too far right and losing core support to the likes of SNP, UKIP, Greens and apathy.

Anyway, they don't need Corbyn to fight an election. It's five years away. Get him in for 3 years or so, get the base inside, then drop in a hero like that guy who isn't running this time but who sounds posh and was in the army and that. He can go more towards the centre while keeping the rest happy, and will benefit from looking like a saviour to the party. I'd genuinely say that's a better, more pragmatic strategy than Burnham et al.

Re: benefit caps, it can feasibly 'lock out' families from huge areas of the country. And like many other Tory policies will continue to increase inequality and child poverty whilst the ministers continue to claim expenses as absurd as 9p for individual car journeys.

Also, nobody should be prevented from having a family purely based on how much they earn.

While I firmly agree with that last, I feel my moral certainty start to waver a little if people decide to have seven kids despite not having a chance in hell of providing for them. So then do you have to draw a line somewhere? Fucked if I know.

Surely the way to do it (and I'm pretty sure the Child Benefit thing is doing this already) is to say that these rules will start at some point 9+ months in the future. Then people who already have lots of children don't suffer, and then people who are planning to have children can take the new rules into account?

Really though?

And we are back to here:

Like my Dad used to say, "you need a license to catch a fish, but any idiot can have a kid"

But...

"Anyone with a dick can be a father, but it takes a Man to be a Dad"

Just think about that.

*strokes chin*

I sympathise, but that is one awful, awful pension scheme - I don't have an investment that isn't worth more than I paid for it, and some substantially so. What the hell your wife's trustees have been doing, I don't know, but till recently the UK stock market was at a record high, so even a tracker would have been showing a decent profit.

As Craster alluded to, time in the market and consistent investment is key - one of the reasons final salary schemes have died is because employers didn't pay in when times were good, thinking a fund in surplus could be ignored. But it can't - keep building it when times are good, to cover when they're not. Once you fall behind in investments, you'll never catch up with the amount needed (and so schemes close, unless some sugar daddy dumps lump sums in).

Yes. What's the alternative?

I don't mean having 85 kids and getting a bajillion dollars a day in benefits, but you simply can't stop people wanting to have kids, and trying to deny that people becoming parents based on income is futile and not a good indicator for civilisation.

As Cras said, the impossible question is where you draw the line.

Also, it could disproportionately impact on anyone that is not white. Which would really make it a poor policy.

Well, yeah. Purely because any other position is either horrifically draconian (e.g. enforced contraception, criminalising larger families, etc) or adversely impacts the children (e.g. limiting child benefit) who are innocent in all this. Don't get me wrong, it is frustrating, but, seriously, what else could reasonably be done?

I'd suggest you base a decision on pragmatism. e.g,. are families with huge amounts of kids actually a huge drain or are they the outliers which generate a lot of press and get people frothing with rage? Also in an economy predicated on unfailing, never-ending growth isn't the creation of many new little economic units something of a necessity?

Bring back chimney sweeps and the mills and let nature take its course?

This question can't be answered, therefore you don't try to. You just have to work on the other aspects of society so that the children can have better opportunities and more engagement with society than their parents. Yes, a very small % of people on benefits are claiming fraudulently, but if their children are well educated and see opportunities available to them then the hope is they won't perpetuate that themselves because they'll see it for the shitty life it is and reject it.

Poor people with kids don't annoy me on a conscious level. Yes, at times they are annoying when they have the same phone as i do, or "affordable housing" is built nearby, but by and large I really cannot begrudge the money from the state. I am fairly sure that in tje £x bandied about, the majority of that could be "tax credits". I think these are just revenues not deducted, and isn't a hand out so much as a "nah, you are on a spot, don't worry about it". I would rather it went to families than funding the fucking opera.

Kay Burley is an utterly hideous, horrible human being. She's a terrible, terrible interviewer. The UK's Fox News hack.

I'm certainly looking forward to my opulent final salary pension... oh wait. Never mind.

Assuming all my funding of the welfare (25% of budget) comes from my income tax, I'm not going to moan to much about the £40 a week going to help others. And I get £20 of that back because of T-Bomb.

Is 'affordable housing' a code word for something else that I completely don't understand? What could be annoying about housing that's affordable?

Poor people live in affordable housing, and who'd want to live near them!

I hope that's not what you mean, Mali, even as a joke

I've been homeless. It's horrible and soul destroying and I don't know if you ever really pick yourself fully up from that point.

I'm sure it was meant tongue-in-cheek given the rest of the post.