Fun Online Polls: Jimmy Carr and David Cameron's welfare reform proposals

On a good turnout after half a week, thanks to everyone who took part, the results to last week's Fun Online Poll are as follows:

What do you think of the Jimmy Carr situation? Multiple answers allowed.

* Fair play. In his position I'd have done the same - 57 votes
* It's yet another argument for replacing taxes on earned income with Land Value Tax - 39 votes
* He'll come unstuck and in the end only accountants and lawyers will have won out - 22 votes
* What he's doing is immoral. He should pay much more in tax - 5 votes
* Other, please specify - 6 votes

All the answers were in fact correct, being personal opinion as much as anything, it's just that some are more correct than others (any opinion or argument based on the word "should" is usually nonsense).

The best 'other' was from Adam Collyer: "Other: it's incredibly boring and I wish the papers would stop wasting space on it and let HMRC get on with chasing him (or not)"
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The most concise summary of Cameron's welfare reform speech was in the Evening Standard.

A proper reform of the welfare system would indeed include some of the things he suggested, but his intention is to make things worse not better.

* By all means have a cap on Housing Benefit, or even better, scrap Housing Benefit for private landlords entirely and stick that £9 billion a year into building more social housing, that's enough to build 150,000 units a year or something, as long as they can rent them out for half the national average rent (i.e. about £80 - £100 a week), it would be self-financing. But that's not how he meant it - with the other hand, he wants to sell off council housing.

* As an interim measure, by all means have a cap on housing benefit. £20,000 looks far too generous to me, but as we know, this would disproportionately affect claimants in London. But 'regional benefit levels' would unduly benefit claimants in London. Far better to give all claimants anywhere in the country the same amount in cash (quite how much is a separate topic) and let them decide themselves how to spend it. So - fraud, error and administrative hassle notwithstanding - the two ideas completely cancel out.

* "Curbs on benefits for large families" is on the face of it a good idea, I've always supported the idea of scrapping Child Tax Credits and making Child Benefit more generous but for the first three children only (cue cries of: Why should the taxpayer fund other people's lifestyle choices?, heard it). The point is that the basic dole is very stingy but Child Tax Credits + Child Benefits are overly generous, so there is an incentive for no-income people to have lots of kids. If they made the basic dole more generous and at the same time reduced child welfare, then the incentive is removed, hey ho, problem solved.

* Offering maths and English lessons to people who are out of work seems like a very sensible idea, but why make it a pre-condition for receiving benefits? Education is a good thing in and of itself, but people have to want to learn. I'd happily give remedial maths lessons for the innumerate who want to learn, but where's the fun in trying to teach a room full of people who don't want to be there?

And so on and so forth. One write-up even said that he proposed replacing cash benefits with vouchers, which just leads to yet more fraud and distortion (shops would just put up their prices and offer discounts for payment in cash). But Cameron has just hastily cobbled together a list of "Things which he read in the comments at the Daily Mailexpressgraph" and left it at that, there's no intellectual coherence to any of his dribblings.

But let's see what the audience says.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar, multiple votes allowed.