Twats of the day (6)

At the bottom of the same article covered in my previous rant we find this:

Mr Purnell said: ... "There's a danger of saying, as David Cameron did in the Sunday papers, that all five million people on benefit are potential Karen Matthews. I think that's offensive to people looking for work."

He said the Government was spending an extra £1 billion over the next two years on more Jobcentre advisers and other help. Mr Purnell said that the lone parent changes were aimed at giving young people more "aspiration". But he admitted that "if there isn't childcare, that would be a good reason for not going to work". Today's White Paper features moves to increase sanctions on those who avoid work, with a range of penalties from losing one week's £60 jobseeker's allowance to being forced to work for the benefit.

However, Right-wing think tank Civitas hit out at the proposals for being "too soft". It claimed that allowing single parents to simply "monkey about with their CV" was a "waste of time".

As ever, clowns to the Left of me, jokers to the Right.

1. I've bolded the important bit; "an extra £1 billion over the next two years on more Jobcentre advisers and other help". I make that about 20,000 extra tied Nulab voters come the next election (20,000 x typical salary £25,000 x 2 = £1 billion).

2. As to 'childcare', it's not my decision if single women choose to have children. They ought to think about 'childcare' before they have 'em. Yes, I am perfectly happy to scrap Child Tax Credits (which are a straight bung for single parents actually) and roll them into a higher Child Benefit of (say) £30 a week (or whatever is fiscally neutral), but of course I'd restrict it to the first three children per mother to prevent baby-farming à la Karen Matthews).

3. The real point is that welfare claimants have no strong motivation to find a job because they lose more in benefits than they can earn in net wages. Until the Powers That Be grasp this simple fact, all this tinkering achieves nothing.

4. Civitas make superficially fair points actually, but I've read plenty of their pamplets and while they are good at diagnosing the reason why the welfare system is so corrosive (the perverse incentives and poverty trap), to my knowledge they haven't twigged that the key to all this is simply reducing the savage withdrawal rates. Such a measure would probably more than pay for itself (total withdrawal rates of seventy per cent-plus are quite clearly on the downward slope of the Laffer Curve).