Innumerates & economic illiterates of the day

I accept this is fish/barrel stuff, but hey. From The Daily Express:

60% OF COUNCIL HOUSE TENANTS DON'T PAY RENT

NEARLY two-thirds of council housing tenants get all their rent paid by the taxpayer, it was revealed last night.

Make up your minds, is it 60% or 66.66%?

The massive benefits handout – largely to households where no one has a job – is costing hard-working middle-income families a total of £10billion a year. That is the equivalent of £476 every year for every privately-owned home in Britain...

The £10 billion headline cost to the DWP is meaningless of course, as this money gets paid straight to local councils as rent who then have it deducted from their Whitehall grants, thus reducing the amount that the council receives from the taxpayer ... so it's just different branches of the government shuffling money around between themselves. The true cash costs are the actual running costs of those units, repairs, insurance, interest etc, not the headline figure, which is covered by the rent that the other 40% pay (who don't claim Housing Benefit). Let's not debate the notional costs, that's too complicated for now.

Figures reveal there are now three million households living in publicly-owned homes whose rent is funded through housing benefit.

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Tax- Payers’ Alliance, said: “This is a shocking figure and a massive financial burden on taxpayers. Ordinary families are struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over their own heads without the ever-growing benefits culture. More must be done to cut the number of people living at taxpayers’ expense, and wherever possible a fair rate should be charged for social housing.”

So he didn't spot the logical flaw either, which is typical of the TPA.

And if 'ordinary families' are so envious of those living in council housing for free, they can always pack in their jobs and put themselves on a waiting list, can't they? It's not the sort of lifestyle I'd choose, but hey, each to his own.

Average incomes of council tenants have plummeted since the early 1980s when the majority of people living in local authority accommodation were in low-income jobs and paid their own rent. Between 1981 and 2006, the proportion of social housing tenants in full-time employment fell from 67 per cent to 34 per cent.

Well duh, if two-thirds of social tenants were in work in 1981 and half of social housing has been sold off since then (not just under the Tories!) to the better-off poor who could afford a mortgage on the heavily discounted price, it stands to reason that the fraction goes up, simply because the same number of unemployed is being compared with a smaller number of social homes. I accept that they probably sold off less than half, but the point still stands (all the Afghanistanis and Somalis probably make up the balance, of course).

Critics claim that Labour’s benefits policy has destroyed incentives to work for many families living in deprived areas, leaving them dependent on handouts and public housing.

Again, duh, the only people who take welfare reform seriously are proponents of a Citizen's Income-style system. The welfare state as it stands has developed piecemeal over the decades and was largely unaffected by changes in government, i.e. the system now is not radically different from what it was in 1997. Worse, yes; more expensive, yes; radically different, no.

We then get the bleating from the Housing Associations that we covered a couple of days ago, and finally:

A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government recognised some housing associations were concerned about a possible cut in their rental income. He said: “We are consulting on proposals which will protect housing associations from a drop in rental income of more than two per cent.”

Protect = give them more taxpayers' money, of course.