People who earn money to live and pay taxes budget and plan to do everything they wish to pursue. This includes having children who are a massive financial commitment.
My DH and I had two reasonably well paid jobs, bought a house and worked for ten years before we even considered we had enough to give children a good start in life.
My mother was married to a very difficult man and had to leave him and support my sister and myself on her own. It was hard and the household never had much money, nevertheless, work she did and, proudly rejected all state help. We would not have free school meals as we did not want to be seen with the free tickets. It was seen as something of a disgrace in those days to take charity so we survived on short commons but with our dignity intact. The difference between today and then is that we now accept that people cannot be blamed for their misfortunes.
However, the problem seems to arise that there are those who use the social and welfare budget as a temporary stopgap to help them back on their feet when misfortune strikes and some people who plan a life of entitlement on its largesse at the expense of hard pressed taxpayers who are tightening their belts to provide, sometimes better, benefits, than their efforts provide for themselves.
Thus you have the strange statistic of today where very rich and very poor families have an average of four children at an early age when workers can barely afford the one/two they have and have to wait years later to have them in order to pay for them. Also, as we found when my daughter worked in central London, taxpayers with paying employment have to move out to the suburbs and pay huge travel costs to be able to afford to buy a small property and then spend their lives commuting past subsidised central city housing where the people they are supporting pay nothing to live there.
The recipients, as can be seen from this thread, are not quietly grateful ( as they would have to feel somewhat ashamed of themselves) but shrilly entitled. They stridently demand their ‘rights’ while ignoring the fact that the hard pressed workers who are providing their homes, children, cash and benefits cannot afford what hthey have without working or, in the case of UC, working so hard.
And before anyone protests that this is not the case, while I worked full time through having children, my own sister ‘ worked the system’ by dropping her hours to less than sixteen and claimed UC for years. She too, is full of the ‘ we are a rich country, big business can afford to pay’ ideology as she knows nothing of finance and how things actually work.
I think it is perfectly acceptable to limit benefits to two children, yes, some individual cases of unintentional consequences will happen and cause some difficulties for some benefit recipients. But unexpected events are the nature of life itself and it cannot be right that some are protected from them while others, who work hard, have to abide by the exigencies of fate.
An additional point is to highlight the irony of benefit recipients gaining assistance with life and then having the extra grievance of UC benefitting business owners and housing benefit going to landlords. Of course it does! How else would it work if you want to be housed, paid for and live at others’ expense? Were it otherwise it would be tantamount to wanting to live free but also have the pleasure of seeing others punished?
The UK benefits bill is now half of all tax spending and, frighteningly, is not covered by income tax receipts. Other countries manage to have high taxation and high spending by also having small populations. The Nordic countries average about five million in a country. We, however, are nearer 60million and growing.
The financial implications of unchecked welfare benefits give one pause for thought but they are nothing in comparison to the observed effect on pride, self determination, resilience and responsibility.