Giving unemployed Britons “new hope and responsibility” by Cameron

[The Spartan]

yep just need to find a way to stop people being paid for watching Oprah and making babies really

Good luck with that one

[minestrone]

Getting house prices and rents out of whack was most damaging, back in the late 90s you could trundle along in a low paid job and make ends meet. You have to think that in work benefits contributed to the rise.

[The Spartan]

The reality is that makes up a tiny part of the welfare budget, perhaps a maximum of ten billions (a very generous estimtae as that's about half of all JSA and HB) out of nearly 150. By all means crack down and save that money, it seems perfectly reasonable to do so, but if you think it will solve the problems you need to invest in a calculator and a copy of "sums for dummies"

I agree and furthermore no one really mentions how big the pension liabilities blackhole is, frightening by all accounts.

[original PM]

Good luck with that one

stop giving them money - they will starve

problem solved!

(probably not though)

[The Spartan]

stop giving them money - they will starve

problem solved!

(probably not though)

Anecdotes aside I went to see my Mother-in-law recently she lives where I grew up and from what I saw driving there nothing has changed one bit and things are even worse now in terms of the entitlement culture

[VectraMan]

Also, "click on image to embiggen"

It's a perfectly cromulant word.

It's insane that working people also get benefits and proves that there's something fundamentally wrong with our economy. But it's not that minimum wage needs to rise; it's that the cost of living needs to fall and the biggest problem with the cost of living isn't electricity or gas or food, it's housing costs. I wonder if what we need is a dose of rent control. A bit of a crazy socialist policy but it's got to be better than councils paying whatever landlords want to charge and ever spiraling housing benefit costs. Also it'd stop BTL'ers pricing everybody out of the property market.

[doodab]

Getting house prices and rents out of whack was most damaging, back in the late 90s you could trundle along in a low paid job and make ends meet. You have to think that in work benefits contributed to the rise.

Housing benefit has certainly distorted the rental market. Perhaps they should be taking a harder look at that. The trouble is of course that reducing it considerably will have a knock on effect on house prices and no government wants to cause that.

[original PM]

Anecdotes aside I went to see my Mother-in-law recently she lives where I grew up and from what I saw driving there nothing has changed one bit and things are even worse now in terms of the entitlement culture

It is not so much entitlement as it is the fact that for some reason there is a culture of people who think that if they have a problem of any sort then there is someone somewhere whose job it is to solve it and thus you just need to pick up the phone and someone somewhere will solve the problem.

You saw it a lot in the floods recently - -

"My house flooded last year- - it has flooded again this year no one has done anything about it'

So my question is what did you do about it? Why is it always the job of someone else to do something about it?

That is the culture that the UK cannot afford

[doodab]

It's a perfectly cromulant word.

It's insane that working people also get benefits and proves that there's something fundamentally wrong with our economy. But it's not that minimum wage needs to rise; it's that the cost of living needs to fall and the biggest problem with the cost of living isn't electricity or gas or food, it's housing costs. I wonder if what we need is a dose of rent control. A bit of a crazy socialist policy but it's got to be better than councils paying whatever landlords want to charge and ever spiraling housing benefit costs. Also it'd stop BTL'ers pricing everybody out of the property market.

I'd agree, as a proportion of income housing costs are far higher here than somewhere like Germany. I lived in one of the more expensive cities and paid €900 a month through a specialist agency for a short term lease on a one bed flat, it would have been more like €550 on the open market, less than 10% of my post tax income.In London I'd pay more like 20% of my post tax income to live in zone 3 or around 40% for a place in zone 1.

That's the problem with a free market, it doesn't always do what you'd like it to, especially when global forces come into play. I think particularly in London and the SE the influx of foreign investment and BTL more generally has distorted house prices, and the general shortage of housing means many lower earners are simply priced out of anywhere except the slums, even with housing benefit.

Councils don't pay whatever landlords want to charge however, it's assessed and limited, so a family of 4 with two young kids for example is considered to need a 2 bed flat, and each area has a scale of the maximum it will pay for such a property. Around my way that's about £3-400 less than the market rate for a 2 bed flat at the lower end of meeting the minimum standard you'd actually want to live in, and about half what I pay for my family home.

[original PM]

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ZG for President!

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