Brainless BBCer interviews London Man who witnessed riots

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The figures are from the Department for Work and Pensions, as far as I can tell it includes incapacity benefits, unemployment, the housing benefit, the single parent pensions, the council tax benefit (which pays the council rates), the local housing allowance and income support, the state pensions, carers allowance, constant attendance allowance, the disability living allowance, severe disablement allowance, the mobility supplement and the income related employment support allowance. The full article published by Civitas is available on the guardian website.

I take your point though. In the UK student support is related to income, so welfare and student income are grouped together.

State pensions- that definitely does not sound like what would traditionally be defined as "welfare" to me. Several of the other things sound like stuff the US probably handles as tax credits of various forms. Certainly tax breaks are not usually regarded as welfare.

It is important to understand that the British Tax Credit system is not a tax cut. It is not related to the claimants tax bill. It is payed out in installments (monthly or weekly), based on how much the person earned the previous year. Tax credits have been a major part of the British welfare system since 2003. They are means tested and aimed at people with low incomes.

In effect, it is not different from a tax credit. At one point in the Bush administration, if I recall correctly, a tax cut was administered by having the government mail out checks.

Are you trying to be tricky with terminology or do you have a point? Are you contending that the British Tax Credit system should not be considered welfare? Remember it comes under the Welfare Reform Bill, I also suggest you check out the Department of Work and Pensions 21st Century Welfare Consultations set up to reform benefits and tax credits. You have so far argued that student welfare is necessary and I certainly agree; as I think a good deal of welfare is. The British Tax Credit system is a welfare payment, poorly named and based off of the yearly income and handed out at regular intervals and is designed to support job seekers.

I just don't think what is being termed "welfare" is necessarily matching the mental associations people have with that word.

Congratulations, you have discovered the interesting world of spin doctoring.

Because it puts forward a narrative I consider wrong - that we're seeing ther effects of the "excesses" of the British welfare state and a return "back to the basics" will fix the problem.



There's two options I see.

• Crackdown on tax evading corporations and start taxing the wealthy (the Uncut Movement's strategy) and use the funds to diretly hire thousands of jobless Britons for public works.
• Print money and use it to hire jobless Britons for public works (shouldn't be that inflationary given the underutilized capacity).

Also from the article



The lower dependence on benefits, if "benefit dependence" is largely driven by an aging population (THAT PAID INTO THE PENSION SYSTEM), isn't surprising (less people had paid into the recently formed pension system, less people were eligible for pension benefits from that said system).

Also, given that full employment was a greater priority of governments than inflation control in the early post-war years may also explain less low-income households seeking benefits.



Or a society with a lot of old people who were young and just starting to work at the beginning of the basic state pension system.



New Labour's tax credit system was based on the ideology of "mutual obligation" or tying assistance with incentives to work.



I think investors will have little confidence in a country with persistently high unemployment, even if the government's running annual budget surpuses (and I really doubt that'd happen, a weak economy automatically hikes the deficit).



I assume you're including basic state pensions in this, which really aren't "welfare" in the sense of a means tested program given to people who are unemployed just for the shake of survival so much as a program they paid into with the understanding that they'd be getting payments past a certain age. In that case, I'd be quite ambivalent on the cap.



Source and context, please.

Orwell, Canada's Conservative Party has made prodigious usage of tax credits. While they're less effective at relieving the stress for various families than directly providing public services and complicate up the tax code, they're good at "eating away" traditional functions of the state, namely directly administering various programs.

Uh, it's more you who is trying to be tricky with terminology. You're using the instance of a state pension driven increase in social program spending and the mailing out of conditional tax credits as evidence that there's a hereditary, blank-cheque no-strings attached, welfare mentality that's producing a culture prone to criminality.

British tax credits seem conditional on either being working poor (in which case, providing a tax credit incentivizes said person to be working poor rather than jobless, purely on assitance, poor) or having children. While people can abuse the latter, over all the system (especially the tax credit for working poor people) doesn't seem indicative of a "lazy, idleness while sucking off the state - I don't need a job", integenerational dependence problem you're characterizing the London riots as springing from. Conditional tax credits are not unconditional handouts.

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/taxcredits/start ... redits.htm

Regardless, the idea that cutting benefits or tying them to "mutual obligation" (whatever the hell that would mean, especially since the Working Tax Credit still counts as a welfare-dependence style "handout" to you) will solve the sociological problems is unreasonable. There will always be the jobless in an economy where monetary policy is based on NAIRU, whether the state, the Church, or family provides for them is of little difference.

I agree, I am not sure the Tories do though.



Risky move, since I am not an economist I cannot evaluate it.



I think cuts to welfare in the UK are necessary. It does not follow that I think the vast majority of people on welfare in the UK are not legitimate customers whose needs ought to be met. Orwell pointed to student support and I certainly do not think that this ought to go. Neither do I think that aged pensioners ought to have their benefits stopped. I am most likely in favor of the larger part of the UK welfare state. What I take issue with is that it has one of the highest levels of welfare dependence, an unaffordably high level and an unnecessarily high level of welfare dependence. It simply does not follow that because I state this, that it is fine to attempt to paint me as someone who is against welfare. Quite a shameless tactic on your part.



The aging population cannot account for all of the increase... are you seriously claiming that it ought to?



Once again you seem to not recognize any difference in degree. The tax credit system often paid more money than a job. Further, it was paid out on how much you earned the year before, if you earned more the next year, you had to pay back the difference; hardly an incentivised system.



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... douts.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politic ... eveal.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politic ... -home.html



Let me ask you the opposite. Do you think that they UK does not pay out too much in benefits? Or that welfare dependence cannot be linked to criminality?


From Iain Duncan Smith:

"A system that was originally designed to help support the poorest in society is now trapping them in the very condition it was supposed to alleviate. Instead of helping, a deeply unfair benefits system too often writes people off. The proportion of people parked on inactive benefits has almost tripled in the past 30 years to 41% of the inactive working age population. That is a tragedy. We must be here to help people improve their lives – not just park them on long-term benefits.

"We must not underestimate the challenge ahead. One of the biggest problems is that for too many people work simply does not pay. For some people, the move from welfare into work means they face losing more than 95 pence for every additional £1 they earn. As a result, the poor are being taxed at an effective tax rate that far exceeds the wealthy. We have in effect taken away the reward and left people with the risk. That must and will change.

Evidence of the scale of the challenge is set out in a report published today by the Government. State of the Nation: Poverty, worklessness and welfare dependency in the UK highlights some of the key problems facing the country including:

New analysis showing that 1.4 million people in the UK have been on an out-of-work benefit or nine or more of the last 10 years;

Income inequality in the UK is now at its highest level since comparable statistics began in 1961;

Social mobility in Britain is worse than in the USA, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Canada, Finland and Denmark;

A higher proportion of children grow up in workless households in the UK than in any other EU country.

A new Cabinet Committee will also be set up, chaired by Iain Duncan Smith with cabinet colleagues from across Government, including the Treasury, Home Office, Health and Communities and Local Government, to tackle the underlying causes of deep-rooted poverty in Britain.

From me:
Any sane response to these figures is going to require cuts to some people's welfare. If you think otherwise you are welcome to try and convince me of it.

Gotta wonder when American cities are going to go up in flames.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Lol, it's always White racism that's to blame, isn't it. As if the British police have never shot at a White person before.
Since you obviously know so much about policing in London, I wonder if you've ever heard of Harry Stanley? He was shot by the police in London in 1999. It later turned out that the object he was carrying was not a gun, as the police had thought, but a table leg. Oddly enough, his death did not then provoke three days of rioting.

By the way, perhaps the following reporter is politically correct enough for your liking:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyzbZrUdfEg[/youtube]

Here's an interviewer treating Darcus Howe with the respect he deserves.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vou_Ani-lKE[/youtube]

I can't even find figures for the allowances of all the services and subsidies available. A standard American SSI or welfare check for a single individual is only worth about 50% more than just the British housing benefit for a single individual. That doesn't include food, transportation, clothing, kids, I can't even remember the whole list. It seems to be worth at least twice the maximum value of services available to an individual in California (which is higher than the rest of the nation) and that doesn't even include trying to compare healthcare services. The "poor oppressed minorities fighting their oppressors" have it far better than their American or even Canadian counterparts, and better than anywhere else for that matter. Since many of them are immigrants, perhaps they need to be made to reflect on what services they would have been given back home under a system of sharia law or under the rule of the local warlord or witch-doctor. The government seems to give them more than enough money for designer clothes, real bling-bling, Droids, Blackberries and iPhones that they use for malicious activities, when they rioted they didn't seem interested in bread and oranges and they seemed well-fed. Perhaps if there were markets with meat and produce stands picked clean rather than electronics stores with laptop and flat screen TV shelves picked clean, I might have been more sympathetic. They seem to have lots of time on their hands, so perhaps their benefits need to be made more basic and if they want more money, work crews can be made available for them. Those cracks in the pavement aren't going to patch themselves.

It will probably beyond my why the British government let in a flood of people from the third world that have nothing to offer the economy. It's like the government was begging them "Please, help us create crime waves and a level of government spending that will bankrupt us! We can't do it without you! We don't like having stability! Can you please help us?". So now, they are going to have to look at going back to the basics for restoring public order. Those communities will need to get used to armed gang members getting shot, getting their asses kicked if they attack someone unprovoked, give the police plenty of bean bags, rubber bullets (and keep real ones handy), and let them get their batting practice in if the "poor oppressed minorities" ever try to burn the place down again! If I was the Home Secretary, there would have been SAS troops in London PD uniforms if there was any legal loophole that allowed me to do so!