May I respectfully suggest to Tory Jeremy Hunt that if the poor "stop having kids they cannot afford" that high earners should stop taking highly paid jobs if they cannot afford the tax?

[HeftyNorks]

All these tax avoidance schemes to help the poor darlings. Or do morals not apply if you are rich enough?

Making a few quick financial calculations to work out if having another baby is going to sink your budget is a fairly sensible thing to do. Being tax efficent is a legal activity. Neither seem to be moral issues.

both are legal

What did JH actually say? Anyone got a link?

Jeremy Hunt

Based on that news story I don't see how anyone can complain about a cap of £26k/year on benefits per household. That's equivalent to £36k/year pre tax.

The ONS 2009 report on annual employee gross pay in the UKwww.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_labour/ASHE-2009/2009_all_employees.pdfput the mean at £26,470 and median at £21,320. The 80th percentile is £35,733. So somebody who got £26k/year in benefits would be getting more than around 80% of employees in the UK.

From that perspective the cap seems very generous.

Looking at it again I think it was naughty of Paxman to keep nudging the word 'undeserving' in an effort to get Hunt to take the bait. The phrase 'don't have too many children' which got picked up by the press was Paxman's. It's known as the 'how often do you beat your wife?' question. There's no good answer to it.

Exactly. I don't think there is any explicit view over how many children you should or shouldn't have. The story is about the benefit cap. Clearly since its a household cap, larger families may find it more difficult.

I think the average gross household income in the UK is around £37k so the benefit cap seems to have been set at the 50% percentile. Doesn't seems unfair.

Seems fair to me too

I agree - an uncomfortable feeling as I don't often agree with anything Tory.

I think fair enough too. All families should liook at how many children thaty are likely to be able to afford before having them. I saw this, and I thought he should have just said yes, actually, if you can;t afford 5 chldren, and are unlikely ever to be able to without state help, you shouldn't have them. I think he would have got some respect for it.

The problem is that there will be some genuine cases more support is required than £26k/year (perhaps special needs children or they have octuplets or something).

The key is making sure those needing genuine help get it and the "scroungers" (in Daily Wail parlance) don't. That's a difficult issue.

UK policy seems to be to discourage people from having children as they cost so much to raise, and to import adult labour from other countries instead.

couples shouldn't be having children they cannot afford. simples.

it has nothing to do with 'following your heart'. When it comes to money, you have to follow your head and not romanticise about it. Having children is expensive.

I know a family of seven children not far from where I live - they just keep popping them out and the house is overcrowded. What is wrong with these people???

What? Paying taxes (not a choice) and having children (choice). It's hardly the same thing.

Since I can't afford another child I rather object to paying for others to do what I can't without thinking about the financial impact.

siasl I've read that disability living allowance falls outside of the benefits cap, which I guess should help in some of those cases.

Jeremy Hunt presumably got his surname turned into rhyming slang at school and is trying to live down to it...

But really, how thick does he think we are? Doesn't take many brain cells to work out that people might fall on hard times many years AFTER they've had children. Or are they going to let children be thrown out onto the streets to starve 'because your Daddy should have known 12 years ago that his company might be taken over by asset strippers and he'd be out of work'?

Although sadly it does seem there are plenty of people who are incapable of working this out for themselves.

Interesting point from Bonsoir - actually people having children is A Good Thing from society's and the economy's point of view. We aren't actually having enough children as a country to support the generations above them.

Well yes, expat, because there's no way of stopping people having babies unless you are a mad dictator who enforces mass sterilisation. Or want to throw children out onto the streets to starve because you disapprove of their parents. That old favourite of foaming-at-the-mouth Tories about handing children over to social services isn't going to work now they are sacking all the social workers, either.

Meanwhile, lots of other innocent people who have just fallen on hard times through no fault of their own will suffer if the government decides to pursue these policies. Comes down to whether your political leaning is towards the sort of people who are happy to cause suffering, or happy to cause it if some of the people they hit are the ones they dislike, or with the sort of people who try to avoid suffering in the first place.

I don't understand why you would have more children than you can afford or have time for. There are plenty of free contraception options. It is a choice.

You can stop additional benefits if people have more babies whilst not working and claiming, I guess. Or stop additional benefits after the first two children, for example.

edam - I don't think it is a Tory policy it is just logical. I did not sleep walk into having a child. DH and I saved and saved and saved before we even started trying. We made sure that we could afford it. Why is it so wrong to expect that of others?

Rhyming slang was my first thought too edam

I think this is purely to placate the DM readers

it's just so sloppy. Especially just before you wield the axe to put loads of people out of work. Surely every case has to be assessed on its own merits- not on some arbitrary figure plucked out of thin air?

Presumably if you had fallen on hard times you'd be quite happy to be given a tax-free income of £26k? I certainly would be. How many families are there who receive more than £26k in benefits anyway? I've read it is comparatively few. And of those, how many have "fallen on hard times" and how many have simply never been able to support themselves in the first place? It's all very DM but presumably those stories about families who haven't worked in 3 generations or whatever are not entirely fabricated. Why should those families "earn" more than the national average?

Jolly, the point is people's circumstances change. Time is linear. People who have a job today may not have one tomorrow or next year or the year after that. Through no fault of their own - often someone else's fault, in fact, looking at the way the economy has been 'run', if you can call it that. You may have saved and saved and saved but if a disaster, ill health or redundancy or outsourcing or whatever hit your family, you would find you were in need of help yourself. Unless you've got a couple of million put away, in which case it's not very nice to be spiteful towards those who have less than you.

Exactly. Agreeing with Edam.

You can have children and be able to afford them and a) lose your job b) your husband runs off c) you have to leave your husband because he is an utter &&&& to you d) you get pregnant accidentally e) your husband forces sex on you f) you are a practising Catholic. There is only a tiny tiny minority of people who deliberately choose to have more children because they know they will have financial support from the govt. And in the main, that financial support is still not enough to lift those families out of poverty, despite what the DM spouts about wide-screen TV's and the like. The more children you have, the more likely you are to be living in poverty - that is the case now as reported by poverty action groups - and having benefits capped is only more likely to send those families deeper into penury and the children will suffer more.

This country needs an increase in the birth-rate, not a decrease. We have 3% of families with more than three children now, compared to 8% in the Sixties.

And the benefits cap hits the children through no fault of their own. Unless you enforce mass sterilisation of those with two children or make men and women sleep separately in hostels or something, you are not going to be able to enforce the "fewer children" approach anyway, and if children are born, why should they suffer through lack of benefits? The govt has a moral obligation to provide according to need, not according to whether they think someone has behaved badly and therefore their children can grow up in a deprived poverty-ridden household.

The benefits cap combined with JH's comments are, I believe, positively abhorrent and actually deeply repugnant policies, if not also immoral.

My circumstances changed three years ago and I ended up on benefits. I have two ds.

Hate to agree but I do. I didn't then go out and have the two remaining dcs that I wished for. Instead I concentrated on getting us out of the situation, which I have.

So although the argument regarding people losing their job etc. is valid it is only a small portion of the story. There are plenty of people who have scant regard on how their children are raised, they have children simply because they can. It isn't a right, it isn't an entitlement but if you are going to concentrate on the welfare of your child then you have to take into consideration if you can afford more.

Hardly immoral. What is immoral is acting without responsibility.

Perhaps I should go out and have two children, doesn't really matter who the father/s is/are after all does it? Then I can be like my neighbour who is complaining that their fourth child is going to mean they're cramped in their house. Council won't (probably can't) move them and, how awful, the kids will have to share a room. Has worked for my two so far. Neither parent works, in the near 10 years I've lived here he has only ever had one job that lasted two weeks over Christmas. Yet they manage a flat-screen tv, plenty of booze and a holiday once a year.

You cannot be completely dependent your whole life. It isn't healthy for you and it isn't healthy for your children.

I do think on here there are some who would bash this simply because it is a Tory policy right enough.