Tuesday, 13 October 2009

Our Welfare System is shit

Dick P reminds us of one of the many reasons why.

My latest blogpost: Our Welfare System is shitTweet this! Posted by Mark Wadsworth at 18:32

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7 comments:

bayard said...

Apart from anything else, this is bad politics. Fining Jacqui Smith and making her pay back all the money she fraudulently claimed would be a crowd-pleaser and not cost Labour anything electorally, as she is now unelectable.
I suppose they don't care any more. They know they are going to lose, and under our electoral system it's the losing that counts, not how much they lose by.
"It matters not whether you won or lost, but how you placed the blame"

13 October 2009 at 19:21
James Higham said...

Trouble is - she got away with it, didn't she? Until the riots next year, that is.

13 October 2009 at 19:23
Dick Puddlecote said...

Thanks for the link, MW.

As we employ quite a few part-timers, I have a good working knowledge of housing ben etc. - the level of understandable confusion from claimants is very high.

Tax credits are the biggest evil. The anomalies are huge and every April I get about a dozen calls asking for assistance from staff.

The whole system is an appalling mess and requires shredding and starting again.

13 October 2009 at 19:36
Mark Wadsworth said...

B, JH, Dick P's heading was misleading. It was a serious article about how shit the welfare system is.

DP, my pleasure, agreed it needs shredding and starting again. Preferably with a flat rate Citizen's Income (at whatever level) and all means-testing dealt with via PAYE codes (i.e benefit withdrawal would be no more than the normal rate of tax/NIC of 31% or 50% if you're on housing benefit or other extras).

So your employee would have paid 50% tax at source on her overtime and that would have been the end of that, no need to report anything to anybody or fill in a single form.

13 October 2009 at 21:03
banned said...

But Mark, that would not employ many people would it ?

14 October 2009 at 06:35
bayard said...

@banned: Precisely the point. AFAIR, Mark's calculations for CI didn't take into account the savings to be made on the salaries of thousands of bureaucrats released into the community to do something more useful to society,so could probably be more generous than the figure postulated.

14 October 2009 at 08:42
bayard said...

@Mark: Sorry, read the article now, but I'm not at all surprised. I've never been one to look at Nazi Germany and say "it couldn't happen here".

14 October 2009 at 08:45

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