Monday 2 July 2012

Benefit Myths


The tories keep repeating them but its worth noting that they are mostly hot air.



Parents of children under 18 get child benefit, £20 for the first and £15 each a week for any more. That barely covers milk/food/nappies, not enough for clothes. The idea that people have children for the benefits is tosh. But thats just the sort if myth the right wing like to spread.



I found some links to benefit myths from the past, click on the link for the full article, ive just copied a bit of the text.



This is intetesting from 1995

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1302



"Five Media Myths About Welfare



1. Poor women have more children because of the "financial incentives" of welfare benefits.



Repeated studies show no correlation between benefit levels and women's choice to have children. (See, for example, Urban Institute Policy and Research Report, Fall/93.) States providing relatively higher benefits do not show higher birth rates among recipients.

2. We don't subsidize middle-class families.

3. The public is fed up with spending money on the poor.

4. We've spent over $5 trillion on welfare since the '60s and it hasn't worked.

5. Anyone who wants to get off welfare can just get a job."



More recently from the new statesman:

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/cameron-repeating-housing-benefit-myth



"It is meaningless of Cameron to claim that the housing benefit budget is "too large" without considering why. The inflated budget, which will reach £23.2bn this year, is the result of a conscious choice by successive governments to subsidise private landlords rather than invest in affordable social housing. Yet rather than addressing the problem of stagnant wages and excessive rents, Cameron, in a bid to appease his querulous party, has chosen to squeeze the already squeezed.

That he should do so by abolishing housing benefit for under-25s is particularly egregious. Of the 380,000 young people who claim the benefit, a significant number do so because they have been thrown out by their parents. As Shelter notes, "Last year nearly 10,000 households in priority need were recognised as homeless after they were thrown out by their parents. Many more won’t have shown up in the statistics and will have resorted to sofa surfing, hostels or at worst the streets."

Others may be unable to live at home after their parents divorced or downsized or, as Petra Davies previously noted on the site, may have been rejected due to their sexuality. As she noted, around 25 per cent of the young homeless population in urban areas is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.

But such objections will do little to deter Cameron's drive to shrink the state. With his latest attack on the working poor, he has finally outed himself as a compassionless Conservative."



And it can end up here:

"@DrPetra: Cameron's attack on the 'feckless poor' has a very long history http://t.co/0JEE8VzZ a useful history,but sad even needs to be written."



Time for a change

5 comments:

howard thomas said...

The predicted £23 billion housing benefit cost is caused by much more than 'greedy landlords'. Rent and property prices work by 'supply and demand'. The sharp rise in the cost of housing benefit to the UK in recent years has been fuelled by the open door immigration poilicy of the last government and the inability or unwillingness of this one to change net immigration levels. Coupled with a very low number of dwellings being built at present its difficult to see how this is going to change any time soon. Before you go 'off on one' Adrian, its not the fault of the immigrants themselves, but the system that has allowed in excessive numbers without being able to properly cater for the resulting rise in demand for accommodation. Flooding the job market with cheaper labour has kept wages and therefore inflation down, but on the other side of the coin accommodation costs have risen which make it all that much more difficult for those on lower wages to make ends meet and fuels the rise in housing benefit costs.
The ideal scenario would be where the average couple on average wages with an average family were able to afford to pay their way without assistance. I can't see this happening any time soon unfortunately as the figures are so badly out of line at present and governments don't seem to have a clue as to what to do about it.

Adrian Windisch said...

Dod you read any of the post and links before the response Howard?

1 there never has been an open door policy, show me a link or stop repeating this
2 building more homes in the most crowded areas are not the answer. Creating jobs in impoverished areas makes more sence. Using empty buildingd would help, along with underused homes with empty rooms. Particularly empry second homes.
3 nothing wrong with using the law against illegal immigranrs, though i feel sorry for them. Some left their home countries because we have helped mess them up. The poorest will suffer from climate change first

howard thomas said...

I don't need to show any 'link' to know that immigration levels in the UK are far too high and having effects on the living stanards ie. wages and accommodation costs.
Would you be suggesting that it has made no difference?
You talk about "stagnant wages and excessive rents" and yet you seem unable to look for the cause !
Might I also suggest that you proof read what you write before pressing the button

Adrian Windisch said...

Im not surprised you havent provided a link, as i dont think one exists. There is no open door policy so please stop saying there is.

Resources are indeed being stretched, immigration is not the only cause but its all you seem interested in.

I would stop cutting immigration budgets for a start.

I write on a phone so not easy to stop typos

howard thomas said...

Adrian.....Links are not necessary to prove anything. My conclusions come from my observations . The term 'open door immigration' has been widely used to describe the fact that immigration has been , and still is, running at levels far higher than it used to. It is just a term. Net immigration last year was 252,000, one of the highest numbers on record. Resources are certainly stretched. Although we all know that there are other reasons for the shortage of housing are you seriously trying to say that adding 3 million to our population over the last 10 to 12 years has had no effect?