Welfare

[What'sinaname]

[AN_Inkling]

The basis of my thinking on this is: every person wants to be a happy and contributing member of society. If there are those who genuinely do not, they are a tiny minority, and are not to be considered. Essentially I start from the point that no matter how different they look or behave, everyone is basically like me.

With that in mind, multiple generations relying on welfare and never working becomes, not: bludgers who are living the life off of my hard earned money, but rather: people not unlike myself except they are stuck in a cycle of entrenched poverty, unhappiness and lack of education.

Still, I don't have an issue with the sentiment behind: earn or learn for those able to do so and a safety net for those who can't. What I do have a problem with is the actuality. As I said above, I feel the number of people who genuinely do not want to be happy and to contribute (I see one as being necessary for the other) are in a negligible minority.

This means we don't really need the distinction between able and wanting to work or learn and able and not wanting to. What it does not mean is that everyone who seems able, or the Government guidelines say is able, will be, or that everyone who is able to work will always be in a position to consistently seek that work. These boundaries are too difficult to draw and given they are guarding against what I consider a negligible minority, should be done away with. Such lines inevitably create cracks, and the number of honest people who fall through these cracks will be larger than the number who are shocked into action by losing their payments. For instance: how many people walk around with undiagnosed or undisclosed mental conditions? You're fit and ready to work, get on with it, and if you don't we'll stop your payments. The effects of this could be quite dire for someone who is already vulnerable.

No, the boundary is unnecessary and will do more harm than it will good. I feel the payments system should be as simple and as robust as possible. We should be guarding against anyone falling through the cracks, not against a very small minority doing the wrong thing. Sure, encourage and provide incentive for people to work, but do not stop payments. The money we are talking about is not huge here. There is much more slippage from those on higher incomes dodging taxes, companies not paying their share (look at Google and Apple for example), etc. The reason welfare recipients are always targeted more heavily than any others is: they are not mobile (can not move elsewhere and can not easily dodge the changes), they are highly disenfranchised and easily demonised. This is why I'm always disappointed when the Government decides on the easy option and calls for the most unfortunate to do the heaviest of the lifting.

[pietillidie]

^Agreed, very well reasoned.

And if you stand back fifty yards from the blood and gore of the narrow argument, there's a lot more support for your view.

The vast bulk of countries or historical nations you can bother naming clearly show that increased welfare correlates very closely with increased wealth, longevity, safety, happiness, and so on. There simply is no law in the universe that shows "getting the undeserving", whoever the heck they are, improves a society. It never has and never ever will.

People who "know" their neighbours are "undeserving" look a lot like the communist thugs of old seizing an opportunity to beat the shit out of people under the cover of some self righteous argument about who deserves what. But that sort of primitive desire is simply too backward to be of any use in a now highly complex, interwoven, mass-scale society and planet.

It is simply much more rational, as you say, to accept a degree of deviance, knowing that efforts to police people too tightly only give rise to much more sinister problems.

[Skids]

[David]

Bit of a dubious bump, this, but this video just has to be shared:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6e9_1423137545

[Tannin]

Awesome link, David. Ucking brilliant!

[think positive]

An hour later, I'm still clicking links on that page!

[Dave The Man]

Well the ASSHOLDS in Government are trying to Penalise Pensioners that own there own home by saying IF you do own you own house then Sell it and go rent or live on the Streets

[HAL]

If I have to choose one, I pick[b]IF[b] you do own you own house then Sell it and go rent.

[stui magpie]

[David]

[1061]

So David would that mean the Government would be their landlord and therefor by responsible for all repairs, rates ect ect?

[David]

^ It's an interesting question. I'd doubt that they'd want to get that closely involved with the real estate market, so the most likely solution is that they'd consider it an asset but turn the pension into a loan (a little bit like HECS) that is then taken from the sale or transfer of the house at the end, as if it were a tax. Repairs would have to come from the owner's pocket, as they would anyway.

[Tannin]

There is no change on the radar.

The push for change comes from those who look at the .... shall we say the "creative accounting" .... that goes on where people with a big pile of money spend the whole lot on the largest and most expensive possible house because then they will have "no assets" for pension purposes and will be able to claim a pension they would otherwise not be entitled to.

My take on this is that the problem isn't with people gaming the system by shifting assets into a pension-exempt house - let them have the pension, we are not talking big bikkies here anyway - the problem is that we provide insanely generous tax treatment to wealthy people with lots of spare money to put into super and this allows double dipping - huge tax exemptions and the pension as well. If we have a sensible, fair tax policy in the first place, then pensions are not a problem. As a bonus, we are no longer tempting people to mal-distribute their assets by (for example) selling their share portfolio to buy a more expensive house they don't want or need just to get the pension.

[watt price tully]