'Taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society'

[Bargepole45]

Having just paid an enormous tax bill, I frankly am fed up with hearing this. There are lots of civilised countries that have a far lower tax burden than the UK. It's just a form of blackmail designed to make contributors believe that there is no other way other than to pay sky high taxes to subsidise people's crap life choices.

Have too many kids and can't afford them? No problem, the state steps in. Have a terrible lifestyle and don't look after your health at all? No problem, the NHS will treat you. Spent all your money with wild abandon and have nothing left to pay for your care when you get old? Don't fret, the state will fund the same care home as someone that has saved all their life.

Don't people understand that these 'safety nets' just facilitate reckless behaviour? We can have a civilised society where people aren't cushioned from all of their bad decision making. I say this as someone from a background where I didn't have much money and I am so fed up with people pretending that poor people don't know that an apple is healthier than a chocolate bar or that it's a good idea to actually attend school. It's insulting and disempowering to keep making excuses for people that simply aren't incentivised to make different, better choices.

Yes, even to the point of land ownership and the legacy of feudal land control impacting today's housing costs.

I agree, not exactly an enviably position.

Yes, it would be the case where a family with lots of children are subject to the benefit cap as they don't have a parent working enough hours. Once a child is in receipt of DLA or an adults get PIP then the cap is lifted. So for example, a family with six children could receive £20k more in increased UC from the lifting of the two child cap alone. If they didn't have a disabled family member then the general benefit cap would still limit the amount of money they would receive.

Just to be clear this is true if one person in the household is disabled and they absolutely don't have to be profoundly disabled.

housing costs have fucked our economy.

If politicians really wanted to make society more civilised, they would discourage the worst people from having kids. I don’t mean those on low incomes btw (there are heroin addicts slumped in shop doorways who are worth ten of Prince Andrew). I mean people with a history of abuse and neglect. I mean the vicious, feral underclass who live by crime and benefit fraud and make their neighbour’s lives hell.

You can tax the rich and give every pennny to that underclass, but it will make no difference. They’ll just laugh in your face as they take it. Some people are not fit to raise children, and we all know it. Violent, ignorant, anti-social people generally produce violent, ignorant, anti-social kids. The sad thing is, if society did stop such people from having kids, you could have some form of socialism. Most of us would be happy to help good people on low incomes. But we resent encouraging the worst people to have lots of kids who they then raise to be just like them.

On almost every estate in this country you will find a family who ruin the lives of those around them. There is a family like that near me. She has five kids by different men, sells drugs from her front door, and claims every benefit going. They are noisy, violent and ignorant, and the kids terrorize the neighbourhood. Her 19-year-old son, for example, drives his car around the village at three in the morning in a souped up car that screeches and backfires and wakes everyone up. The Left seem to think such people are loveable rascals ‘fightin da system’. In reality, they just drag everything and everyone down to their level.

But you've not said why that's important/relevant. Whether on PAYE or self assessment, they're still paying taxes. Fail to understand what point you think you're trying to make!

I am making an assumption here, but I suspect you don't have a child that qualifies for PIP? The average cost of a disability has been estimated at £1000 per month. My son has cost us far more than that, I am able to work but only part time and only because I have absolute flexibility, when he's ill I am fortunate that i can work in the night.

So I'm about £20,000 a year down on my salary. I've spent about £100,000 on adaptions to my home (mostly added to our mortgage). Of course I had to move to an adaptable house in a cheaper area too, so there are the costs of moving too. My wheelchair adapted van that I am fortunate to get on the motability scheme has an advance payment of £14,000 fortunately thats only every 7 years. Its a transit van, in case you are thinking its some sort of luxury Winnebago. Somehow in our haze of living on adrenaline coffee and antidepressants my husband and I have managed to stay married, the statistics for divorce when there is a child with special needs in the home are heart breaking.

I could go on, I won't even discuss my electricity bill. I haven't been on a plane for over 20 years and I absolutely have not thought this is such a wonderful life I want to bring 5 more children into it.

The systems are not there, the support is not there, thank goodness the love is there because I absolutely would not still be here if it weren't.

Please, do not just generalise "oh but they're on PIP". You have absolutely no idea. They might have more money coming in but that certainly does not equate to being better off by any recognisable measure.

Don't get me wrong, there are shit parents out there, both on benefits and not. But the vast majority of the ones I see at the special school gates are just trying to make it to the end of each day.

My point was not everyone is on PAYE & often when discussing higher earners etc it’s only based on PAYE data.

@Badbadbunny you are not required to find it relevant 😁

I'm not talking about PIP as a benefit in itself but more about the fact that in the example cited it was the gateway benefit that allowed the benefit cap to be lifted. This meant that the non working l family didn't just receive the PIP but also the additional UC that they ordinarily wouldn't qualify for which can be worth many multiples of a PIP award. That's my point. It can literally make the difference of tens of thousands of pounds to some families.

You clearly have a severely disabled child and your costs are far higher than you are receiving in benefits. Don’t you think it would be a better system for you to receive your costs rather than a set amount a month?

So move?

It’s difficult though.

Other countries have experimented with trying to sterilise groups of people to stop them having kids (India). Or to take away their kids automatically (Canada and Australia). History hasn’t looked kindly on those experiments. I don’t believe there would be public support for dragging people off the street and sterilising them. Or taking away all the kids and a massive bill for it.

I don’t know the answer but I suspect it lies in more kindness, empathy and support. I don’t believe anyone is born evil, people become horrible for various reasons.

Like the woman you refer to. At some point she was just a kid. So the answer should be to support her kids in making sure they don’t end up the same.

That costs money though.

"because we created this ridiculous system where MH and ND disabilities were considered as the same as actual physical disabilities."

My son doesn't have a physical disability. He is still assessed as requiring 3:1 care. That's pretty disabled wouldn't you say so.

@LeastOfMyWorries Louder for those at the back 👏🏻.

It never takes a thread like this long to arrive at disability and how much better off we allegedly are. Personally I don’t take financial judgement from people who aren’t spending hundreds of pounds on personal care items, bedding and various other items every month. Our son is on his 2nd bed this calendar year, his 3rd tablet, and probably his billionth fitted sheet.

The amount doesn’t scratch the surface, and wouldn’t provide anyone with a life of luxury. Even if it did, they wouldn’t have the time or energy for that luxury.

What kind of society do you want op? Every country needs money to survive and pay for infrastructure. No taxes mean no infrastructure. No infrastructure equals no country.

Yes everyone is annoyed by the rise in problem families but destroying the country entirely is not an ‘appropriate response’ as the phrase has it. Dealing with the cost of living and economic decline by reducing the power of landlords would be the best way to reduce the welfare bill.

I swear some people just want a total collapse in civilization and the rivers to run with blood. And of course there are actors that would love to see that. There’s been a couple of wildly ignorant ops lately that seem to move towards that end.

Did I suggest we should pay no taxes? Did I suggest we were spending too much on infrastructure? And give the poor landlords a break. We need a strong private rental market. Studies have consistently shown that rent controls don't work and the nature of our private rental sectors means it's dominated by small scale landlords that can't unilaterally set high rents. The housing shortage is driving up rents and prices. It costs £200k in construction costs alone to build a basic three bed. The idea that housing should be cheap is just idealistic and not rooted in reality. Materials, labour, land all cost money. It's the reality of low supply, high demand and high construction costs. You don't tackle this through making it less attractive for people to build houses and rent them out

@Weetabixw how would that work? Would I have to estimate what I would have been earning had my son not been as he is? Would I have to submit receipts for his pads? How would I quantify needing new flooring more often because of the wheelchair? That wouldn't be workable. And actually, for the most part, I'm so used to it that all that would be really nice is not to have read someone saying "but why should you be better off because your son is disabled".

If I could change one thing (or maybe about ten things) it would be empathy. And kindness. And taking a moment to think of the bigger picture before you (as in people not you personally) comment or share something that's literally just there to fuel divisiveness. People all working together to actually make our country better- don't drop litter, don't leave those bloody scooters all over the pavements so I can't get the wheelchair past them, don't block lowered kerbs. If we all just thought of someone worse off (NOT FINANCIALLY) than us a bit more often I think we would all be a lot happier and threads like this constantly putting the country down wouldn't get the traction that they do.

So what are your solutions?

How many ‘breaks’ have ‘poor’ landlords give those of us who never had mummies and daddies to pay deposits for us?

We need housing. We need jobs that pay the cost of housing. We need wages that pay the cost of living. We do NOT ‘need’ a private rental market. There are other solutions. We managed far better economically without so much privatization and money being sucked out of the system by rich private individuals.

And I suggest you change the title of your op and rewrite it substantially if all you really want to do, innocently, is discuss the growing welfare bill. You also need to be prepared to discuss real change to the modern economic system that has been impoverishing us for 25 years now. Change, do people remember that word? Remember all the ‘change management’ and ‘change positivity’ crap that accompanied the forced shift to landlording and the rentier economy that has all but killed the country? Where is all that change positivity now, when real change in the world is upon us?

You've never had to live on benefits, have you?

I think it’s actually £200k to be in the top 1% now.

Your point about care homes is one of the best examples. People who pay more should get more, or at least have more choice. If you disincentivise, it doesn’t take a genius to see what will happen. Socialism’s great in theory but in practice it doesn’t work.

I don't think any child is born evil either but generational trauma is real and this is the outcome. (I'm not saying I feel sorry for the parents though because I don't)

I was unemployed and had to attend the office every week and account for my attempts at finding work. It was an interview not an on line box tick.