to think benefits are a safety net against poverty, not a cushion against an uncomfortable life ?

[TalkinPeace2]

Prompted by a thread where somebody said "DH has lost his job, what benefits are we entitled to?"

Sorry, but its the duty of ALL those on more than average wages (£26k per household) to put money aside for a rainy day.
No wonder the country is up to its eyes in debt if people first think about benefits rather than self reliance.

The benefit system should be to prevent true poverty, no more.

The American system has too many gaps. Most European systems, including that in the UK, provide far too comfortable a cushion, at far too high a cost to the next generation (as historically current over generous benefits have been kicked down the road to be paid for by our children who will never be entitled to such things).

I think OP, if you want serious debate and "intelligent" comments, you should re-phrase your post and put it elsewhere.

You know you have opened with a deliberately inflammatory post. You are goading and yet surprised when you get the reaction you've had.

I don't know anything about your posting history, I can't be arsed to search you but if you are an experienced mumsnetter, you will know tat these sorts of threads come up every couple of days and people get bored of responding to them/bored of the predictability of the responses.

If you are not a regular mumsnetter, you would have no reason to make that post unless you are a troll

Either way, you will not get what you want here, so off you pop, there's a dear.

so they are getting rent and probably having a fair wack of their morgage paid this way

so in my eyes they are buy to let lanlords

why didnt they sell one of them when they got together permanently?????

educated proffesionals possible free uni education as well,yeah sounds well spent

i will save my empathy for those living in substandard,high rent,mw jobs that didnt have the choice to futher educate themselves

Bastard benefit scroungers with their flat screen bendy top of the range surround sound, plasma TVs it's no good, cannot bring myself to give a shit what sort of TV other people have

Well said Crashdoll -funny thing is like with everything in life, you don't no the ins and outs of everything until you have experienced it 1st hand.
I now know from personal experience jsa isn't a fun cushty 'way of life' its actually dull, depressing and quite frankly soul destroying when you see your dh looking so sad, as all his life he has worked full-time and is now sad & depressed to be stuck at home with no hope of a job anytime soon.
Not only that he also misses the social interaction & routine work gave him.

Pumpkin

im joining the rest and getting of this thread

'BTW the global financial crisis was NOT caused by social security spending.'

Why are people so ignorant!

DERIVATIVES are financial structures where loans are bundled up and sold on, so that the BORROWERS could keep them off balance sheet. So those wicked evil banks were in cahoots with BORROWERS to 'hide' levels of debt. [Can you think about what debt can get hidden?]

Now, WHO do you think, BORROWS SO MUCH MONEY that it crashes the whole system?

Here are a few flash cards to subliminally get those little brain cells going Gordon Brown PFI

That's right, the main borrowers are not corporates, but GOVERNMENT.

Why are right-on lefties so unreal, I wonder????? It must be why they are so easy to lie to. 'I have a nice smile, and I really care about you unlike the nasty nasy evil other people like Thatcher and Tebbit who tell you unpleasant truths' - automatic vote for life. Stupid!

And, you know the Euro bullshit crisis at the moment? The ECB injects Euros into the foundering banks of distressed countries - at .5% repayment interest, which money the banks promptly re-lend to GOVERNMENTs like Spain, Portugal, Italy etc. - at over 7%.
Have you ever thought about Quantitive Easing? Do you know what it means?

Where do you think this will end? How do you think this will end? Time to wake up everyone.

Presumably they didn't sell it because they didn't have a Crystal ball, didn't know they'd be stuck with a squatting tenant etc? So it's OK that their kids health can suffer?

This is the reality for the middle class all over the UK just now. And chastising people for not forseeing a recession of this magnitude is both unfair and unhelpful.

Exactly poached, thats the problem if some people had their way all working class & lower class would slowly be left to die in the cold with no food.

The entire West: USA, the whole of Europe except Germany, and unfortunately for Britain the stupidity of voters in choosing Labour, has for the last 15 years gone on a cheap credit spending splurge the like of which has never been seen before.

The global financial crisis has been caused by GOVERNMENTS which are the only entities that can absorb that amount of money on credit. Mostly, to pay for the social security promises they gave to their voters.

So you can trash her, get emotional and call her evil into question all you like, but the originator asks a very pertinent question and you are all going to have to face it one way or another, in time.

WHOEVER you vote for. I am serious. The West cannot sustain or afford the welfare system and it will be undermined/run down/done away with.

so in my eyes they are buy to let landlords

Right, because all buy to let landlords are evil greedy scummy bastards out to screw people over. I also hear they love to spend their time kicking puppies.

The attitude towards BTL LLs is horrible. At least they are doing what they can to hopefully provide themselves with some financial security in the future, which is something that seems to have escaped many people in Britain today.

Earlier on up the thread there was mention of third-generation benefit families, as proof that some people choose a life on benefits as a lifestyle choice. I'd like to address that.

I bet no one on here would admit to that, or think it acceptable that their DC would grow up with the ambition "to go on benefits". So it's worth asking the question why some people grow up to do just that. If we don't want that, why do they? Is it because it's the 'best' or the only realistic option available to them? If so, what can be done to change that in an age when we are cutting budgets to schools, sure start centres, social services, arts and heritage projets, community groups - all those things that can lift the aspirations of those who had little to start with and nothing to aim for.

Only when every child in the UK is given the same opportunities and chances in life can we blame them for not reaching the lofty heights of self-sufficiency.

If we cut benefits or access to them, all that will happen is that the poorly educated (in the broad sense of qualifications, life skills and aspiration) will become even more poor. It won't mean they get jobs that either don't exist or are already being chased by people with superior qualifications and skills.

wow - do you think some people MEAN to be so patronising AND rude?

pumpkin
and you are being penalised by the lunacy of the system.
The point of the newly out of work benefits should be to help you get back into work ASAP
BUT
Tax credits / interns and workfare have gruesomely distorted the job market so that people like your DH are trapped.

OK
I am self employed, I'd love lots of kids but I cannot afford to raise them properly.
BUT
If I was on benefits I'd get more money for the more children I had even though I did not work - why is that sane?

And Y Y Y about the debt crisis being driven by collateralised, derivative sovereign debts.
We cannot afford what is currently being paid out.
Either we change it now or we UTTERLY shaft our children.

Its depressing that only the well off can now have assurance that their children will do better than they did - the true sign of a civilised society.

This is ridiculous. You do realise savings run out, don't you OP? When you become unemployed you use them and they diminish. Then what? If you're lucky you get another job, but you now have no savings and god knows how long it will take you to build them back up. How on earth do you expect people to get into a position where they always have savings.

I don't. That would be silly and I never said that.

So how do savings keep you safe from benefits then?

OP, sorry if I missed the answer to this, but do you know for sure that the person in your op actually earned more than 26K? As for that being the average wage, it isn't round here. It is well below. We have low wages and high housing costs here, much like a lot of tourist places.

What should we do?

£26k is the median household income (ie 50% of households earn less than that - as the median single person income is £18k)

sadly under the spend and borrow policies of Broon, "benefits" were given to far too large a proportion of the population - leaving not enough in the pot for those who genuinely need it (the short term out of work, the disabled and families with young children)
it is now being rolled back but in a really crass and management consultant driven way (by politicians who have never set foot in the real world)

Lavish benefits should be stopped. They are breeding, have bred a huge culture of entitlement and dissatisfied, grasping cynical people. No wonder the UK is in the mess it is. We are mugs.

I was going to write a long post about how companies/employers participating in workfare are the entitled bastards but i cant be arsed.

Lavish benefits should be stopped.
If there were any ...

The most entitled and grasping people I have ever seen are comfortably off posters on here and other forums whinging about what they think other people have got.

The vast majority of benefit claimants I know just keep their heads down less they get accused of being entitled and grasping and not grateful enough.

Sometimes my toddler DS says something when he knows the answer perfectly well, just because he's bored and wants my attention. To seek to dissuade him from this, and to encourage him into more constructive and less bloody boring conversational ploys, I always respond, "it's a giraffe."

I want a giraffe emoticon, dammit.

The attitude towards BTL LLs is horrible. At least they are doing what they can to hopefully provide themselves with some financial security in the future, which is something that seems to have escaped many people in Britain today.

we have been on many threads together about lanlords,BTL freddo,im guessing ur one urself or am connected in some way as you always stick up for the lanlord rather than the tenanat

we will have to agree to disagree on this subject

Have we? I don't remember. On LL threads I stick up for what I think is fair, not always LLs. There have been a couple of threads in recent weeks where I have sympathised more with the tenant. I do think LLs get an undeserved hard time on here, maybe it's partly you that makes me think that if we have discussed it before.

I am a LL, but not BTL.