Cash cards for welfare?
21 December 2012
Is an idea mentioned by Iain Duncan Smith in a very limited form for drug addicts and such like who will only be able to buy food and clothes with them and not drugs.
Is an idea mentioned by Iain Duncan Smith in a very limited form for drug addicts and such like who will only be able to buy food and clothes with them and not drugs.
But is this not an idea worthy of a more widespread use?
A lot of people are able to spend benefit money on cigarettes, smart-phones and alcohol and this cannot be regarded as a good use of public money. If people want such luxuries then they should work to get them and not have them paid for by the taxpayer.
Time to consider stopping cash payments to working age claimants who are fit for work and to give them such a card instead....
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This is my last blog until the New Year so I will wish you all a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
- pre- empted me barry i was about to start a thread on it, unworkable anyway as seen in the past with vouchers given to aylum seekers. struggling small shopkeepers will exchange them for whatever the person asks for and i don't blame them either.
i very much doubt that benefit money stretches to the luxuries you mention, in cases where claimants have these items it is due working "on the side" or dealing in substances. - Actually Tom what I want is a lot more money and prosperity for everyone. Obtained through their own efforts, hard work and enterprise with living on benefits being unacceptable for those of working age except for those genuinely unable to work through disability.
You can only get that from a prosperous economy. Governments are what holds us back from that. The public sector along with benefits, when it gets too big and expensive, as it is now, stops being a help to that prosperity and becomes a parasite sucking the lifeblood out of it. - More rot.
There is but one way to make the NHS and the rest cheaper in the sort to medium term and that is by reducing the levels of care and cover.
Hiving so much off to the Private Sector will raise costs considerably, 'fortunately' this will also bring in their innate cost cutting habits:reducing wages, increasing unemployment and reducing expertise. All good and well for those in bonus-land and for those charged with looking after the bonus money.
Actually Barry, what you want is exactly what King Midas wanted. That too worked out so well? - Tom - you are wrong on all counts. A great deal can be done to reduce costs.
The NHS is a debate all on its own with the second rate service it provides. The British public deserves better than what the NHS is capable of providing.
Your problem is that you see the government as the source of all that is good with a never ending supply of cash to doll out to all and sundry and have no care as to how that money is created. The fact is that you hate all that is necessary to create that wealth in the first place. You would bankrupt this country and turn the UK into a banana republic. - "A banana republic is a politically unstable country that economically depends upon the exports of a limited resource (fruits, minerals), and usually features a society composed of stratified social classes, such as a great, impoverished working class and a ruling plutocracy, composed of the élites of business, politics, and the military...In practice, a banana republic is a country operated as a commercial enterprise for private profit, effected by the collusion between the State and favoured monopolies, whereby the profits derived from private exploitation of public lands is private property, and the debts incurred are public responsibility."*
Perhaps you are so caught up with defending the indefensible Barry that what you see as a fault of mine is nothing more than your own deepest wish, expressed by another.
*Wiki definition. - i see what you are getting at tom:-
politically unstable = cobbled together coalition.
ruling plutocracy, elites of politics and business = getting too close to home now.
impoverished working class = my latest gas bill.
debts incurred are public responsibility = we are all in it together.
do you know of such a country? - Barry, unemployment is a deliberate tool used by the Government to separate the rich elite from the People, and other such tools are impossible mortgages through over-bloated house-prices, and high rents, so that working people work and work and never stop paying until they fall into poverty.
This demonising the unemployed and calling them drug-addicts, and the proposed introduction of a yellow star of David in the form of a ration card, all comes down to what has already be seen in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Time is up, Barry, time for the Government to go. - As per usual Barry is taking aim at the usual suspects and missing the bigger picture. Straight from conservativehome He pontificates about this, that and the other whilst much more intelligent people are using this wholly simplistic agenda to create wealth for themselves. God there's nothing to be said for received wisdom is there especially when it comes to really important issues as to the long term future of the UK.
- As for tobacco paid for by the taxpayer, about 95% of the price of tobacco is direct tax and goes straight back to the Treasury. I pay my tobacco duties to France.
Happy Christmas. - I don't mind part of the tax I pay going to help people who need it, but I do object to it going towards someone's drug/alcohol/smoking addiction. I also don't see why I should pay towards their tattoos etc.
I am all for helping those less well-off or unable to cope.
Roger - Can it be that taxation rears it's ugly head only after the money has come in?
Is it at all sensible to hold that the level of payment would remain the same if there were to be no tax levied upon it?
Do we not all set, or have set, our preferred level of remuneration to take account of the immediate outgoings?
Therefore could we conclude that a part of each and every £ we ever see is in fact pre-apportioned for national distribution for the greater good?
How can anybody lay claim to a certain level of remuneration fit for the twenty first century and yet set the levels for others in line with the aged (and discredited) Poor Law, and of again putting people in front of the Parish to, cap in hand, beg for their daily loaf?
Roger, dear Roger. You wish to approve of people, and have your approval sought by people, in order that they might live. Dear Roger, it is not your actual likeness on the currency, it is not your money, none of it is yours more than it is another's.
He with the largest lungs does not, cannot, have any greater claim to the oxygen in our atmosphere, those whose lungs are of a lesser dimension cannot be expected to forever struggle to calm their more well endowed compatriots to sleep in order to breathe more freely themselves. - My translation of the final stanzas of Burns' "To a Mouse"
But, Mousie, thou art not alone
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
often go awry ,
An' leave us nought but grief an' pain
For promis'd joy.
Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But, och! I backward cast my e'e
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I cannot see
I guess and fear
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-a-mouse-on-turning-up-her-nest-with-the-ploug/ - Roger, count yourself happy you don't have to pay for my sleep addiction:
sometimes on waking up I think "Oh Jolly! I'll go out and dig a plot of field for this year's crops".
Then it dawns on me we're in dismal do-nothing-all-day world, where there is no will on the part of the authorities to allow you to do anything.
So I turn over and go back to sleep. - Roger, I was informed that Thanet Earth created many jobs, of which 2% went to Thanet people, 8% to people from Dover and Canterbury, 90% to Poles and Co.
Have a Merry Christmas Roger. ThumbsUp! - can i have one off them please,as long as there is 5k on it every week.
- Mr. Nair is a fairly well-known musician and left-winger. He is a local 'character' in his part of Dartmoor and most of his neighbours would disagree with your description of 'non-rabid', Tom.
- We each are, I suppose Peter, something somewhere and somehow.
Mr. Nair is fortunate indeed to have his presence in this world summed up so succinctly, even in such a mundane and rather nondescript fashion:fairly well known musician, fairly well known left-winger...scant, if not faint, praise, but 'local character', that takes the biscuit. On the other hand, to be so egregious amidst such company as the 'Denizens of Dartmoor', must be an achievement of sorts.
It is only that what he has to say chimes with the points I wished to make that his name has travelled this far east. Perhaps he should not write to the papers?
As we have heard from one of his bow-strings we should round things off by having an opportunity to hear from another, his smooth jazz aspect...
http://www.myspace.com/dhevdhasnair/music/songs/fourth-world-6938792
While it is understandable that those who push for a return to the 19th century tend to act as though we are already there, all talk of 'the taxpayer' is complete tosh. While the payment of tax is an option for the wealthy.
You do expend a great deal of virtual ink, Barry, in saying that your money is your money and that governments should avail themselves of less and less of it - something you do know a great deal about, BUT once the money is paid as tax it becomes 'our' money.
Elsewhere, with the Universal Jobmatch database and surveillance system in the pipe-line, an overall picture is emerging of the purposeful, if clandestine, nature of the Conservatives' daemonisation of all and any that do not vote their way. It has been posited that all PAYE employees shall be monitored via this UJ database. With part time workers, receiving any benefit whatsoever, being penalised for not constantly striving for a second job or full time employment.
Much of the present, non-rabid, thinking on such matters has been neatly summarised by a letter writer in today's paper...
" What upsets me most about this government's rhetoric is that unemployment is a recognised tool in its economic strategy designed to keep wages down. Most individual ministers and coalition members must be aware of this, meaning they are knowingly castigating and attacking the unemployed while simultaneously deliberately maintaining a level of unemployment and low pay that suits their neoliberal policies. It is hypocrisy and cruelty of the worst kind. Even worse, it need not be happening. It is a result of ideology and callousness in the face of the real human suffering being caused. Government by the rich, for the rich, and vicious with it. What have we come to?
Dhevdhas Nair
Chagford, Devon"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/dec/20/redundancy-rights-amnesty-bad-employers
Your adoration of money Barry, no doubt plays well in conversation with your fellows, but your insistence that those without money should nevertheless be as single-mindedly devoted to your service will not play so well in the wider, much wider, world.
With two and a bit years to go we all shall, perhaps, have to wait until 2014 to have voting rights married to acquiescence to all things Tory-big-brother.