Benefit Britain - the irony

[Mhoys]

Years ago there was no Housing Benefit as far as I remember - talking about growing up in the 1960s. Or even Child Tax Benefits, etc etc. Now it seems so many people get these, even people working in reasonably good jobs. The Government is meant to be anti-benefits but expenditure on all this must be significant. Some of this may be due to a small rise in living standards since then. But also have wages become so low relative to living costs, that the state is effectively subsidising private enterprise? There is nothing necessarily wrong with this I guess, but isn't the government "in denial" when few ordinary people could afford a family or rent or buy a home in the South at least , so the taxpayer/State has to stump up? I have some thoughts but am also genuinely puzzled ...

I think the op could have phrased her op much better if she wants a valid discussion.

If this is not a terrible non-apology for not bothering to read the OP properly (not sure tbh), I think it serves as proof that many here complaining of people not reading the OP properly fail to understand just how bad some posters' level of comprehension is.

IRL I know tons of people who wouldn't grasp the nuances (if you can call them that) of arguments in threads on Mumsnet and elsewhere. People with such low ability that they don't even grasp that others have higher ability. Think Dunning-Kruger effect, I guess. I think this is part of how Brexit took so many people by surprise - we fail to understand the general level of comprehension of many people coming out of education in the UK. I suspect I'm too young to try to tell whether the level has slipped or whether it has always been this way.

So again we will have massive defaults and people will end up homeless costing the government millions, whilst properties stand empty and landlords will loose them to - wait for it - the banks

Anyone would think that was the game plan all along

I'm afraid I agree

IRL I know tons of people who wouldn't grasp the nuances (if you can call them that) of arguments in threads on Mumsnet and elsewhere. People with such low ability that they don't even grasp that others have higher ability. Think Dunning-Kruger effect, I guess. I think this is part of how Brexit took so many people by surprise - we fail to understand the general level of comprehension of many people coming out of education in the UK. I suspect I'm too young to try to tell whether the level has slipped or whether it has always been this way.

I'm afraid I agree with you. Large numbers of people have become so used to having "information" shovelled at them in stock phrases, headlines and soundbites that they won't actually read anything properly and think about it for themselves. It's quite frightening actually. More was spent on education between 1997 and 2010 than at any time in history, and this is still the result. Things are not going right.

user1471453629 it's interesting to read your post about wages, and reminded me of when I had a Saturday job almost 30 years ago. I worked for WHSmith when I was 15 and I was getting £1.91 an hour. Sainsbury's announced that they were going to pay £3.60 for all workers including Saturday staff. Lots of people decamped.

Then M&S said they would pay more than Sainsbury's. I was moving to a new area so I got a job at M&S earning £3.65 an hour at 16. Twelve years later, when I went back to work after having babies, I was earning £4.00 an hour, as minimum wage had been introduced in the interim. So in 12 years, my wage had gone up by 15p an hour. In real terms, this was a pay decrease.

Before minimum wage, companies offered attractive pay rates to encourage people to work for them. Then it became bare minimum wage, as there was no incentive any more.

In my opinion, this is where the rot set in.

KitKats, I clearly remember seeing jobs offered at £1 or 50p per hour in the 1990s. I don't think the rot set in there.

Real earnings for ordinary people have been falling since the early 1980's, at the same time the amount going to those at the very top has increased exponentially.

The end of the post war consensus and the start of trickle down economics is to blame for the crisis.

YANBU OP and i can't understand why any discussion around benefits these days is deemed goady and gets a

The system is broken without doubt.

How can it be that those in full time employment need to have their wages topped up by benefits? The government are absolutely subsidising employers and in turn keeping wages low - meanwhile those at the top get huge salaries, pensions and bonuses for being so clever and making huge profits.

Then there madness of means tested benefits and benefit cuts for those in need while some well off retired people can get a state pension, winter fuel allowance and bus pass regardless of their wealth. How about we have a few documentaries about the inequality of this?

Yes, but surely these big companies don't have to entice staff for bottom of the rung jobs anymore, as they have a huge pool of workers to choose from due to immigration and other factors such as the highering of the pension age among other things. Also, where at one time, in a family type set up, you would have had one parent working, now both are.

I think that's interesting KitKats. I have to admit I don't know much about minimum wage, by the time it was introduced I'd managed to work my way up to the greasy pole. Are you saying that in effect it has worked as a wage freeze and kept rates down because employers don't feel they need to offer above that rate? So that instead of being a benefit to workers, it has prevented competition between employers and is actually detrimental to their progression?

My pennyworth comes from the four years we ran a guest house. We hired a oart time cleaner. When it came to wages we only paid the minimum wage because she was also getter ng income tax credit. I wanted to give her a pay risenut she said that any rise I gave her would be taken off her tax credits so she wouldn't get any more in her pocket. We couldn't afford to double her wages and she didn't get a lay rise.

In short Labours big idea of minimum wage and tax credits was keeping the poor ... poor. Stinking attitude from the so called help for the poor and disadvantaged

I work in the care sector which is funded by local government and over the past few years have cut care package payments meaning that I have not had a pay increase in three years.

I earn just over the soo called living wage and rely on tax credits to make ends meet. I am entitled to claim housing benefit and council tax relief but have chosen not to do so as concerned over being overpaid etc and having to pay back etc.

There is a conspiracy with paying lower wages expecting tax credits etc to top up, however, not all employers can afford to pay higher than the set minimum. The majority I believe can and they should invest in their employees as their workforce is a huge asset to them.

The house benefit payments paid to private landlords and some housing associations charging the maximum they can get away with needs to stop. I know several cases where tenants were paying £600 a month for a property only when bought out by a housing association they more than doubled the rent.

And that's why immigration will not stop.
How many of us have used cheap builders, cheap cleaners ? Everyone is guilty

I think we've all seen Tony Blsir for what he is now. Poor Gordon Brown is the only one with clean hands and look how demonised he was

Tax credits have resigned a generation of women into poverty.
When children grow up and credits end the stark reality beckons.
The reality of full time work, working for peanuts.
A failed social experiment, borne from altruistic intent, destroyed by human nature.

smallfox i also remember the 50p and £1 an hour jobs back in the 90s. They were everywhere. I was in my twenties throughout the 90s and remember an article in More magazine (before it became a celebrity rag and used to run intelligent articles) about the abolition of the Low Pay Unit and how it would lead to even lower wages.

If you were childless in the 90s and were offered one of these jobs you were fucked. No tax credits at all for those without kids. There was one which was £50 a week and my rent then was £47.95. ppl talk about the booming 90s. Well it wasnt booming everywhere. This was why there was a fair amount of long term unemployment in my area back then and this was the reason why.

NO NO NO. The failure to enforce the payment of Child Support from absent fathers is what has resigned women into poverty.

It is not just women who are responsible for their children so can you please drop the thinly veiled single parent bashing misogyny.

When children grow up and child support ends, what then?
I hear you. I'm not aruging with you.
Everything is connected.

Tax credits have not consigned people to poverty, in fact they did the opposite, in the vast majority of cases it made going out to work actually beneficial, gave people skills that they could then take on to full time work.

The problem with people accepting a minor pay rise or a few more hours per week (not guaranteed) because of their tax credits is trotted out a lot, and of course it was a problem. But it doesn't encourage people not to take work, it actually encourages people not to take work that is guaranteed, or which would not offset the fall in benefit. However some of you seem to think people should be grateful for your benevolent largess. In effect the tax credit system has allowed people to maintain some dignity by not having to accept shit paid exploitative jobs just to survive, it allows people to work and maintain some quality of life.

They have, when you no longer qualify you are.
Without them we wouldn't be in this situation. Work would pay.
It has become a race to the bottom, not for employers i should add.

YY smallfox Trouble is those extra hours are very often intermittent and inconsistent which can mess up claims which can take months to put right.

Agnes i hear you. HAs are actually getting away with a bloody sight more than private landlords are.

But also have wages become so low relative to living costs, that the state is effectively subsidising private enterprise?

Mhoys, this had been one of the best and most thought-provoking opening posts I've read on MN in recent times.

I'm sorry you got the biscuit.

For anyone interested reading further about this topic, I would highly recommend the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty. It focuses on wealth and income inequality in Europe and the United States.

Its central thesis is that wealth grows faster than economic output. (Hence, a property previously affordable to those in certain jobs becomes increasingly inaffordable. ) The result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability. The central thesis of the book is that inequality is not an accident, but rather a feature of capitalism, and can only be reversed through state interventionism

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/2734921-to-think-this-is-not-the-tenants-fault

In fact user, wages did rise between about 1998 and 2008, we had a fairly large period of prosperity where average wages, and even those of the people at the bottom rose.

The LSE did a study into the current low wage issues and put the blame squarely on the fall out from the 2008 crash. People have been willing to accept lower wages to stay in jobs, lower pay increases etc, this leads to lower wages being offered at entry level. At the same time we have had a massive lift in cost push inflation as energy, transport and food costs have risen and an extremely large increase the in the value of asset prices because of cheap interest rates, QE etc etc.

Tax credits are not responsible for low wages.

I totally agree with the points about the state subsidising private enterprise.

I've said many times on here the Conservative economic policy is Keynesian for the corporations and the wealthy, whilst offering everyone else up on the altar of free markets ( which btw don't exist).

People have accepted lower wages because of tax credits, not in spite of.
When a teacher is in receipt of housing benefit and tax credits we clearly have a problem.
I wasn't always this way.
Is there a connection?

ProfessorPreciseaBugYou;ve missed the point. If it werent for the tax credits your cleaner woulnd have been able to afford to work for you before oyuoffered her the pay rise.

Tax credits enabled a lot of women to get back into the work place. Your comments are a thinly disguised dig at Labour and they wont wash.
The problem is at the edge of entitlement. Its ture that a change in wages or hours can adgerseltyy affect the benefit; that doesnt mean Tax Credits are inherantly bad. Its just a fact of systems and how they work.