Here's a list of the main benefits and how many million claim each.
The categories overlap to some extent (some pensioners still do paid work, lower paid employees get WTC etc). The total number of claimants/recipients must be less than the total UK population, not more! And clearly there must be a million or two people who get nothing, but I struggle to think who they might be or why they are singled out.
The cash value of most of the working age benefits to one individual is in the order of £3,000 - £4,000 per year (transferable personal allowance is a lot less, SM/PP is much more, but for a shorter period, disability-related payments are much higher but those would be in addition to UBI, that's a job for the NHS not the DWP). Each has its own rules, rates and allowances, but they all come to the same thing. Seriously, why do they keep up the pretence, apart from creating jobs for civil servants?
Click to enlarge.
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9 comments:
It's astonishing that so many more people get the State Pension than Child Benefit. The former is a moral imperative but we get very little return on investment on it. The latter pays for itself many times over as it produces millions of healthy taxpayers. The sad reality is that only 85% of people get the State Pension anyway as 15% die before reaching pension age. Compare to 100% of people who get Child Benefit (except if they are in the growing proportion of those with at least one parent on £50k+)
M, the child benefit figure is my estimate, I couldn't be bothered to look it up.
M, I've looked it up, it's actually 12.7 million children.
Mrs L and I are living proof of how UBI will - and does - work. We each have State pension. I go to work every day to run my business. I am not in any way 'dis-incentivised' from working. So that scotch's Tory arguments that UBI will create idleness.
I also obviously score the Personal Allowance of 12.5K. The lunacy is that my income tax bill takes all that away...
L, agreed. Broadly speaking, your state pension uses up (mot of) your tax free personal allowance. Which is fine, common sense says people shouldn't get a UBI and a tax free personal allowance. It's one or t'other.
mot = most
MW. Yep. But. If IT was largely scrapped and replaced by LVT that would be even better. Our State Pensions would then pay the higher land location charges. Quite happy with that.
L, yes of course, but I have to promote UBI to non-land value taxers (sadly, a majority of people).
In a perfect world, HMRC would net off your UBI and LVT bill to a single figure and either pay/collect the difference in cash; or collect it via PAYE (if you owe more LVT than you get UBI) or adjust your personal allowance up (if you owe less LVT than you get UBI, the govt collects less income tax from you to balance).
It's all perfectly do-able within the PAYE system and nobody would really notice.
"So that scotch's Tory arguments that UBI will create idleness."
Tories argue that an unearned income would create idleness because so many of them either have an unearned income from inheritance or as landlords or would like to be in that position where they can be idle if they want to be or continue to work if they enjoy working or making money. They cannot conceive that the majority of the less well of would choose continuing to do the jobs they do, if they could be idle instead, and given the sort of work involved they may be right. Ultimately, the problem of a UBI from a right-wing perspective is that it severely limits the ability of employers to get workers to do shitty jobs for little pay.
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