to think its not that benefits are too HIGH, its that the minimum / average wage is too LOW.

[MistyMountainHop]

inspired by a load of recent threads about benefits (which may or may not be bullshit a bit of a stretching of the truth) and lots of mnetters (and a lot of the general public) up in arms about people choosing to be on benefits rather than work and that benefits are too high

well i think that the average wage is too LOW and vastly disproportionate to the cost of living. when people can "earn" more for NOT going to work than they can working then something is badly wrong. and i have been on benefits (single parent) abou 5 years ago and its SHIT. me and dc were POOR. i certainly didnt have this fictitious daily-mail benefits lifestyle with lots of spare cash, luxuries etc. hell no. i had enough to cover my rent and bills with a bit of change to feed me and dc. but if i had have worked at that time i would have probably only managed to get a minimum wage job which would have been pretty much the same as what i was receiving anyway. so shoot me, i decided i didn't want to work because it just wasnt worth it. (disclaimer for any dm readers: i do work now and have done for a while and now married and dh works too so no benefits apart from a little bit of tcs)

i know people on min or very low wage get "topped up" with tax credits and all that shit etc but IMO there is something really wrong with the world when people can work full time and still need financial help from the government to pay their rent and bills.

so surely in the final analysis its not that benefits pay too much, its that employment pays too little?

i am not very good at getting my point across so i hope this makes sense! but this was just something me and my friends were having a drunken conversation about at the weekend. and thought i would put it to the aibu jury :o

YADNBU to want or deserve more ££, but if you increase the minimum wage, cast-strapped employers will respond by making less positions available, so there would be just as much poverty as before iykwim. It's about balance imho.

YANBU. House prices are also too high. I bought my first (and only) house on a starter-teacher's salary alone for £33k and it was bigger than I needed. Sold it for more than double that after only six years.

I would need a mortgage loan seven times my salary to get a similar house no

Governments are always propping-up big-business. Workfare, for example. If Tesco or Poundland have jobs available, why force someone to work for their JSA when they could be on a decent wage and paying tax?

I TOTALLY agree with you OP, YANBU. Minimum wage is set at a level that is BELOW what is needed to live off in our country today. Which is why it is necessary to pay Tax Credits to low-income earners. Therefore Tax Credits are a Business Subsidy allowing that business or employer to get labour for less money than that worker requires to cover their basic living costs. Which will be a moot point soon (Hence the cuts to TC's that are coming in April) due to Workfare meaning that businesses will no longer need the Government to pay this subsidy to their workers, as they will be made to work for their benefit money through workfare. Thus undercutting the minimum wage. Why would an employer pay someone £6.09 an hour when they can get someone to do the work for nothing? AND they get PAID to take on the free labour.

What's not to love if you are an employer? It's shit if you are the worker, but brilliant if you are the boss...

In-work poverty has been the scourge of this nation for generations; but the recent shortage of afforable housing has made it a modern crisis affecting millions.

HUNTY! Nice to see you

It is simply untrue that benefits in the UK are high in comparison to wages, they are much higher in the rest of Europe: www.consent.me.uk/calculator/

Would previous posters care to join me in forming the provisional central committee of the Popular Democratic Republic (provisional cc until elections, or it wouldn't be democratic)
Policy 1 - massive council house building programme, builders paid living wage inc training period
Your votes please? Sorry, secret ballot unavailable

Minimum wage is set at a level that is BELOW what is needed to live off in our country today. Which is why it is necessary to pay Tax Credits to low-income earners. Therefore Tax Credits are a Business Subsidy allowing that business or employer to get labour for less money than that worker requires to cover their basic living costs

^ this is what i was trying to say, a lot bit less articulately!

i shouldnt comment on thia subject, it makes me so cross.

yes min wage is far too low.

universal credit will be fun ....not

Minimum wage is too low, but it shouldn't be (and shouldn't need to be topped up). Costs of housing and transport are much much too high.

YANBU

It particularly sickens me that Tesco and the other big supermarkets can make huge profits while their full-time staff with families have to have help from the tax payer to keep body and soul together.

YANBU

I was thinking something along these lines the other day.

I had rather naively assumed that tax credits were simply a tax break for people on low income, I had no idea that people in receipt of them ended up with more than their gross income. I am fairly angry about this because the government are essentially creating an economic situation whereby companies do not have to pay people a living wage by creating what is essentially a large scale subsidy for business.

YANBU

Housing, childcare and transport costs are far too expensive in UK.

The welfare state was designed as a safety net for the most desperate, not to bridge the gap between earnings and household costs.

I agree, though I think NMW would be liveable on if housing costs and travel wasn't so ludicrously expensive.

I read somewhere once that to be considered affordable housing costs should take up no more than 25% of your income. Given that even a room in a shared house will cost you £300pcm, that's anyone on minimum wage effectively priced out.

I work within 30mins drive of my home (the average commute in the UK is 45mins). It still costs me £160 in fuel just to go back and forth to work each month, which doesn't include driving to the CM to pick up the DC or doing anything else. I spend more on getting to work than I do feeding the three of us in my family, and that's just barmy. And what's worse is that my situation is better than many.

If housing and travel take up 75%+ of your income, how are you supposed to live? Just paying for domestic fuel would wipe out the rest, let alone paying for food or anything else that makes life more than simply existing.

mw is far too low, house prices and rents are too high and not enough social housing and anyone working more than 20 hours a week shoud not need to receive extra money. most companies especially those that employ many p/t can afford to pay more adn help shoudl be given to smaller companies that would struggle

It particularly sickens me that Tesco and the other big supermarkets can make huge profits while their full-time staff with families have to have help from the tax payer to keep body and soul together.

It's not just these companies, CEOs now earn 120 times the amount that the average workers do in their firms, up from 47 times in 1998 source

To put it simply they are taking the piss, and no one in power has the balls to stop them. A law I would like to see introduced is a cap on the amount the CEO can earn in relation to employees (including all remuneration items such as share options). This still gives them an incentive to do well but stops them exploiting the workforce who basically earn their living for them.

How much does all the admin (inc IT system maintenance, admin wages, fraud investigators, postage and form printing) cost for tax credits? I don't understand why they take tax off low income earners - only to give it back to them in the form of tax credits?

The money saved from this could be spent on ensuring 20,000 pensioners don't die of the cold each winter in a so-called "developed" nation. Or re-employing those tax credit admin bods as carers so people are fed in hospital etc.

Effectively decent, hardworking productive members of society are forced to "beg" for their own fooking money on a daily basis!!!!

It seems more efficient and just well, SIMPLER to allow everyone to keep the first £20K of their earnings before applying any tax or NI at all.

An extra tax allowance of say £2.5k per child and the whole nation would feel better off. Over time there would be less need to import immigrant labour to overcome our own falling birth rate. Traditional families would feel supported while lone parents wouldn't feel penalised.

A higher base tax allowance would probably also help the sme's hire staff by reducing payroll expenses. This is the sector we depend on for economic recovery.

The beuracrats are tying this country in very expensive knots and we let them!

Welfare has become far too expensive in this country - that's gov handouts to huge corporations like the banks (biggest 419 scam in history), tax credits to the low paid & now welfare to work schemes where instead of companies paying workers the government pays the companies! That's before we get to corporate tax avoidance tricks or a new £60m yacht for the Queen etc.

Me and my DH where talking about this last night and it is stupid! They need to up the NMW or city by city CAP house rents so those citys where people earn less a family 3bedhouse rent would be say what £450 (random figure pulled out my bum tbh) but in say london where the wages are alot lot higher a 3bedhouse should rent out for say £800 (I know someone who rents out a 2bed flat for £900 eek)..

Althouh I guess the house cap would be better than upping the NMW since if you upped that people would just up rent prices ahh

Agree that house prices are too high. It annoys me so much when newspapers are all "OH NO! HOUSE PRICES FELL SLIGHTLY! WHAT A DISASTER." Falling house prices is good for anyone with no house, or a tiny house and a growing family.

I'm on benefits as I'm a Carer, i get 53p per hour.

I do think you have a point, minimum wage is too low but not all benefits are too high. I am unable to work due to my 2 sons disability, I am however entitled to carers allowance which is the grand total of £55.55 per week. CA can be topped up with earnings but that is capped at £100 per week. If the government where to pay someone to do the extra caring my sons need it would cost them around £9 per hour.

keepingupwiththejoneses the benefits I'm annoyed about are those that are paid to people who are working to get them to a living wage, I'm of the opinion that it is the business employing them that should be paying them enough to live on rather than it being the responsibility of the state to provide top ups. Maybe if this wasn't the case there would be more in the pot for carers and those unable to work through disability etc.

I understand where you are coming from but you did just say benefits. Large companies that make massive profits should be paying their employs a much higher wage, instead of paying them the minimum possible. The Tesco near here opened about 12 months ago and made a big deal of the fact they where working with the local job centre to make sure they gave priority to long term unemployed. In the end it turned out that 90% of the people they employed where under 21 meaning they could pay them even less. Total joke! A friend of mine had been unemployed for a few years, although she has done numerous training courses, without them forcing her to, she was turned down for a job even though she had experience but her son who had no experience was given a job, he was 17 at the time.

bochead - not taxing wouldnt work as a lot of people on tcs get substantinally more in tax credits than they pay in tax.