Asquith on Universal Benefits

Just to get the crowd warmed up for my next post on welfare reform, I'll take the liberty of cutting and pasting the excellent comment which Asquith left on The Nameless Libertarian's post on cutting welfare fraud:

Reduce means-testing to a minimum for reasons that I cannot be arsed to articulate as I had a big dinner & we all know already.

As many benefits as possible should be universal, it may be silly that well-off old c***s still get a pension but there's a lot worse in this world than silliness, such as the state going out of its way to encourage people to do the wrong thing, which is all that means testing is.

They were also right to scale back these maternity grants & means testing child benefit is an especially fucking woeful idea which has hopefully been stamped upon.

I don't especially like the idea of state child support at all as I think having babies is a CHOICE which should only be made by those who are certain they will be able to provide financially, emotionally, & in terms of putting in the work with reading etc. etc. But it exists, & should be universal because the last thing we want is for people to be worried about accepting a pay rise in case they lose their benefits.

In terms of support to children & pensioners, the means test has been malignant. I would be in favour of raising the basic state pension & reducing pension credit, even if this made some people worse off* that would on aggregate be made up for by the encouragement for those who can to save for their own retirement, whereas now & even more so in the recent past it has been a case of discouraging them from doing anything for themselves.

At the time when the income tax threshold was raised (an excellent policy for which I think we have Clegg to thank) c***s objected that it wouldn't benefit the poorest because the poorest don't have jobs. But if it makes it worth their while to work then it f***ing does. This is what c***s don't appreciate, that the government doesn't have to be wiping people's arses for it to have a good effect, sometimes it can do less.

I do not support any more state support to "private sector" f***ers whose aim it is to push unemployed & otherwise poor people around. In my view it is a mistake to give taxpayers' money to all these "private sector" f***ers, which the last government did, but so did its Tory predecessors.

A mate of mine has never had a job & is often sent on waste of time courses. I'd rather pay for his benefits than for the sort of twat who is employed on these make-work schemes & trousers £20-30,000 a year for doing nothing of any worth.

I don't vilify people on benefits if they are just people who haven't got jobs, or are disabled. They only become reprehensible if the go on to have kids that they have no means of supporting, & will grow up without a half-decent upbringing.

PS- I know this is long but I got pissed off in the course of writing so I randomly went on.

* That's the only bit I'd disagree with. IMHO we ought to merge the Basic State Pension (a miserly £98 per week for a single pensioner and based on contributions, but at least non-means tested) and the Pensions Credit (a more generous £130 per week and non-contributory, but savagely means-tested) into a least-bad-of-both-worlds flat rate, non-contributory, non-means tested Citizen's Pension.