Comment on Dale
Should we take money from people who earned it and give it to people who do not ? Sounds bad , but should we allow child poverty to continue ?Sounds worse . Child poverty is in fact a rhetorical re-casting of the poverty of its parents and needs based welfare will inevitably encourage the acquisition of needs , like children.
The Clintonian drive for more welfare conditionality ,as exemplified in Wisconsin , was accompanied by efforts to stop this cycle . It was understood that children undermined the “responsibility “ argument and once you see the this you notice how every argument for left seems to centre on children . Asylum , relative poverty investment in soviet style crèches and so on.
But all this costs and we are now living in a country where the only people replacing themselves are those on income support and immigrants .We are headed for a population of about 70,000,000 largely due to immigration and welfare brats so a radical change has been engineered .
Ordinary people are denied the right to children because they cannot afford them , meanwhile they are obliged to pay for other peoples via welfare and depressed wages due to our having solved the unemployment problem in Warsaw
If there is such a thing as a right to children then that right has been systematically denied to the hard working the responsible and those most able to love care and nurture that child . For the feckless and cunning it is route to income and a house for life .
The inevitable stress that this causes justifies further state prescription and so the ghastly cycle continues , chiefly among the Housing empires of Labour’s inner city stronghold’s.
3 comments:
Precisely :)
Ultimately, the only solution is societal care of all children, equally.
Communism is inevitable for exactly the reasons you've outlined.
The coalition have already moved in, for example, abolishing some of the grants they paid to women simply for being pregnant. They also restricted the Sure Start maternity grant to the first child, which while abolishing it would have been better was a vaguely good move.
I agreed, while we're on the subject, with raising the income tax threshold, a policy I thank Clegg for as I don't think a Conservative government would have done it so soon, or at all.
Rightly they resisted the suggestion that child benefit be means-tested, a terrible idea that would simply have discouraged poor parents from going out & bettering their lot by earning money. Freezing it is hardly something to celebrate but IS a better option. In general they are removing the barriers to poor people raising themselves by earning.
If we are going to have child support, which we are, it should be universal as it may be silly that affluent parents get benefits but it is worse to focus them on the worst off as that just encourages people to say poor, a tactic which was totally enacted under Labour (deliberately or not? worth asking).
I didn't agree with abolishing the Child Trust Fund though. In my view, that was a liberal policy in the best sense as it extended opportunity to all sections of society without the government really butting in or involving itself in over-complex schemes, while it was also liberal because they were free to squander the money, it would just mean that they had none left. Which encourages responsibility & lets people pay the price for making bad decisions.
One last thing. They say middle-class parents are feeling the pinch. But a young, single, working-class person gets very little out of the current arrangements & it has only become slightly better off now that we pay a bit less tax.
This is why so many people live with their parents, which I don't but I can totally see why people jut give up & go down that road.
You make a lot of good points there DCF. I think , personally , that child benefit could be cut at the highest tax rate but there isa vertiginous marginal rate for the middling if you start cutting anything there
Where I think you really hit the old nail on the head is in registering the impact accomodation costs have on income
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