Could you manage to live on $777.75 a week?

[The Stranger]

Or, here's a thought... Don't Have Kids!

Professionals can have to put off having children for a decade or more for both the career and to get enough money to look after them. Or of course one can get knocked up at 15 and just keep on going. Don't worry if you can't cope - the state will step in as no Child Shall Be Left Behind - which means a blank cheque. The more you screw your life up, the more you'll get. If your kids misbehave at school they'll get special tutors and even trips out to bribe them to behave.

I am not saying my upbringing was perfect, but I learnt early on that things need to be paid for and frankly my parents didn't have much money. Not poor enough for massive handouts of course. I learned that to get things I'd have to work for many years, and the reward for hard work was a better quality of life.

If you've seen your parents get everything for free, then why bother? Society provides for free without effort on one's part.

lol have no children and allow no immigrants, i think this is a good policy. within a few decades there will be no overpopulated areas in the "West". Prolly there will be nothing left here but that may be negative speculation.

[The Stranger]

Not only could I live on it but I would have enough left over for all the drugs and anal sex I could handle

u pay to get ur **** ****ed?

EDIT BY COUNTARACH: Language warning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmOehfTAyCk

[econ21]

Doesn't that incentivize welfare babies? In the US, when welfare was reformed in the late 90's, all of the child benefits were excluded. Guess how people are still living off welfare in 2012?

Perhaps like in the US, child benefit is a very popular part of the welfare system in the UK. It used to be universal, which - along with the fact that it was paid directly to the mother - may account for that. Recently, it was withdrawn from the highest tax payers. I am not against withdrawing it, although the UK does not suffer from too many babies and without immigration could be said to have too few. However, the reason the House of Lords voted to exclude child benefit from the welfare cap is that it seemed unfair to withdraw the benefit from households on benefits getting £26000 per year and keep paying it to households earning up to £80000 per year.

Why should someone paying a lot of money to live in central London have to pay for their neighbors as well?

AFAIK, the whole of the UK pays for the welfare system - it's not a case of paying for your immediate neighbours. All national taxes go into a pot and some of that is spent on the poor. But those paying a lot to live in central London should definitely pay to help the poor - they include the richest earners in the UK (those working in the City of London).

I am not sure I used the right phrase "central London" - but "inner London" is where 54% of those affected by this change live. It includes a lot of quite poor areas that have experienced sharply rising house prices over the years. It's a strange situation, with newly gentrified areas co-existing with some of the roughest places in the UK and is part of the background to the riots we experienced last year. If you think about the contingencies that cause households to fall into poverty, it's not obvious that them moving home is necessarily the best thing. For example, if someone falls sick or becomes incapacitated, loses their job etc. it's not clear to me that we should add to that the stress and cost of moving home and being uprooted from ones community. Especially, as London is quite a vibrant economy with excellent health services. There can also be social tensions among the new host communities if benefit claimants are driven into their areas in large numbers.

Back to the OP: $777.75 a week sounds a lot, but another way of saying it is £108 per person per week[1]. Which is not a lot when you factor in London rents.

[1]The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that 64,0000 households will be affected by the cap. They include 90,0000 adults and 220,000 children. So on average, those households have 1.3 adults and 3.3 children: £26000/[52*(1.3+3.3)]=£108

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2...eat?intcmp=239

[ajaxfetish]

Taking a quick look at my records, it seems my family of 3 has been living on an average of about $486 a week for the 8 months after my son was born (haven't added the last couple months in yet). I think we could probably manage to get by on about $300 more than we have been.

Ajax

[Gaius Scribonius Curio]

One thing that hasn't been mentioned, and I will state for the record that this is only in my limited experience, is differences in the cost of living.

I'm currently in Australia but am originally from the UK and my partner's cousins live in the US. Based on this I can state that the costs in Australia are much higher than in the UK, and that they seem to be more expensive there than the US. This could account for some of the differences raised earlier in this thread...

[naut]

im very interested that the austrailans are the ones who seem to think it is not enough money.

IIRC the average salary here is $44,000 odd a year. Probably explains it.

But, food and other necessities are 30-40% more expensive here (except meat) than in the US and many European nations.

[econ21]

One thing that hasn't been mentioned, and I will state for the record that this is only in my limited experience, is differences in the cost of living.

Housing costs in London are insane. The average rental price for a 3 bedroom property is over £3000 per month. This welfare cap would pay for only 2/3 of that and leave nothing left for food or whatever.

http://www.rentright.co.uk/london/3_rrpi.aspx

[rory_20_uk]

Oh no! Couldn't do that. The only good way to spend goverment money is on bombs, foreign occupations, and bolstering clandestine government agencies. God forbid we spend more helping the poor.

Who in this thread is advocating this?

lol have no children and allow no immigrants, i think this is a good policy. within a few decades there will be no overpopulated areas in the "West". Prolly there will be nothing left here but that may be negative speculation.

Keep taking the tablets mate... Let us know when you're feeling up to addressing the topic.

I'm sure someone must have mentioned the fact that companies / the very rich avoid taxes... and therefore addressing welfare shouldn't be done as it's an either / or situation.

Housing costs in London are insane. The average rental price for a 3 bedroom property is over £3000 per month. This welfare cap would pay for only 2/3 of that and leave nothing left for food or whatever.

http://www.rentright.co.uk/london/3_rrpi.aspx

Yes. And I couldn't afford to live there. I have for a few years lived in the periphery of London, generally in the nastier bits. Should I get s subsidy so I can do so? No, I've moved out altogether.

It is "odd" that when unemployed are grouped together in estates these do not become very pleasant areas - these are groups of people with vastly more than the average amount of free time and so could ensure their environment is kept clean and tidy.

[Craterus]

Easily. And, of course, it's far too much. People should get the cost of food (own brand prices), rent, utilities and some sort of luxury allowance (cars and cable are luxuries). If you want McVitie's jaffa cakes - God knows why, they're not as good as the own brand ones (worse jaffa:cake ratio, if you had to ask) - then find a job, or dip into the luxury bank.

Why is the thread title in dollars? There was a time when non-US threads in the Backroom had the self-respect to deal in their own respective currencies. What went wrong? That's the real question we should be asking ourselves.

I'm disappointed.

[InsaneApache]

It sounds more in dollars.

[Furunculus]

I can't help thinking this cap is a short term populist measure that avoids tackling the deeper issues. But it will go down well with the Daily Mail and Sun readers. And Orgahs it seems, oh well. Well played Mr Cameron.

Civil society only exists along as their is popular consent to restrictions in your negative liberty (via taxation) in order to improve the positive liberty of the group as a whole (via Gov't services).

Without that consent you pave the road to insurrection.

I don't believe there is such consent for a level of benefits that approximates a wage of £36,000 (far more than i get), and if that is threatening to undermine the common consent to collective social provision then it is not populist, it is flat-out necessary!

[Furunculus]

What kills me about conservatives is that they often don't realize how the money is being spent in the first place. They whine and moan about welfare, but turn a blind eye to untold hundreds of billions of dollars going into constitutionally questionable intelligence activities. There is a very obvious moral contradiction here that makes the entire "anti-welfare" argument incredibly suspect and borderline offensive to common sense.

maybe that is because we believe the defence of the realm to be the primary job of the nation-state, and outside that we look for the minimum possible interference in our lives with the obvious corollary that self-reliance is an important trait to foster in society.

[gaelic cowboy]

maybe that is because we believe the defence of the realm to be the primary job of the nation-state, and outside that we look for the minimum possible interference in our lives with the obvious corollary that self-reliance is an important trait to foster in society.

Depends on what you mean by defense of the realm.

Does making sure you have suitable candidates for millitary life through HSE or educational spending come to an equal or greater concern as actual military spending.

I only ask because it seems to be important to yerself so we would need to ask who decides where the line is.

[rory_20_uk]

Defence spending in the UK is pretty small as a percentage of the total budget.

I think you will find that a number of people look to the state / others to provide everything in their life as it is a birthright. Some state that the trend to download content for free is further causing the expectation that things are provided on a plate with no requirement to invest time or money in achieving them. Labour recently has stated that they would not increase the wage of public sector workers - to howls of protest from the Unions who still have the thinking that the State is a piggy bank to be squeezed for all the money possible.

What are "suitable candidates"? The Foreign Legion seems to manage well by having entry requirements of 18+... and that's it. The percentage that require to be highly trained academically is pretty small. Most vocational skills are best learnt undertaking the vocation. Does a grasp of French suddenly make one a better citizen, or the ability to calculate the height of a building from the distance from it and the angle of inclination? The Navigator needs to know where the ship is heading, but those below decks in the trireme merely need to know how to use an oar.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

I don't understand why government doesn't use a transitionary welfare system. Peg the amount paid to the calculated poverty line given the circumstances. Allow them to get jobs while continuing to get welfare for extra money. As their salary increases, they report it to the tax man and their welfare decreases by a slightly less amount to encourage more hard work.

Oh no! Couldn't do that. The only good way to spend goverment money is on bombs, foreign occupations, and bolstering clandestine government agencies. God forbid we spend more helping the poor.

Guys.... we're talking about the UK (in this case), not the US - we have graduated benefits.

As to Child Benefit, it is regressive with the way it is because (and I know this from where I live) men get women, have them pump out babies and get a new one once she's past childbearing. Children become comodities and women become cash cows - capping child benefit stops that.

[rory_20_uk]

It's a two way street. Women get men to get them pregnant and then since in many cases they are financially better off without the man sticking around they get rid of them. If the man wants to stay around they can then fight through the courts to see their child - with the assumption being that the children are best off with the mother and that contact can be delayed as long as there are any outstanding allegations by the mother as to the fitness of the father. The other way around appear to be ignored. Since this processs can take years before contact is even gained many think they'd be better off starting again elsewhere.

[Furunculus]

Depends on what you mean by defense of the realm.

Does making sure you have suitable candidates for millitary life through HSE or educational spending come to an equal or greater concern as actual military spending.

I only ask because it seems to be important to yerself so we would need to ask who decides where the line is.

i really don't intend to define it at all, merely reject the notion that there is some inherent iniquity or contradiction as posited by GC.

[econ21]

I don't believe there is such consent for a level of benefits that approximates a wage of £36,000 (far more than i get), and if that is threatening to undermine the common consent to collective social provision then it is not populist, it is flat-out necessary!

The reason I think this is a populist measure is because it is an ad hoc quick fix. Why £500 per household? Why not £450 or £550? Why not £100 per person?

The welfare system has arisen by trying to estimate how much people need given various contingencies:

A for housing
B for kids
C for disability
etc

Then to say they need A+B+C+... but can't have it because the total is over £500 per week just seems inconsistent and irrational.

I agree that a case can be made for reforming A - who benefits from the very high London housing allowances? I suspect typically the landlords. Or reforming B if we are afraid of "incentivising" babies (I'm not but apparently many are in this thread). C (disability) may be ok in many cases, but perhaps going to many who don't need it etc.

But fixing A, B and C is difficult. It would cause political problems for Boris in London, would challenge the middle class entitlement for childbenefit (electoral suicide for Cameron), would bring the government into conflict with doctors and disability rights campaigners (guess who would win?).

So we take the popularist route - splash big payouts and bad cases over the headlines, then watch as 284,000 people on benefits arbitrarily lose money to save the taxpayer £150m.

The Lords have done the right thing in asking the government to think again.

[Centurion1]

Depends on what you mean by defense of the realm.

Does making sure you have suitable candidates for millitary life through HSE or educational spending come to an equal or greater concern as actual military spending.

I only ask because it seems to be important to yerself so we would need to ask who decides where the line is.

uhhhhh if by suitable candidates means physical fit, mentally stable, and no health concerns then I think the money would probably be well spent.

[rory_20_uk]

The reason I think this is a populist measure is because it is an ad hoc quick fix. Why £500 per household? Why not £450 or £550? Why not £100 per person?

The welfare system has arisen by trying to estimate how much people need given various contingencies:

A for housing
B for kids
C for disability
etc

Then to say they need A+B+C+... but can't have it because the total is over £500 per week just seems inconsistent and irrational.

I agree that a case can be made for reforming A - who benefits from the very high London housing allowances? I suspect typically the landlords. Or reforming B if we are afraid of "incentivising" babies (I'm not but apparently many are in this thread). C (disability) may be ok in many cases, but perhaps going to many who don't need it etc.

But fixing A, B and C is difficult. It would cause political problems for Boris in London, would challenge the middle class entitlement for childbenefit (electoral suicide for Cameron), would bring the government into conflict with doctors and disability rights campaigners (guess who would win?).

So we take the popularist route - splash big payouts and bad cases over the headlines, then watch as 284,000 people on benefits arbitrarily lose money to save the taxpayer £150m.

The Lords have done the right thing in asking the government to think again.

Keeping a system that has several parts increases complexity and hence has both higher overheads, higher unintentional error and increased risk of fraud.

Having benefits that are close to the net earnings of someone on an above average salary should be fine. This will mean there is an upper limit on the size of one's family (as is true of working families) and where one can live (as is true of working families). This does not meet that disabled people need to use this money for their carers / alterations to their house as this comes out of the NHS budget and in some cases will be vastly more.

If you can't live your life in this sort of money, then frankly you need to alter your life - be that alter what you spend the money on, or move to a less expensive area.

[Furunculus]

The reason I think this is a populist measure is because it is an ad hoc quick fix. Why £500 per household? Why not £450 or £550? Why not £100 per person?

i believe £36,000 is the average household income.

[gaelic cowboy]

uhhhhh if by suitable candidates means physical fit, mentally stable, and no health concerns then I think the money would probably be well spent.

Yes thats exactly what I mean.

A western country can hardly defend itself in todays world if it's population suffer chronic health problems or rampant illiteracy.

[Centurion1]

Yes thats exactly what I mean.

A western country can hardly defend itself in todays world if it's population suffer chronic health problems or rampant illiteracy.

I mean its not even about defense its about competitiveness and not becoming a nation of degenerate rejects that are so out of shape and mentally unstable the state plays mother hen.

[classical_hero]

im very interested that the austrailans are the ones who seem to think it is not enough money.

Hell GC when (god willing) i commission i will make literally that much as a 2lt.

thats a ridiculously high number if you ask me you could probably easily live as a smaller family. I should say, "easily" it would not be a comfortable life and certainly a lower standard of living compared to what i live like.

If I ever want to own my own home, then that is most definitely not enough to get me a house of my own. Also cost of living is much higher in Australia than it is in most places since we did not experience a slow down like much of the rest of the world.

[econ21]

i believe £36,000 is the average household income.

Thanks, so it's an average - that explains the sum. But why per household? Average household size in the UK is 2.3. For those households affected by the cap it is 4.6. If there was some allowance for the size of the household - such as excluding child benefit - it would be more reasonable and have passed through the Lords.

[Papewaio]

Two problems. Do they have more children/larger households to get more benefits?

Second issue is if the cap is per household then the consequences are pretty clear given current welfare eugenics. The fathers will decamp and get another home leaving the mother and offspring in a separate house. This will double the amount of income available and further shatter marriage/de facto relationships. End of the day if you reward a sequence of actions don't be surprised about them salivating when the bell tolls.

[Papewaio]

Two problems. Do they have more children/larger households to get more benefits?

Second issue is if the cap is per household then the consequences are pretty clear given current welfare eugenics. The fathers will decamp and get another home leaving the mother and offspring in a separate house. This will double the amount of income available and further shatter marriage/de facto relationships. End of the day if you reward a sequence of actions don't be surprised about them salivating when the bell tolls.

[rory_20_uk]

Two problems. Do they have more children/larger households to get more benefits?

Second issue is if the cap is per household then the consequences are pretty clear given current welfare eugenics. The fathers will decamp and get another home leaving the mother and offspring in a separate house. This will double the amount of income available and further shatter marriage/de facto relationships. End of the day if you reward a sequence of actions don't be surprised about them salivating when the bell tolls.

Often the case already, where there is more money without a useless, unemployed man. As has also been said the child benefits should be capped for the first two children.

The only "solution" would be to give money for marriage - even then who is to say it is a genuine marriage? There will always be ways of gaming the system. At least this would be capped in the new proposed system.

[econ21]

Child benefit is £13.40 a week (after the first child). Given the cost of rearing kids - financial, in time and emotional - I just don't see that as a big enough incentive to induce increased fertility. You'd get about that by working a couple of hours or so on minimum wage.

Papewaio, I do agree with your second point that the per household cap will induce family breakup, but that's a problem with the government's proposed cap rather than with my argument that any cap should be per person (or per adult equivalent, if we think children have lower financial needs than adults).

The argument is not controversial: no serious economist would measure individual well being per household without adjusting for household size - it's like measuring Chinese citizens' well being by looking at China's GDP not GDP per capita. It's nonsense.

[Papewaio]

I'd like to be able to split income within a married houshold and a higher tax free threshold for income earners with children.

Until androids of Asimov variety come along, the children will be the doctors and nurses and carers looking after the perma DINKS. So we should be looking after our future prosperity.