From The Evening Standard:
Britain's 120,000 greediest families are costing the economy well over £8 billion a year, the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said today.
Unveiling plans to turn around their lives, Mr Pickles said the "silo approach" by some of the 20 local agencies dealing with the problems caused by bonus-hungry bankers, subsidised landowners, private landlords, estate agents, house price speculators and NIMBYs, as well as quangocrats generally, meant that it was costing up to £330,000 per household.
He told town hall chiefs that by spending £14,000 on helping every such layabout into productive employment, the state could save £70,000 per household.
"Look at it this way," he added "Paying an unemployed family £25,000 a year to sit around and watch television seems like a waste of taxpayers' money, but it's still a lot better value than the £1 million-plus annual bonuses being paid to the people running state-owned banks like RBS."
A grim document
5 hours ago
14 comments:
I am surprised you haven't picked up on this news item highlighting yet more "me me me" antics by another special interest sector which ultimately "costs" UK society quite a bit ....
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23999214-skiving-mps-want-another-holiday.do
Anon, good point, let's add them to the list.
How about immediately stopping child benefit after 2 kids? How about giving them tokens that can only be spent on food? Not 50 inch plasma TVS?
TSO, in the MW manifesto it says child benefit for first three kids only (but education vouchers for all kids).
The tokens idea is nonsense, because those people who are determined to spend the money on 'other stuff' will just sell the tokens at a discount to face value in order to pay for 'other stuff', making their children, in relative terms, even worse off.
Next question.
MW already covered it but food stamps in the USA cost twice as much as direct cash benefits for the same nutritional outcomes among eligible families.
Actually MW I think "thespecialone" has a very good point there - but rather than just limit the use of "food tokens" to "problem families with children" let us extend it so it becomes the universal form of "welfare benefit payment" and replaces all the existing cash benefits - old age pensions, all child benefits, working and pension tax credits, the whole lot.
I should think that after the first week of that the national uproar against "tokens" (and in particular how no matter how clever you try to be you always end of with "food items" below the supposed value of the tokens [it might even provoke the appearance of dual pricing - "Bread £1 for cash, £1.25 for tokens to cover administrative costs to this shop of accepting them"]) should see this "wizard and simple solution", stuck in a tin box and buried 100 feet below the ground for good ...
RA, thanks, as ever. It all reminds me a bit of ration books and Co-op stamps.
Anon, exactly, if something doesn't work on a practical, administrative level, then it can't possibly work in theory either. Which saves us the bother about having to worry and argue about lofty theories. Pragmatarianism in a nutshell.
"It all reminds me a bit of ration books and Co-op stamps."
I am sure there are a lot of bureaucrats who'd love to bring back food rationing - the control! oh, the control!
It's very much in the pipeline, the food rationing - vouchers are being given out already. It will expand before it stops.
B, JH, oh Crikey, the bansturbulary would love to have rationing, that way they can 'encourage healthier lifestyles and relieve the burden on the NHS'.
Why f- about with 'minimum alcohol pricing' and 'fat taxes' when you can just give each household a butter voucher for no more than half a pound of butter a week, and a booze voucher for entitling each man to purchase no more than 20 units of alcohol a week, or 15 for a woman (or whatever these insane limits are). They'd be doing a roaring trade selling these down at the mosque, wouldn't they?
Any twit knows the more people, the more wages. Why are you limiting it to 3 kids? If good for 3 its good for 20.
Wage fund theory perhaps?
Flame on. . .
More Muslim racism there too. The irrational fear that immigrants will take from a limited wage fund rather than add to it.
RS: "Why are you limiting it to 3 kids?"
Ask yourself: what is the biggest cost in deciding to start a family and having kids? Then the answer is clear.
"More Muslim racism there too"
What are you talking about? I think that to sell for a few quid something that cost you nothing and is worthless to you shows good business sense. Muslims are supposed to abstain from alcohol, they don't have to try and get the infidels to abstain too.
(BTW, Islam is a religion, not an ethnicity, so slurs on Muslims cannot, de facto, be racist. Vile and undesireable perhaps, but racist, no.)
Roughly £66,666 per family. By comparison each new civi8l servant seems to add £100,000 to bufgets. There are moral reasons not to give to much money to the undeserving poor but finacially we can suirvive genuine welfarism far better than we can survive ever growing government bureaucratic parasitis,
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