Unemployed earning more than working households

Certainly not at the point of delivery, unlike earnings.

The tax on JSA will be paid (if paid at all) only when and if the recipient moves off the benefit and into work. In some cases, that will never happen.

No reason at all, physically.

But it would be disingenuous to directly compare the positions of (a) a 55 yr old retired police officer in receipt of a significant occupational pension (yes, we all know he has paid through the nose for it) and (b) a 55 yr old redundant manual, office or shop worker who is not in receipt of a pension.

Mr B would have to be relatively choosy about a full time job (especially if he still has a mortgage to pay, as there is no in-work support available for mortgages). He would have to choose a job where the pay met all his commitments or one which would allow him access to the range of in-work benefits available to those in work. He wouldn't have a pension to pay the bulk of his outgoings, would he?

It makes the difference about how careful we are of turning on the heating

...but not to the question of whether you are entitled to the payment.

When one has an alternative source of income one can take any job without worrying whether it will pay the mortgage/fuel/council tax/water/food/transport/medical bills

I agree with all of that - although you appear to be confirming my opinion that the benefits system is a disincentive to work for many people. Also, although I chose the grocery delivery job as an illustration, there are plenty of police officers who move on into jobs earning as much, if not more, as they did as police officers.

Ret.

True - but as I have pointed out elsewhere, not all police officers move onto into jobs for pin money. The majority move into jobs that are well paid. The jobs *are* there!

Ret.

I don't disagree with that basic position and have never said that I do.

The single most visible and telling aspect of how welfare provision has affected behaviour is to do with eupemistically-named "one parent families", housed in social housing and dependant (at least officially) on social security.

Fifty, or certainly sixty, years ago, the phenomenon hardly existed, except, of course, for widowed families (notably war-widowed families). It would have been difficult to find a single voice to the effect that the situation of such families was in any sense "good".

But today, it exists in... never mind spadefuls... it's in JCB scoopfuls.

I dare say.

Yes - sadly all very true.

Ret.

Certainly. If benefits were paid to people getting minimum wage, it would achieve the same thing surely?

My firm does not use agency, we hire on a temp. basis to assess over 3 month. If the worker is no good, then byebye. Agencies supply random jobs along with random hours, I know this. Very few agencies have links with certain companies. and very few companies take on except to replace people who leave. The previous poster is quite obviously correct, there are too few jobs for too many people.

There may be now, because of the credit crunch - but that has not been the case for the past few years while the East Europeans have been flooding in to fill the vacancies that the Brits did not want. What about plumbing? There is always a need for plumbers and even if you can get one to respond to your answer-phone message - he wont be available for two weeks. It's a highly paid job - so people should go and get the training. You don't need to be an intellectual to solder pipes - and as most modern plumbing systems involve push-fit plastics, you don't even need to do that anymore!!

Ret.

Which wasn't anything asked or claimed

Only if qualified

Picture this in your mind

Heard outside Aldershot Job Centre a week before xmas one young girl just out from behind her school desk (if she ever went there) with a "very" young baby in a buggy, she was sharing a cigarette with a youth while another youth stand's there talking with them, one youth said to her those bastards just had a pop at me coz i didnt turn up for my appointment yesterday, second youth said why not, first youth said coz i was helping a mate rebuild his car engine we need it for the weekend to go clubin in pompey, the young girl said me and my sis could come coz we got f*** all to do so it would be cool, one youth said wot about the kid where you gonna park it, no probs there my mum will ave it, other youth said c'mon i'm pissed of wiv this place let's f*** off down the caff

Well i ask you with no employment where do they get money from to own a car, buy the spares to fix the car, fuel tax and insure a car, smoke, go down the "caff" and go "clubin" about 40 miles away tha't a total of 80 miles at "say" 25 mpg equals apporoximately 15.00 worth of fuel

It amazes me i must have led a very sheltered life as a teenager as i worked and have never drawn dole money or owed any money other than agreed amounts of hp which were allways paid on time and in some cases before

Why not scrap the benefit system then, or just rely on NI contributions? In other countries people have to rely on their families and there can be greater social cohesion.

One possible problem could be an increase in crime, because if people were starving they may get desperate. The Victorians had the workhouse to keep the poor out of society, but now maybe a country like Morocco could keep them in camps (segregated so the problem doesn't perpetuate).

Not true. A "Citizen's Income" scheme that replaced most benefits and tax allowances by a flat-rate income comparable with the basic state pension would be pretty-much self-funding. For those on benefits, CI would replace benefits; for standard-rate taxpayers [which is, very broadly, the rest of the population], CI would take the form of an allowance which is clawed back.

Quite so. ...

... No, it's limited to the total cost of CI. In a wealthy household, this is recouped from IT/NI; in a poor household, it replaces the assorted benefits that the household either is or ought to be receiving.

It's not at all like that. The current problem is that you receive benefits only by jumping thought a number of hoops. A few of these hoops are "universal" and virtually free from debate, but many contain grey areas and unfairnesses, which we try to correct not by going back to first principles, nor by applying common sense, but by writing ever more complex rules. These lead to poverty traps, to snoops and jobsworths, and to those who play the system doing better

-- quite legally -- than those who try to behave responsibly. Sweep it away, make CI universal, and all these problems simply disappear.

More important, really, is the change in attitude. Instead of "them and us" -- half of us paying tax so that the other half get benefits --, we get a fair and universal system. Everyone pays tax on their income, everyone gets CI, as part of being in a community. The calls for tax thresholds to be raised so that millions of us can be "taken out of tax" are quite misguided. We should all be in the tax system together. Poverty, unemployment, children, old age and illness -- we don't solve the problems of these by treating sufferers from them as second-class citizens, spongers on the rest of us.

Not in the parts quoted above, that's true.

But didn't you (some posts back) say you were not entitled to the allowance on "income grounds"?

... and your point is?

WM