To think half of all households not paying their way is OK

[FraidyCat]

and should be a formalised target?

Thought prompted by a Telegraph article.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10927902/Labours-costly-legacy-of-dependence-on-the-state.html

Several years ago when I got the figures off the government (ONS) web site I became aware that at that time almost exactly 50% of households received more from the state than they payed in. All the article tells me that i didn't already know is that the recession has caused the figure to rise slightly since, and that in the 1970's the figure was in the region of 40%. (So 25 years after Thatcher, the country is more socialist than it was before, contrary to what many people seem to believe.)

If you'd asked me when I was younger I would have said help should be for people in exceptional circumstances. Exceptional in statistical terms would mean that figure should be 1%, or 5%, or at most 20%. However I can't see any realistic way back to that from where we are.

Given that we have two main political parties, one of which can be caricatured as the party of the poor that wants to maximise resdistribution, and the other as that of the better-off that wants to minimise it, maybe they should agree to meet half-way and formally set 50% as a target/constraint?

I suppose I think it would kill some arguments that are pointless, because the conflicting forces that lead to the status quo aren't going to go away, and leave politicians to focus on optimising the narrower details of redistribution.

It's not really ok though is it. What happens when the figure is 60/40 and the 40 percenters have to pay more tax to pay for the 60 percent? As the tax burden goes up those paying the most are going to start asking what the point is and will either stop working so hard if they are seeing so much of their income taken or emigrate.

I agree with the principle of equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. If everyone gets the same amount of money, some by working a 70 hour week without claiming any benefits whilst the rest do a 24 hour week and are topped up by benefits, what the hell is the point of going to university, progressing in a career or working hard? Eventually the country will run out of other peoples money.

Also, everything is backwards.

The way consecutive governments think is instead of reducing the cost of things like housing and increasing wages, which would mean more money for people to spend in the economy, they perversely say, "house prices are rising so we need to give people more benefits to pay for the rising cost and wages are too low so we need to top up the wages with benefits". Not only does this go straight into the private sector (landlords/companies) who can absolve their duty to provide good quality, affordable homes/decent wages because the government makes up the shortfall but it actually perpetuates the problem because housing benefit acts as an artificial prop to house prices because landlords know the minimum rent they can get (rather than letting the market decide) and landlords buy up all the properties via BTL because they know the taxpayer will pay the rent to a minimum level.

The same with tax credits - work doesn't pay enough because companies don't pay enough and want to increase profits so rather than the government saying "up your wages", they say "we will subsidise your workers via the tax of other low paid workers".

It is disgraceful but then the country is being run for the benefit of the rich and corporations.

The middle income workers who are paying the majority of the tax wouldn't have such a big burden if the people/companies at the top of the pyramid (the very rich) were stopped from avoiding taxes but our government has actually been taken over by the representatives of the 1% and they make the rules (in their favour) so it's heads we win, tails you lose for them.