to be utterly disgusted at people's comments re. welfare cuts

[HappyGoLuckyGirl]

Yes, I'm aware that our welfare system needs reforming. I do not profess to know how this should be done.

I've just read a few articles on the proposed cuts that primarily focused on reducing tax credits. The vitrol is appalling. I can't believe this is the country I live in.

I am a single mother working 40 hours a week also mid way through a 5 year part time degree. I earn slightly over minimum wage. Things are tight enough as it is, with the tax credits I get (80% of which goes on my weekly childcare bill) and now they are planning to reduce them.

I am trying to better myself so I don't always have to rely on benefits to get me through the month and yet I'm being punished! Why are working people being targeted? How is that fair in the slightest? If I wasn't so furious I would cry.

And as for people saying that employers should raise workers wages, I can say with 100% surety that if I approached my employer and asked for a living wage (increase of £8k+) I would be flat out refused and or fired. And I work in a skilled job! What hope do people who work for a large multi-national company have?

I am very this morning.

People are dicks about benefits. Ignore them :(

Lotus you think it's okay wages are so low, people have to work 6 days a week to survive?

YANBU
Are these comments on the bottom of DM articles? If so give up reading DM immediately, it will bring nothing but misery!
Unfortunately in this last election we have revealed ourselves to be a majority society of 'I'm alright jack so fuck the rest of 'em'.

If that means the less well off have to work an extra day a week or one night a week so be it.

Because, of course, there are spare jobs everywhere, and everyone that needs the extra money has transport to these spare jobs as well as childcare available to them as well.

oh wait....

Too - if you know generations of the same family who have never worked, you should get in touch with the academics who've been trying to identify such families. Because they can't find more than a tiny handful.

www.jrf.org.uk/publications/cultures-of-worklessness

I have searched the Conservative's websites for "multi-generational unemployment" and found only repetitions of a passing reference to "the shorter life spans of the unemployed, the higher risk of depression and other mental illnesses, the harm long-term or even multi-generational unemployment does to social cohesion." They don't appear to have published any evidence for their existence.

If you know of the statistical basis for their assumption, please share it. I love data :)

Not so keen on 'anecdata', as it happens.

Lol at local coffee bar jobs for everyone

Lotus I work 5 days a week, so during the week I see my DS for approximately 3 hours every day, then he goes to bed.

His father has him one day and night at the weekend, leaving me with one full day to enjoy with him. I don't want to work another day and never see my Son.

Plus, where would he go whilst I was working this second job? Would I stick him on my back?

And nevermind the fact that if my employer found out they wouldn't be happy. And when would I do my uni work?

It's not as clear cut as 'get a second' job.

I agree with a PP you think it's okay wages are so low, people have to work 6 days a week to survive?

Lotus how do you support 5 children working 1 day a week?? Do you get other benefits that are not tax credits because you don't work enough hours a week to claim them or is the Saturday on top of full time working hours mon-fri?

YANBU OP

The wages paid are terrible and the hours employers want longer than ever. If the wages were raised there would be no need for WTC.

Cutting down or scrapping their own (MPs) expenses, second homes and money for just turning up would save a bundle, but they won't do that.

If I as a single mother of 5 can work Saturdays and do not get a penny of tax credits or child benefits I do not see why lower earners cannot

because not everyone has childcare? because the cost of weekend childcare would outstrip wages earnt? because plenty of people are already working flat out and need to actually sleep and rest a little?

I was looking at the comments on Metro Facebook page. Most of the ranting, largely illiterate comments were talking about things like "dolies in the pub" and crowing about the cuts. Even worse was the fact that many of the comments were from people who didn't even live in the UK.

To be fair () tax credits are ideologically incorrect for the Tories. Wage support is basically a Keynsian idea - the people's money is spent on facilitating employment, so that the people will be able to work, earn, and therefore spend, creating more demand which helps create jobs.

The Conservatives follow economic liberalism, which holds that the free market will properly determine the value of everything and prefers individual owners to collectivity.

I am a capitalist, but I think markets have to be constrained by governments. No unconstrained capital system has ever afforded health & well-being to a population. We have evidence, in the last half of the 20th century, that collective capitalism does actually work.

In an era of increasing automation and complex global markets, it's absurd to imagine monetary demand will furnish adequate earned incomes for everyone. When Mrs T said "The weak shall go to the wall" she didn't specify what that 'wall' looked like - we're now just beginning to see that, obviously, it means starvation and disease. As, indeed, it always has done and always will when the individual wealthy are favoured over the less-advantaged many.

I find it so hard to comprehend that people just don't give a shit about other people.
I hope jeremy Corbyn gets elected labour leader and wins the next general election pie in the sky

I don't get it either - I can be reduced to tears by heading of others hardships and always try to help anyone I can. I don't understand how people can just not give a shit. Makes me sad :(

To me the answer seems fairly simple: increase income tax on high salaries. The additional income could be used for creating jobs and supporting people who can't work. If I recall correctly, people in Denmark, Sweden and Norway pay much higher rates of tax and have a more equal society. I'm sure it's more complicated than the couple of sentences I've written, but I think the basic principle is that people in those countries want to live in a society where people are treated fairly, and don't spew vitriol about paying a reasonable amount of their hard-earned money to the government. Perhaps people are just more selfish in the UK - my mother always says, "I blame Thatcher!"

Cameron equates worklessness with addiction. Says it all right there - poverty is a crime to him.

The Conservatives couldn't do that, Sorcha, because personal wealth is their holy grail. You mum's right - not only did Mrs T say "The weak shall go to the wall" and "There is no such thing as society", but also "I will destroy their society" (she meant our expectation that Britain would share amongst ourselves as needed) and "I will make capitalists of them all", meaning she'd promote individual ownership over our despised 'society'.

Given that everyone under 40 grew up in a Thatcherised Britain, it's hardly surprising so many find it hard to believe it's possible or desirable to run an economy more fairly.

I was very lucky to be born around the same time as the welfare state: it taught better human values on the whole, because it could afford to. Remembering that the welfare state was built out of a war debt situation - which was bigger than the banking debt - it's clearly ridiculous to say we can't afford it now. The difference is ideological.

Lotus as usual, is failing to mention that three of her children are grown up and working. One as a lawyer in the family firm. And that she works from home

Oh, it's that Lotus!

Yep, the poor single mother of five having to juggle childcare for the er, two left who are probably both at University by now.

What is there "not to get", some of us are old fashioned fudddy duddies I guess - we can care about folks, but still not understand about the huge growth in the benefit culture

I think the problem lots of people - including me I think - have is that we don't see how the heck we have ended up in this position in the first place -

I am almost of the boomer generation... (in my early 50s) we grew up thinking of "benefits" as a dirty word, thinking that you DID go out and work 2 or 3 jobs to prevent the wolf knocking at the door. When I was younger it was a "safety net" and there was shame associated with claiming if you were capable of working for a living

It just does not make sense I suppose - HOW can you be a 2 salary family with a mortgage and need to be claiming benefits? How?

(Fully expect to be flamed for simply having old fashioned views, because that is how MN seems to be on these threads )

Somewhere, because inflation and ridiculous price rises mean 2 salaries often aren't enough, especially when minimum wage is extremely low and 0 hours contracts are popular

Surely you should be thinking "what's gone wrong that a working family doesn't earn enough to survive?" Instead of "why are they claiming benefits?!"

SorchaN people in Denmark etc pay a hell of a lot of tax. And there is no tax free allowance on any wage. They have a completely different tax system than us. Tbh people would be up in arms if we adpoted they're system.

The main reason that people need state top-ups is because we have become a low-wage economy with a high cost of living. The main reason that we have a high cost of living is because the cost of housing is so insanely high. Back in the baby-boomer days, a man like my dad (a train guard) could afford a three-bedroomed two reception-roomed house on his wage alone. My mum worked a bit, but didn't need to. Postmen were paying off mortgages on desirable family homes. Factory workers could afford to support an entire family on one wage. No hand-outs, no top-ups. But then, the average home didn't cost 7x the average salary. And jobs paid properly, and the people doing those jobs had guaranteed wages and guaranteed hours, which is not the case now. Except for the train guards. They still have regular hours. Postmen and factory workers, not so much. So it's not that your views are old-fashioned; it's that you are ill-informed. If you really think that a person can support a family on a minimum wage rate when they literally don't know what hours they are going to be working from one week to the next, from one day to the next, and when the cost of the average home costs £270,000, then yes I can see how you might not understand why workers need tax credits and housing benefit.

You are quite right OP. The language used against people who dare think that our country needs to live within its means IS disgusting.

But it's only a forum on the internet so it doesn't really matter a jot.