Welfarisation has made people utterly entitled and unable to take responsibility for themselves and their families.

[hagchic]

I grew up in a working class family. The values I was taught were that you stood on your own two feet and it was no one else's job to do what you could do for yourself.

If you were hurt, you were expected to get up and go and clean yourself up - and stop whining about it unless it was actually serious. If you were ill, you went to bed and if you were lucky some magic lucozade appeared.

If you were sad, then you were sad. If life was unfair then that was just how life was and you needed to deal with it.

You never ever sought charity or took benefits when you were able to work or put up with less. You lived to your own means, not to what you saw on TV or at school - and if you wanted that lifestyle it was up to you to get it.

Today everyone has the expectation that someone must help them, that they are obliged to help them - even before they have made any attempt to actually do the work of helping themselves. They expect luxuries like holidays, pets, new clothes and treats when they do nothing to earn this.

I think self sufficiency is a value that needs to return to our society.

So does mortgage debt.

I think that there are some groups in society who have no connection with, don't come into contact with, live in 'better' areas - from other groups who do take advantage of the benefits system and all it offers.
If you are familiar with this way of life you are going to be fully aware of how some people live like this and how they very often have an expectation for others to take on the responsibility of their choices.
Until you have seen for yourself i don't think you can understand .
I am not knocking the benefit system and the majority of claimants , i am proud to live in a country that will help its citizens when they need help.
I am talking about those who know how to work the system , those who lie and cheat and it absolutely does happen, but because of this way of life some have expectations of wanting everything handed to them on a plate and whatever their problem is becomes someones else's to solve.
I repeat, if you live a million miles away from people who live like this and you are working and self sufficient with no experience of another way of life then i can see how you may perceive this kind of response as a benefits bash, when it absolutely is not.
Living not far from a more deprived area lets you see the reality .

This 100%. When you live or grow up in areas like these you see how people/families make claiming welfare a career. How to play the system to appear disabled, creating paper trails to create “proof” of said disability. Not bothering to correct their childrens behaviour and in fact, encouraging the bad behaviour for a DLA claim. Folk like to pretend this doesn’t happen, but it’s rife in some places.

Quite happy with the point I made, thanks.

There has been a pattern creating threads to stir hate and run on MN, but I don't believe it is what the OP intended. They actually came back to the thread!

IMO the OP expressed their thoughts clumsily when questioning whether some forms of support can reduce incentives, resilience or self-reliance. They may also have romanticised certain aspects of the past. Ironically, some posters attacking the OP have done the exact same thing in order to weaponise it against today's pensioners, who are all apparently responsible for all of today's ills...

Questioning unintended consequences of the welfare state is not exactly revolutionary. Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Putnam and Robert Nisbet et al spent years effectively discussing these issues.

Your point being that you hate Christians?

You seem to like control, though. You were recently arguing passionately for the state to make age-gap relationships illegal.

That attitude reflects the financialisation of everything.

My advice- if you're likely to be affected by disability cuts - is to learn advocacy skills. The system relies on being isolated and individualised...so write to local papers and self organise local groups.

That's what the people who spread hate are doing and it's working for them.

I would argue that most religions have, at various points throughout history, done enough on their own to generate mistrust, criticism and hate. I don't need to devote much energy to attacking them. They have often done a perfectly good job of damaging their own reputation.

But you keep reaching though. When your arms get tired, your neurons could do with a bit of a workout.

Yes, youth unemployment is now at 12 percent.

Reaching? You made it clear you felt a quote from the bible was without the camp.

So life is unfair, some people are prettier, taller, more athletic, born into wealth and yes may develop health issues in later life that say makes it difficult for them to work and makes them poorer.

But isn't it also unfair to tax the person who is physically able to work and is in work, thereby making also them poorer?

Sooo, tax no one then?

That's clearly not what I'm suggesting because you need taxation to pay for law, national infrastructure (roads, water etc) and order, a justice system and a defence system.

At the extreme everything including education and healthcare could in theory be provided by individuals. Now this was tried in Victorian times and didn't work out too well. So I am most definitely not suggesting this approach.

My question though is at what level of taxation and at what level of benefits/ support does it become unfair on the working person to support the person unable to work?

I really don’t understand this line of thought. I’m just into the higher rate tax bracket, I need care (high I have to pay towards), I need a highly adapted vehicle which I also have to pay towards over my PiP award, I have additional heating costs, wheelchair costs etc etc. If I save enough to go on holiday, I have to pay double as I have to pay the carer to come too - their wage and their costs on the trip. The additional cost of being disabled, on average according to scope is an extra £1000 a month. The benefit doesn’t cover that. Why should I, just because I lost the genetic lottery, not be able to enjoy the same standard of living as my colleagues who do the same job as me, have the same qualifications as me and earn the same as me? I did everything society told me to do, I worked hard at school, my parents endlessly fought the system that tried to stop me from achieving well at school. I work. I try to contribute to society and yet because I now earn more than average I’m wrong again and I shouldn’t claim the benefit that levels things out for me a bit.
People also seem to forget the more money any of us have in our pocket the more we spend and the more goes back to the treasury in VAT and other taxes. If we have carers we are providing employment, we are paying for insurance and all sorts of other things, again paying back I to the system.
Most “high earning” disabled people aren’t earning enough to squirrel thousands and thousands away in savings or tax avoidance schemes like many non disabled high earners. Those savings do nothing for the economy.
What ever the media likes to make out, we get virtually nothing without fighting for it. It often takes years. Then we have to start again, it’s exhausting.

One working person is not supporting another that is unable to. I bet if you did the maths, someone too sick to work sitting next to you would be taking less than 1p of your yearly tax deductions.

People now too sick to work get just over £600pm. That is less than what pensioners get, and less than what some working people get in UC top ups.
On another thread right now, OP is on £31k, and gets £800 in top ups because the Gov have deemed that her income is not enough to live on. Yet someone who is unable to work is considered to be ok on £600pm. How does that make sense?

Most “high earning” non-disabled people aren’t earning enough to squirrel thousands and thousands away in savings or tax avoidance schemes.

The working person may not always be the working person though as disability can happen to anyone at any time just like the disabled person unable to work may not have always been disabled and unable to work.

There’s nothing to gloat about. PIP is a universal benefit and not means tested. If you have a severe enough disability you can be a higher rate tax payer and not see the benefit because you’re spending significant amounts supporting your disability. That’s one of the things PIP is meant to address - the poster is doing nothing wrong.

They can’t almost every European country has an equivalent disability benefit. So do America and Canada, and Australia has a means tested version.

So I've done the maths Someone on £60k Pa would pay roughly £15k in tax. Of this £15k approximately £600 is paid for disability allowances.

But the amount is largely irrelevant when the key point is that if you tax people for working and pay people who are not working then you will discourage work and encourage welfare dependency.

Funny how most Mners wernt fans of taking responsibilty for yourself and no state dictating during the lockdowns.

With the average person going on 4 holidays a year where 2 of them are international, and many of those in the above average category going on 5, 6 7 or even 8 holidays a year (often with multiple children in tow), I don't think that's true. Many of those will be saving and squirrelling as well as going on all these holidays, but those in this very large category that aren't saving could surely afford to do so if they went away a bit less. It's up to individuals how they spend their money of course but the point is that we're not a poor country - most people have plenty. It's just the people at the bottom who are struggling - income inequality is getting more and more significant.

Interesting.

You may want cross reference the ONS data for salaries by age category with the age profiles of the people taking the most holidays...

Younger people and people with children took the most holidays according to the report by ABTA. People with children under 5 went on an average of 6.5 holidays a year (2.8 of them international) and people with kids aged over 5 went on an average of 5.3 holidays (2.3 of them international). People over 45 with no kids at home went on the fewest holidays (only 2.8 - with 1.2 of those being abroad). This doesn't fit with the narrative that we're all struggling with money. Most people aren't - the problem is growing income inequality with the people at the bottom struggling to afford food while everyone else goes on endless holidays. Tax increases rather than welfare cuts are the obvious solution. Most people would simply have one less holiday and still be going away vastly more than the generations before them ever did.

https://www.abta.com/sites/default/files/media/document/uploads/ABTA%20Holiday%20Habits%202024-25.pdf

If someone is unable to work because of illness or disability, it is not possible for them to be self sufficient. The whole concept of the welfare system was to help people in this situation. It is open to be abused by people who could work and choose not to. As a society, I think it is better that mental health is openly talked about so people can get the support they need. I do agree with the OP that people were very resilient in the past, but that's because a lot of issues were ignored and not spoken about. Returning soldiers from WW2 had no support or counselling and a lot struggled with depression, alcohol dependency or took their own lives because of just being expected to get on with their lives again after suffering trauma.