From the BBC:
The government is to lay out its plans for what it calls a "root and branch reform" of Britain's welfare system. Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is set to create a welfare to work programme and make benefits more conditional on willingness to work. He told the Guardian that at present the rewards for choosing to work were "very minimal" or even "none at all"(1).
In families where unemployment was widespread, those who did try get a job were often seen as "morons", he added. Mr Duncan Smith, brought back into frontline politics by Prime Minister David Cameron, has spent several years in opposition (2) preparing a blueprint for the future of the welfare state...
Labour sought to increase incentives to work and introduce penalties for those unwilling to do so (3) but the Conservatives said reforms must go further and faster to tackle the problem of long-term unemployment, which they say underpins many of the country's most deep-seated social problems...
The proposals are also likely to include paying welfare-to-work providers on a results-basis (4), loans to help unemployed people set up their own businesses (5) and local work clubs where people out of work can share skills and make contacts (6).
1) What's the point of that then? If they want to increase the relative rewards to working relative to the dole, then how about just reducing the marginal withdrawal rates (between 70% to 100%), or reducing the administrative barriers to changing from out-of-work to in-work benefits (i.e. by replacing the lot with a Citizen's Income and taking away their 'tax free' personal allowance as a quid pro quo)? This'd save between £5 billion and £10 billion in admin costs etc. Even more fundamentally, how about reducing the burden on employers? Scrap the National Minimum Wage; scrap National Insurance; scrap Working Time Directive; maternity leave stuff etc?
2) *ahem* "Has wasted several years" */ahem*
3) Before we dream up penalties for not working, can't we just get rid of the penalties for taking a job (see 1) and see how it pans out?
4) Great news for fakeprivatecompanies!
5) Get the poor buggers even deeper into debt?
6) They used to be called "pubs".
In The Metro, IDS said he was appalled at the number of children living in workless households. That's easily fixed. Stop fire-hosing money at "single" mothers.
Thursday, 27 May 2010
"Ministers to outline 'radical' agenda to preserve status quo"
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6 comments:
then how about just reducing the marginal withdrawal rates,
You must be getting your message over since IDS was on breakfast telly and used more or less those words "marginal withdrawal rates" to try to explain why people were doing the sums and deciding it wasn't worth going to work.
WOAR, it would be nice to think he understood it, and although some senior Tories mumble occasionally about the 95% withdrawal rate being a bad thing, IDS himself suggested a 55% withdrawal rate - but there'd still be 31% tax and NI on top of that. Big deal.
Some pronounced quiet man style tub-thumping going on today, with IDS assuring us that he does not see his mission as simply cheese-paring around the edges when it comes to his welfare reform. To be fair he does seem to have grasped that "withdrawal rates" and the accompanying "eye watering" marginal tax rates that can hit those coming off welfare and going into work are a major disincentive for those who might possibly "find a job"and almost went so far as to agree that someone in that situation is showing "common sense" as opposed to "a scrounger mentality" in preferring not to be shoe-horned into a job which sees them ending up with less ... unfortunately I suspect he is somewhat less of a "screw 'em" merchant than some of those who advise and support him, and some of his colleagues in the Grand Alliance, and will end up being pushed into adopting a "very tough line, with little or no concession to any collateral damage", and indeed when he does will be silently cheered on by quite a few people sitting on the Labour benches, which is to say any actual opposition Labour "spokespersons" voice to his proposals will come less from a "social conscience" and more from the need to be heard uttering "social concern" sound bites. The welfare system is "bust", the tax system is "bust" and the jobs market is "bust", and no surprise at all really that the focus is on fixing the "welfare system" first in the belief, hope, well actually mainly for PR reasons, assertion, that fixing that will mean the other 2 problems somehow fix themselves, or indeed prove not to be bust at all ! Just goes to show what levels of blue skies thinking the UK is blessed with in the 21st century, and the value of having so many political positions filled by people with double firsts from Oxbridge advised by SpAds with double firsts from Oxbridge whose real life experience is entirely gleaned from the PPE courses they undertook - supplemented by an MBA, preferably an American one ...
4) Great news for fakeprivatecompanies!
Yup. If you want to keep your benefits, you have to sign up for FakePrivateCompany's WasteOfTime programme.
Once you've signed up, if you then get a job that you would have been employed for anyway with your skills, FakePrivateCompany gets a nice fat commission.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/14/one-size-fits-all-approach-jobseekers
JT, exactly.
If the meddlers just pissed off and left well alone, then proper private employers would soon work out how best to harness people's skills (however modest they may be), i.e. instead of creating a raft of meaningless and distortionary payments-by-results nonsense, let's reward private employers for employing people by, er, cutting Employer's NI by a couple of per cent?
It's just C21st jobbery : in the C18th they had sinecures - jobs where the function was obsolete, but the publicly funded salary remained - and now we have fakecharities and fakeprivatecompanies but it's the same game, politicians rewarding their friends by dishing out taxpayers' money. At least in the C18th no-one else's life was affected apart from the recipient of the largesse.
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