To love the idea of scrapping all benefits and just giving everyone £500 a month

[DyslexicScientist]

Like Finland are going to do.

Would get rid of all the east that goes on with means testing and would cost about the same.

Would be much fairer as the current system does discriminate against certain demographics.

I'd prefer it if we were more careful with other parts of fiscal policy tbh. I'd be prefer it if we didn't live in a country where crony capitalists claim free market economics when profit is involved, yet want Keynesian intervention when things go wrong. I'd prefer it if we didn't both subsidise investment whilst cutting corporation tax to incetivise it.

I think far much more could be done to correct much of what is wrong with the country, but because it is in the vested interests of those in power not to do so, we don't. The benefits "cuts" and the rage storm it creates on here is a distracting mirage from what we should be concentrating on.

I earn £340 a week. £57 a week is not negligible to me. But I do want a benefits system, but one that doesn't penalise those unable to jump through hoops, but encourages work.

At the moment some of the most vulnerable people do not get what they are entitled to anyway, as they can't manage to apply successfully for it. A CI of £500 per month would be automatic, so would be a guaranteed income for everyone.

Cleaty but as stated to get a £3,000 rebate would require you to be paying a large amount of income tax, on your level you aren't.

So you wouldn't get £57 a week, you'd get a few quid, but this would leave someone else in poverty and have a massively detrimental effect on society.

Well, the first post and thread title are about doing away with means testing and giving everybody £500 a month, so we can scrap all benefits, which would "cost about the same".

Then when it has pointed out that that would leave disabled people, single parents with several kids etc, the OP says that the system would have to give more money to the disabled, which rather pisses all over what she said to begin with, and negates much of the admin savings which are, apparently, enough to pay for this scheme.

But that doesn't refute my point badlad. Which is that it's wrong to say all mentions of disabled children have been ignored.

It doesn't at all only s tiny fraction of people would need to be assessed. The way sometime speak on here you'd think half the population had a limiting disability.

It's not really "giving" you 500 a month if it comes out of your taxes though. If you're going to go that route, you might as well just cut benefit amounts and lower the taxes to save people money.

It would cost less to give people benefits on an as per needed basis.

you'd get a few quid

depends on how you do it.

That 3000 per taxpayer is half your CI. so, if you do just give 3000 to every tax payer you are half way there. That's not even counting the savings you'd get from scaling back the bureaucracy in DWP.

HB alone is 17B. that doesn't include social housing costs.

FannyTheChampionOfTheWorld I'm not intending to refute anything you said, just bemoaning the fact that the OP never addresses any of the flaws pointed out about what she proposes - instead she just pedantically picks up on one sentence in other people's longer posts and nitpicks at it.

You're right - disabled children have been given a throwaway comment of "of course we'd have to give them more money", even though it completely contradicts the original proposal. They haven't been completely ignored.

Ah but you see, you're also assuming that all £3,000 would come off your tax bill, but really you would have to take into consideration the wider tax take.

Only 25% of tax take is income tax, so if we were to pay the tax payer each individually the saving, without adjustments for contribution just a flat rate saving, that would work out at £750 a year.

Or 14.25 quid a week, see, really just a few quid. For which the "and guess whose paying" crowd would see other destitute.

There may be savings on VAT or duty somewhere down the line, but the net benefit effect is less tangible, £14.25 a week. Really worth having for yourself at the cost of society?

It coming off tax does not benfit the poorest such as homeless people.

fannyyes you're right 4 adults 4 kids. We used to live well a few months back husband had his own business, but since moving for caring duties not great but I'm still getting my essentials so i cant say I'm poor. yes that would cover the bills 3 k you say that's a lot. well my rent is 1500, so even then id have more than enough.but why would every child get 500 a month, regardless of parents employment status?, seems like a lot of money.

would this idea be sustainable 500 quid for every individual including kids who have no disabilities? i thought things were bad now hence benefits are capped, this would be well over any caps no?

Yes! I think everyone should get £500 a month from the government. We can all give up work and .....Oh wait! Where will the government get the money to give everyone £500 a month if we all gave up work? But I am loving the sentiment.....and hope you can come up with a solution as to how I can give up work and live on £500 a month

Usually people advocate for children to get half the adult amount katarzyna, or sometimes a couple of hundred a month if the adult figure is quite high. But yes of course, making the sums add up is a huge deal, and it's the reason I don't think this would work in the UK unfortunately. The idea is that you cut a lot of the bureaucracy, and also you start taxing earned income straight away (and unearned wealth one would hope). At the moment you get a 'personal allowance' you don't have to pay income tax on, unless you're a very high earner. That amounts to 2.1k saved, if you use your personal allowance that is, but the CI would effectively be your personal allowance instead.

Except that's not what I said at all badlad. Please don't attribute your opinions to me. It's simply wrong to claim the discussions on the topic have been throwaway, same as it was to suggest the issue had been ignored. There've been people talking about what amounts might be needed, and highlighting the increase that CI would provide to many carers, who of course include carers of disabled children. And you seem to be presenting 'contradiction of', ie disagreement with the OP as some negative thing. If you've read the thread, you'll see that there are lots of proposed modes of CI that don't simply propose a flat adult rate and nothing else. That is, some people have better ideas than the OP did. It would be ridiculous to suggest that differing from the OP is somehow a weakness, and particularly ludicrous to only have a problem with this when the person concerned also differs from you...

Disagreements and contradiction with the first post and the title are a sign of weakness and a poorly thought-out idea when they are from the OP herself, which is all I presented them to be.

You're right in that people are refining the model, but they are moving further and further away from the idea of a "citizen's income". If you take it to be money that every person receives, without condition, from the government, then just taxing it away from people who don't need it, as one poster suggested (from memory), then that is a giant step away from what a citizen's income is. Every type of benefit does likewise, and moves us closer to what we have at the moment, where some people pay taxes and others receive benefits.

I don't think anyone would pour scorn on a discussion about how to make the benefits system more efficient and fairer, even if they disagreed about how to do it. Similarly, a thread originally wanting everybody to live in social housing eventually became a discussion about what could be done about the lack of affordable housing. Like that thread, the idea originally proposed here is so ludicrous that it can't possibly be taken seriously, and it's particularly frustrating when the OP responds in the way she does.

you're also assuming that all £3,000 would come off your tax bill

I am not assuming anything. This is entirely our made up scenario (and not one that I am advocating), so we can do what we like.

Keep taxes the same. Give every individual tax payer 3000 back. Job done.

So your average salary would pay tax of £100?

But again, income tax is only 25% of the tax take so we'd have to return to the tax payer a proportionate amount, as expressed above, its buttons....

we'd have to return to the tax payer a proportionate amount, as expressed above, its buttons

it's our made of fantasy. We don't have to do anything.

But if it were to work,that's how it would work. Which again, leaves the "and guess whose paying" types with very little argument.

Oh and we were discussing it as a philosophical point which means we use terms like " we'd have to" as we were discussing potential application.

In any case, the point of that was to dismiss your erroneous PP which stated something about paying each tax payer £3000. So I took your calculation and based it in reality on income tax contributions, in order to prove that not paying benefits would result, for most, in a very small return in income tax.

So I took your calculation and based it in reality on income tax contributions, in order to prove that not paying benefits would result, for most, in a very small return in income tax.

no, you didn't. you made up a scenario where that's the outcome, when I gave an equally plausible scenario (certainly in the context of CI) where everyone gets 3,000. What I am saying is entirely in line with a CI and would likely potentially work just like I said.

You are just trying to get out of your "only a couple of quid a week" statement by introducing your favourite scenario and dismissing it.

Sorry, but you took the benefits bill and halved it for pensions and then divided the remainder up between tax payers. Which works on the assumption that this would be what could be paid.

In reality, because only 25% of tax take comes from income tax only 25% of that would be divided between tax payers, which works out at £14 whatever a week, which is a few quid.

In any case I think the CI point of £500 has been proved to be unworkable, and some kind of fantasy.

In reality, because only 25% of tax take comes from income tax only 25% of that would be divided between tax payers,

why? that's just your constraint. That's neither the reality, nor a necessary constraint.

You're right in that people are refining the model, but they are moving further and further away from the idea of a "citizen's income".

That's highly debatable. There are many different models of CI, and no reason at all to claim that only those not giving any extra in any circumstances amount to CI. Which is what you're doing when you say refinements move away from CI. Really all that amounts to is a statement of your opinion, which you're allowed to have of course but is hardly persuasive in itself.

Well, what definition of Citizen's Income are you working from?

I'll put it another way. What characteristics must a system have in order to qualify as a Citizen's Income system?