Thursday, January 26, 2006

Incapacity benefit: I'm chewing over and mentally writing a response to this topic

In the meantime, some 'debates' and rants at Bloggers4labour.

3 comments:

Neil said...

Rupert Murdoch argues for lower taxes but he pays under 10p in the pound on his earnings, and has done for at least the last decade.

Most people on benefits (of any sort) are just getting by. By all means clamp down on organised fraud but there is an argument that most "fraud" is petty and often not deliberate - AND costs more to recover than it saves.

This needs more study but there is a case for giving every adult a guaranteed income. Say everyone gets 100 ukp paid into their bank account every week.

Simple. No bureaucracy.

It's paid for by increasing taxes, and lowering thresholds; AND having a rigorous pursuit of anyone earning over this amount and not paying tax; AND the savings in administration.

AND Ernest Hemingway would be proud of the number of conjunctives I'm using.

Lisa Rullsenberg said...

Anyone out there prepared to mention the S word?

Socialism?

Unknown said...

The proposal is surely about targetting benefits better/more fairly, not targetting people on benefit - in the sense of victimising them - which seems to be the claim.

Also, I don't accept that every policy proposal can be boiled down to the govt. either being able to spend more money, or having to save money, when the whole purpose of this plan would appear to be getting people into work and opening up opportunities.

I'm not sure that socialism is compatible with having incomes at all, let alone welfare benefits. Or is that communism? Either way, there's only so much you can do within this competitive, interdependent, capitalist world of ours.