Where's my blood pressure tablets?

[cromwell]

I would agree with the limit on child benefit.
One stat I remember is that the govt gets around £150 billion from income tax, but are paying out £207 billion in welfare.
So I don't see how that can go on.

[Workingman]

One stat I remember is that the govt gets around £150 billion from income tax, but are paying out £207 billion in welfare.

But don't forget that most of the money goes on CB, working tax credits and all sorts of other top-ups for working people so that companies do not have to pay a living wage. Only a bit of it goes to 'traditional' benefits scrou... err, claimants.

[cromwell]

That's capitalism for you. The state says if you are on a low wage they will give you some "working benefits" like tax credits.
So employers make sure that people most certainly will be on a low wage.
I remember reading years ago about Bernard Matthews. When some of his workers moaned about their wages he was alleged to have told them to "get it topped up down the social".

We have a big problem in this country that is giving me an idea for a thread, which is that the needs of big business and the needs of a nation state are very often not the same, and this difference is causing a lot of our problems.

[Suff]

One stat I remember is that the govt gets around £150 billion from income tax, but are paying out £207 billion in welfare.

Well you do have to remember that 19.4% of the people paying taxes are already paid by the government in the first place so they are not really tax receipts, more a case of reduced payouts. Personally I feel that counting public employees as tax payers is stupid and just skews the figures and that's not just because of the Austerity, I felt that when I was being paid by the government myself. Although it does give the illusion that government employees are just like everyone else that pay their taxes and contribute to the growth of the economy (public spending is included in the GDP but is not growth).

Paying out more than you get is the epitome of a deficit economy. Every economy runs that way nowadays so we shouldn't worry too much about it for the next hundred years or so. The game is depreciating debt. Note that the UK has gone from around 1% inflation to around 5% inflation. That destroys debt. OK it destroys wealth too in terms of money, but it certainly destroys debt. If the government gets in again, expect inflation to go up to somewhere near 8%. The BOE has already committed to running any level of inflation compatible with getting the UK back on it's feet.

This is what most people should be focusing on but they are not, they keep on focusing on the wrong things because that is what Brown spent 12 years teaching them to do. Not so clever, Brown was an idiot who thought he could lie to the people all of the time....

[miasmum]

Suff if you honestly believe no woman is going to carry on having children if they are taken away from her you are sadly wrong. At work I was filing papers for a woman who has had 5 children taken into care for child protection issues, she is now pregnant with her sixth, because every time she believes this time they will let her keep it.

Plus the care system damages children. Children that are in danger yes, remove them, but not children who belong in loving homes but sadly with misguided mothers.

[cromwell]

Suff if you honestly believe no woman is going to carry on having children if they are taken away from her you are sadly wrong. At work I was filing papers for a woman who has had 5 children taken into care for child protection issues, she is now pregnant with her sixth, because every time she believes this time they will let her keep it.

Plus the care system damages children. Children that are in danger yes, remove them, but not children who belong in loving homes but sadly with misguided mothers.

MM that is so sad. Those poor kids.
"The care system damages children". Those words should be tattooed on the heads of politicians, because you are right. I used to work for a police force and the number of young offenders who had been through the care system was phenomenal. There is a cycle of dysfunctional home / care / crime / benefit dependency going on. The life story of some of these kids is written from the moment they are born.

[Suff]

Yes I understand the downside. But what do you suggest we do to reduce the impact on the country and state finances?

Constantly saying "This won't work because of x, y, z" is not the way forward. We have to DO something and it has to be aimed at the majority, not the exceptions. As it appears that it is now impossible to allow these families to descend into the poverty they create (10 child Victorian families had real poverty), there has to be some way of stopping it.

There ARE much more draconian ways of resolving this issue. Just ask the Chinese. I get the perception I'm some kind of radical for advocating ANY action at all, besides what we are doing today, which is nothing. In the world today there are several different ways of dealing with population growth irresponsibility. China just kills the child before it's born, India lets them live in poverty and squalor, Africa abdicates all responsibility altogether.

Personally I thought the UK was a bright clever society with ideas and innovative ways of solving issues.

Perhaps I was wrong.

[cromwell]

Well either as a country we start earning more money, we start to pay out less money or we just say "To hell with it" and carrying on borrowing money until the roof falls in.
Despite the "savage cuts" government spending is still higher than it was six years ago.

Do we have a chance of improving the country? Maybe not, and I'm being serious.
Depending on where you live this might sound too grim and ridiculous; or it might sound right.
For a couple of generations now we have been producing people who aren't much use for anything. Not many at first, but then they have children, and their children have children, and in the space of a few decades, you have a lot more people who are no use for anything. You can't give them jobs. The idea of a job scares them; it's the unknown. They have never worked and their parents never did either. Besides this they are virtually unemployable. What work can they actually do?

My wife started work as a teacher in the eighties. In those days there were maybe a handful of kids in the school with problems. These days she works in a school only a couple of miles away from her first school, but a million miles away from it in terms of parental income and aspiration. In this school, the children with problems are the ones in the majority.

Welfare spending has to be cut but you have politicians who think that the family has had it's day; the state will provide, whatever happens.
Well, you can't do that. You can't provide for every eventuality for everyone, especially when you don't know how many other people you are going to have to provide for courtesy of immigration.
I don't think the people who set the Welfare state up set it up to cater for the poor of other countries, to cater for the needs of young mums who make a career out of having children, or to buy methadone for heroin addicts, but that's where we are.

We have to have jobs, and more jobs in the private sector.
We have to get people out of the cycle of dependency and into those jobs.
The state has to wind it's neck in; get out of education, stop supplanting the role of parents.
Reduce welfare spending.
No immigrant can become a citizen or claim any benefits for ten years. No NHS treatment unless it's an emergency. Let's have checks on potential immigrants for aids and TB, as well. Where is the sense in letting someone with aids into the country, then paying for their treatment?
Limit child benefit to the first two children
Cap on total amount of benefits paid to anyone. Mick Philpot was getting more money in benefits than he would ever have got from working, this has to stop.

Trouble is, many politicians (and the BBC locally and nationally) would scream about "the most vulnerable in our society" being attacked by the nasty, nasty Tories if welfare spending is reduced. Well, let them scream.

Oh yes, and as a balance let's have the utilities re-nationalised. Tony Blair said there wasn't enough money to do it, but Gordon Brown suddenly found lots of money to bail the banks out. All that profit from energy bills is going straight back to Germany and France; it should be going to our government.

[Suff]

All fairly balanced measures Cromwell. But in the end they do not recognise the society in which we live today.

Today we have a political class who will do anything for a vote, no matter how blatantly wrong or how much it will damage the country in the long run. So many of these solutions are out. Not because of the political classes but because the voters, who have the responsibility to ensure the country is well governed, want to believe what the political classes say.

Unemployed and unemployable are voters.

Now, let's think about that. How about we only give the vote to those who are direct recipients of benefits only. Cue howls of "unfair". I don't mean pensioners with dss topups and I don't mean working tax credits. I mean those who's sole means of support is benefits, those who have absolutely no other recourse.

Now WM is going to slate me for this as I know it impacts him and is absolutely in no way his fault and I think people like WM should be protected. But, think of it this way. There is no incentive for these people to work, it is the unknown, the big fear, how do they survive. Well let's turn it the other way around. If you are on benefits and you have no say in the levels of benefits, or even if you actually get them, then perhaps it would incentivise them to work.

More importantly, the politicians would not have to worry about those who live totally on benefits as they can't change anything for the politicians. Those who DO have an income, however, would have a strong say in where their taxes go....

Radical, certainly. Possible? Well not whilst we're in the EU and the HRA, given that they are insisting that we give the vote to people who have broken the rules of society and incarcerated themselves. But a thought.

Cromwell, you were exactly right when you said that the architects of the social security state did not expect what we have become. I, for one, believe that they would be horrified at what has no happened. Those people believed in a fair wage for a fair days work, in a working society which paid for it's retirement. A working society which put a little away for those who were unfortunate enough to be caught out by recessions and drops in the economy.

In short, "A working society".

Not what we have today. They could not conceive of it. Nothing in their lives or experience could have prepared them for the state of the country today.

Yet we continue with the system they created as if it was designed for this.

The first sign of madness? Looking for hairs on the palm of your hands
The second sign of madness? Finding them
The third sign of madness? Expecting we can borrow forever, to give away and never pay it back!

[Workingman]

Now WM is going to slate me for this...

Not this time. I only do that when I disagree or am playing Devil's Advocate.

Both you and Cromwell make good points and I agree with nearly all of them. We have to do something, but whatever that "something" is it will be unpopular.

The big problem is that governments globally are stuck in the Keynesian mindset where borrowing and credit are good. Brown was a big follower and, so it seems, is Osborne.