But we either deal with it now (we should have dealt with it 10 years ago) or we will have a real crisis in a few years. Having people on welfare for 10 years is going to bankrupt us all.
Well, yes. But if a politician can kick the can down the road, he or she will do so until the road falls off a cliff. I would argue that we've been in crisis for years; it was only the cheap credit boom that hid the reality.
We also face a substantial section of the political spectrum that refuses to accept that public finances are finite. While there's a good argument for increasing taxation at the top end, we are talking about a state spend that is already near enough half of annual GDP and a operational budget deficit that is more than the annual cost of running the NHS. And I am not even going to go near the National Debt and unfunded state pension liabilities. Even Corbyn's anti-austerity policies were based on Osbourne either getting rid of the deficit or halving it.
But still many people will not accept that present liabilities, in a climate of increasing population, are unfundable.
It's only in the last 25 years that house prices have broken well away from 2.5 salaries and launched into the stratosphere and rents have followed.
It's more like the last fifteen to be fair. And to solve the problem, you have to be honest about the cause. And to my mind, a major part of the cause is a) foreign capital pouring into the British property market because it is such a cheap place to park money and b) financial shenanigans that leveraged British property and mispriced risk. We have had hyper inflation in the housing market, in my view, but you will never get anyone in government to admit that ... not when stamp duty revenues have increased by 300 percent. The problem isn't supply and demand per se, though it is a factor, it's the global shed-load of money chasing British bricks.
We were even in a situation prior to 2010 where residential property owned by a company wasn't even liable for council tax, which is one of the only costs of holding British residential property, ffs.
^The welfare state isn't an insurance policy for individual tax payers.
The point of it is to protect people from the problems associated with poverty if unable to earn enough money to live on. ^
Actually, it is supposed to be both. That's why we have still both contribution and income-based streams. Theoretically, your NI payments are still supposed to guarantee you a certain period (used to be 18 weeks) of unemployment benefit. If you go over that, under certain conditions, you then transfer to income-based. In practice, this distinction means bugger all though.