If you rely on state support , you should have a great quality of life, not the breadline

[confidenceboost]

Aibu? Can we have a healthy chat on this one:

I will set my position out so nobody can say I've drip fed. I would say I have quite socialist mindset to be honest although I have grown up very privileged due to my parents hard work
I am from the uk but moved around as a child coming back to England age 18 for uni

I have been always lucky enough not to need help from the government. I think some people probably do claim help and don't need it but mostly I would say the cases are very genuine

Here's where I don't know if I am different

I think you should be given a high , highest quality of life by the govt if you genuinely for whatever reason need it.
Why should you live on the breadline?
Why should you turn down your heating?
Why should you not get treatment or help that would improve your life ?

Is it degrading to give state benefit as a breadline type lifestyle? I say yes

I think I am not being unreasonable saying that benefits and state support should be increased as it is unfair to resign people to a poor quality of life due to them needing help?

Thank you

Gawd this is such a selfish rant, OP. You are all over the place with what’s not fair for you, what you want & not even sure what of what you say is true or if it’s a purely hypothetical rant.
Blaming the same old trope about offshore, the 1% hiding money etc etc what ARE you seeking from this rant.

I regret trying to help you

I agree.

My general view is that people on state support should have enough to live on - 'breadline' if that is what it is - but not enough for luxuries.

That is a baseline which they can keep and add to if they get a job, so that there is an incentive to work and not an incentive to stay on state support.

As for the OP's posts, I find it quite a difficult read to be drawn into the minutiae of her life to justify her position.

I agree. OP is not sticking to the issue and throwing up all kinds of distractions and smokescreens to bambozzle us.

It really isn't helping her argument and very little point to engaging.

Incidentally OP, @Commonsense22 and @Badbadbunny are wrong about savings wrt benefits. As I replied to @Commonsense22 but you may have missed it:
AngelicKaty · Today 14:43
They're not. Contribution-based benefits aren't affected by savings at all. Even means-tested benefits allow claimants to have up to £6k of savings without any loss of benefits and you only lose your eligibility to means-tested benefits when your savings exceed £16k (between £6k and £16k you lose a proportionate amount of benefit to the level of savings you have on a sliding scale).

People should also remember, when the UK Welfare State was created in the early to mid 20th Century, it was only ever meant to be a safety net. Sadly, many people (particularly those where they and previous generations have lived entirely on benefits and this is the only lifestyle they've ever known) see it as an entitlement. To give you an example of this, I remember a client who had been on means-tested benefits most of their adult life and then, unexpectedly, came into a decent chunk of money - £200k. Obviously they were notified by the DWP that their benefits would cease as their savings were now above the £16k threshold and they came to us for advice. We confirmed to them this was correct and they were absolutely furious and stormed out. No amount of pointing out to them that now they had their own resources, they no longer needed the safety net of benefits, got through to them. They'd always lived on benefits and didn't see why this should stop just because they'd come into a large sum of money. 🙄

I don't quite understand this either.

She talks about having a Tesla car.
Her husband earns over £100k.

Husband has an additional rental property.
On another thread she's looking for a holiday for £5k
She spends £2k a month on private meds

At one point on this thread she suggested that welfare support should be x 5 times a person's rent or mortgage per month.

I'm sorry but when somebody puts up posts like this others, like me, often look at other relevant threads that have been posted to try and gain some form of insight into the lifestyle of the person.

I whole heartedly believe that people with genuine disabilities should receive decent support and those caring for those with disabilities the same.
But 5 times their rent/mortgage is just laughable.

You actually did say a word about the state pension. You wrote "I don’t regard the state pension as a benefit, no. Do you?" To which @Whatafustercluck pointed out to you that the SP is a benefit as it comes out of the DWP's budget (i.e. the Dept for Work and PENSIONS) and is, in fact, the single largest expense from the dept's budget.

If you genuinely can’t see a difference there then I don’t think anything I can say will make you see it!

Furlough was to protect jobs and to prevent a huge rise in unemployment during an unprecedented time- it was also for a short period of time, not someone’s entire life, and it kept businesses afloat which again- prevented huge unemployment.

You get your state pension because you’ve paid the NI contributions for it.

Yes ok then it’s a benefit, I’m wrong. A benefit that has been CONTRIBUTED TOWARDS.

I'm pointing out your inconsistent views on benefits. You don't agree with paying taxes for benefits. State pension is a benefit, so presumably you disagree with paying for that too.

This....

The promise of a government pension for those who paid into it was made to provide a guaranteed income source for people in retirement is a paragraph from a social agreement by the government.

Way back when I was 16 and started work the government, by subtracting money I'd earned, handed me a social contract as a tax payers that at 60 I would get a state pension if I'd paid in..

Now in my mid 60's having stuck to, and still continue to pay my tax feel I've fulfilled my half of the 'social contract' yet the government feel its acceptable to move the goal posts.

I suspect this will be moved again within the next few years affectively stealing more of my pension from me...

Odd how it was a crime when Maxwell done pretty much the same thing.

I agree that 'work should pay',i.e. you should be better off working than claiming benefits. But if the disability/sickness benefits cuts are going to be as bad as threatened later this month, people on these benefits will really be struggling. Punish people for being sick or disabled. What a great idea.

I mentioned earlier, I support a disabled person with some financial admin. I am not paid to do this. This person is not “breadline” - so I think OP doesn’t really live this. In fact - her “emotive” breadline word is ridiculous in this context.

The person I know is not humiliated, or any other the words OP used in her rant to say the “system” is degrading. This person gets what they need, there is enough financial support. They have a motability car (not a Tesla). A view could be they get a generous amount. The car is a very generous benefit.

Will this person’s entitlement be cut back, or grow more slowly? Possibly, they will be ok if the cut is small. Everyone is feels the austerity … let’s just see what actually happens before we lose the plot on MN.

They have a motability car (not a Tesla). A view could be they get a generous amount. The car is a very generous benefit

The motability car is not an extra "benefit". It is leased by paying the mobility component of PIP to motability. The car is never owned by the disabled person.

Feel free to explain it all to me. Are you from one the countries I mentioned? I lived in the region but I’m sure you understand it all so much better than I do.

A company car is a “benefit” for tax purposes though and you never own it yep pay significant tax for it so yes a car is a benefit.

How about these stats, which I read this morning?

Adjusted for inflation, in 2010 Britain spent £13 billion managing a group of 120,000 troubled families, or almost £110,000 per household. That same year one single family ... was consuming the total tax contributions – income tax, national insurance, VAT, the lot – of eight average households in housing benefits alone.
...
If you work in London and can’t afford the rent, you move further out. But if you’re workless, you might end up with the state paying for your home: almost 60 per cent of the capital’s social rented households have no adults in work. Their presence in the capital blocks up homes that could otherwise house productive workers
...
This system, however, is running out of room. After accounting for all the services they receive, the top 20 per cent of households are £32,000 out of pocket each year. The next 20 per cent, almost £6,000.

I cannot see where these stats come from, not one specific report, but this situation is not sustainable forever.

It’s a generous use of entitlement? OP complaining about shabby degraded lives. Having access to a new car every 3 years is not breadline. Maintenance, insurance all sorted. It’s not a degradation.

My point is, OP has no idea.

Same should be said for people who go out to work and slog their guts.

Sorry, what does "duh" mean? Why so rude?

Why did you edit your response from "Duh"?

You still get state pension if you've never paid a penny in NIC but have accumulated enough "credits" by virtue of wages under the threshold, caring, unemployment, etc. So you really don't have to have "paid in" to get them, hence why it's just a benefit. Likewise you now get the same state pension whether you've paid £50 NIC per year or £5,000 per year. Even government official figures include it as a state benefit.

Am I missing something?

Why would anyone bother to work if State paid them to have a great quality of life while doing nothing?

If noone bothered to work, who would pay for all these fantastic lifestyles?

I have always had a full time job, not min wage but not megabucks, husband same. Our child wore hand me downs, and second hand bundles from eBay. Benefits should only cater for basic needs as a safety net and no more than that. No one should starve, but luxuries ARE a privilege not a given. Period.

You don’t seem to know much about finance. Just think about how much tax financial services bring to the exchequer every year. And just think how quickly that will evaporate should we bring in a financial transaction tax. I’d give it a fortnight. Jeez. Of all of the woefully naive comments I’ve heard on these boards….

Try learning about how we tax and spend in this country. Try looking at the IFS, or even better read their Directors Paul Johnson’s best selling and much lauded book on this ‘Follow the Money. We all want better public services, but it’s you and me and all the other average joes in this country that aren’t paying nearly enough income tax. We want Western European public services while paying US income tax levels and it will never add up.

How are you actually going to achieve that?? How are you going to change the tax/accounting laws of other countries over which we have no control. Putting more taxes in the UK would mean firms would just move abroad, the London Stock Exchange would collapse as the firms listed on it (and all the hedge funds, pensions, etc based on it) would just move en-bloc somewhere else where taxes etc were lower. We're not China nor North Korea - rich people and international firms are free to set up and move to whatever country they want to move to and pay the tax rates in that country.

It's why lots of international firms set up their European head quarters in Ireland. It's why a lot of trust funds and businesses etc are based in the Isle of Man.

Come back to us when you find a workable way of getting the entire Western World to agree on the same tax rules/rates!

It's exactly why we've had a movement over from direct taxes (income tax, corporation tax) over to indirect taxes (VAT, employers NIC, fuel duty, alcohol duty, air duty, insurance duty, etc), over the past 30 years as they're harder to avoid as they're "local" taxes, i.e. paid on sales in the country the sales are made and paid by employers in the country where their workers are based.

We already have transfer pricing laws/treaties between lots of different countries in an attempt to get huge international firms to pay a fair share of tax on profits in each country where they trade, but it's a long protracted job and it's been ongoing for decades.