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The work and pensions secretary has issued a stark warning that some poor people are stubbornly clinging to life despite his best efforts to remove them from the welfare system by killing them off.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Iain Duncan Smith said that people who are poor and alive are much more likely to claim benefits and tax credits than people who are dead.

“The overwhelming majority of people who claim benefits are alive,” he explained.

“This is a situation that we cannot allow to continue.”

“We need to implement a system that encourages people off benefits and into mortuaries.”
Duncan Smith on obituaries

Mr Duncan Smith also lambasted the tax credit system put in place by Labour, describing it as “not fit for purpose”.

“It is not fair that decent hardworking people should have to foot the bill for decent hardworking people,” he said.

“What we need is a fairer system that involves employers paying what they want, being able to sack people when they want and for whatever reason they want.”

“Employers are more likely to create jobs and take on more staff if they can sack them.”

Duncan Smith used numerous pieces of evidence-free evidence in order to highlight how the poorest in society are causing the UK to haemorrhage money quicker than Paul Merson playing Three-card Monte.

“It is important when discussing welfare reforms that I use the word ‘fraud’ as often as possible,” he said.

“It is equally important when discussing tax avoidance and MPs expense claims that I don’t use it at all.”

“That way everyone knows where they stand.”

newsthump.com/2012/12/31/poor-people-still-clinging-to-life-warns-iain-duncan-smith/

Can MPs be sacked?

That is a spoof news site.

It'd be funny if it wasn't true....

D'ya think Zebra...?

Also - did you win the Christmas name comp, tethers, for jingle bellend?

Nice work

Is it really a spoof, do you really think so? Hrm.

Not even a nomination, Sleighbells. Gutted. It's almost like MNHQ don't realise how important I am.

This makes me so sad. Even if it is a spoof, this is what is happening in 2012 / 2013 in Britain

This, on the other hand, is not a spoof:

Iain Duncan Smith: Monster of the Year 2012

Some people just don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.

It seems Iain Duncan Smith, the creature whose Department for Work and Pensions launched an ethnic cleansing programme (in all but name) against the sick and disabled in 2011 and 2012, has now turned his baleful glare on the working poor.

Tax credits – the system devised by the last Labour government to try to relieve poverty for people who work but receive low payment – has created “a sorry story of dependency, wasted taxpayers’ money and fraud”, according to the Immoral Delusional Sadist.

Let’s remember that this is the man who is using recorded fraud of 0.4 per cent, among sickness and disability claimants, to force at least 20 per cent of them off benefits altogether. His understanding of the extent of fraud is, well, flawed.

Let’s also remember that his planned replacement for tax credits – the Universal Credit – is already far over budget and still far from ready, despite pilot projects being scheduled to start in April. Its expected national roll-out in October may be put back to 2014. This man knows how to waste taxpayers’ money with the best of them!

As for tax credits creating dependency – this is the only part of his argument that could possibly be justifiable, and even then it is only because of government laxness regarding pay. If the national minimum wage had risen in line with company bosses’ average pay, it would currently stand at more than £18 per hour – three times its actual current level. That should explain everything you need to know about why low-paid workers may be dependent on tax credits to survive.

Tax credits – and other state top-ups for the working poor, like housing benefit and the soon-to-disappear Council Tax benefit – are only paid in high amounts because they subsidise employers who refuse to pay a living wage. If the private sector paid working people what they are worth, the benefits bill would drop like a stone.

The Insidious Dole Snatcher is currently leading an overhaul of the welfare system that will see a number of benefits replaced by a new universal credit that is designed, he says, “to make work pay at each and every hour”. He keeps saying this. I don’t understand why. Cutting benefits to less than what people are paid at work won’t “make work pay” – it’ll throw more and more people into poverty, debt and destitution.

But this is a creature who is determined to do his worst – actually refusing to be moved from Work and Pensions in David Cameron’s autumn reshuffle in order to continue inflicting his wrath on the defenceless poor.

The latest attack on the unemployed is the Universal Jobmatch computer system. Jobseekers are coerced into signing up (they don’t have to) and into ticking a box which allows Job Centre Plus staff to view their activities and pass their personal details on to possible employers (again, this is not a legal requirement). Advertisers on the site have, so far, included identity thieves and pimps.

Obviously, if you don’t have a computer – and many claimants don’t because, in case you’ve missed it, they’re poor – this system is impossible to use.

That’s not good enough for the Irrational Debt Starter. Under a headline that stated “Log on or stop signing on”, he told Metro: “I’m a job adviser and I’ve got someone who doesn’t want to do this. I will haul them in a lot. Instead of them going in every two weeks, these job advisers can bring them in every day if they want, if they think they are not getting out of bed in the morning.”

If the adviser does not believe the claimant is looking for work, their benefits will be withdrawn, he added.

In other words, not owning a computer is not, in this lunatic’s world, a good enough reason not to use a computerised jobsearch system.

I wasn’t going to do an ‘end-of-year awards’ feature but it is for the above reasons that Mr Smith takes the biscuit – ahead of other heavyweight contenders like Andrew Lansley (ruined the English NHS), George Osborne (expenses cheat, continuing to ruin the national economy), Maria Miller (expenses cheat, threw disabled people out of work by closing Remploy factories), Michael Gove (ruining our education system), Jeremy Hunt (too close to certain media barons) and of course David Cameron (living embodiment of dishonest with an embarrassing combover to boot) – to take the title.

Smith – YOU are Vox Political’s Monster of the Year!

https://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/iain-duncan-smith-monster-of-the-year-2012/

I think IDS is quite right about the Tax Credit problem. Badly thought through when it was introduced, open to abuse, bribing the wealthy rather than supporting the poor, keeping wages artificially low, impossible for a layman to check if the awards are right or wrong resulting in terrible anxiety when refunds are demanded and .... especially criminally for a Labour government to engineer this.... keeping good people down and dependent, knowing their place, rather than helping them advance and be more independent.

Zebra ...!

Very funny, Cogito.

Cogito, where do you get this stuff from? The same spoof website?

News thump is pretty good. As is the Daily Mash. Must be hard for them though when the government of the day's actions are beyond parody

Cogito DH and I would be stuffed without CTC. we are OAP's and have 2 DC's age 7 &14 with complex needs

If the politicians keep talking about the scrounging workshy poor who have nothing and live in an area with no jobs anyway then we may all forget about those billionaires and companys that have off shore accounts and dont pay any corporation tax in this country.

cogito, do you really think that if tax credits disappeared tomorrow, wages would actually rise in any meaningful way? (factor into your calculations the current unemployment rate, and of course workfare...)

We may forget about the bill for terrorists and criminals legal aid, we may forget about mp,s allowances for two homes and all the rest they get given, we may forget about the bankers and banks cos thanks to them no one can easily get a mortgage anymore even though it wasnt homeowners that got the country into debt. So lets all blame the poor, those little parasites that have nothing in a country that didnt educate them properly, and take their stuff away.

'do you really think that if tax credits disappeared tomorrow, wages would actually rise in any meaningful way?'

The fact that they argue this tosh shows that they don't understand the market system or pretend that they don't understand the market system. Employers are not charities, they will on the whole employ people at the minimum level that they can do so.

'keeping good people down and dependent, knowing their place, rather than helping them advance and be more independent'

that really means cutting benefits, "liberating" people and making them accept less.

Sorry. just thought, you know, if anyone thought it was real...

' we may all forget about those billionaires and companys '

crypes, that's what they hope we will do, but it won't work. They are millionaires and had all the advantages so they were never in the same boat as the rest of us, which is why they can so easily forget about us. But we are all in the same boat to a greater or lesser degree and we will identify with the people and not the millionaires.

When we read of elderly people dying in hospitals of dehydration and poor quality care and when we read that 60000 people have been put on death "pathway" without being told, we know that that may possibly end up as our fate or our relatives' fate, but it won't be the fate of the millionaires who are not in our boat.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255054/60-000-patients-death-pathway-told-minister-says-controversial-end-life-plan-fantastic.html

They want us to think that we are all in it together with them - the millionaires. They want to "liberate" us and stop us being "held back". But we all know that they are lying.

'Anti-euthanasia group said: ‘The Pathway is designed to finish people off double quick'

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255054/60-000-patients-death-pathway-told-minister-says-controversial-end-life-plan-fantastic.html

That quote sounds like it could be something out of newsthump or another spoof site, but unfortunately it is a real quote.