Better Off Working Shock

Case study from Plymouth:

TAMMY MEWETT, aged 30, from Honicknowle, has five children aged between three and 14. She gets about £300 a week in Income Support, Child Tax Credit and Child Benefit. She also gets Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit, paid separately.
...
She said: "They have calculated I would be better off if I was working."

Why did anyone have to calculate that?

When Job Creation is Bad

You'd think that the creation of at least 30,000 new jobs over the next five years would be good news, right? Wrong.

MigrationWatch are suggesting that over the next five year there will be another 550,000 students in primary and secondary school in the UK resulting from immigration. According to the ONS the average number of pupils per teacher is 17.6 meaning that these extra students will create 31,250 new teaching jobs. Of course, far more jobs will be created and work generated.

However, since the taxpayer must foot the bill for those new jobs rather than the parents paying fees, the result is that all this job creation is apparently bad.

Charities Don't Believe in Charity

From the BBC:

Six Welsh charities have urged the UK Government to rethink proposed cuts to housing benefit.

...

"We urgently call on the government to reconsider the cuts, which will disproportionately affect those in greatest need, including homeless and vulnerable families, those in need of housing-related support, people with mental health problems and children living in poverty, and result in greater long-term economic and social costs for local authorities, housing associations and government in Wales."

If there is public support for keeping housing benefits unchanged why don't these charities simply ask people for the money voluntarily? Could it be that they don't think they'll get anything?

Two Facets of Welfare Dependency

Over at CiF, Joseph Harker is bemoaning the cut to Child Benefits for high earners. His article illustrates (though apparently not realising it) two of the main problems with the welfare system both of which can be described as welfare dependency. The first is noting the poverty trap:

"The bizarre maths of Osborne's proposal is that if someone with five children earns £44,000, and they're given a £1,000 pay rise, they'll receive an extra £600 net income, and have £3,800 in benefits taken away."

More commonly expressed as being faced with a high marginal effective tax rate, this same affect effects all welfare payments. It's not just a result of Osborne's maths. But if Mr Harker can see it when it affects him, can he also see that it serves to discourage the poorest people from doing that little extra work? That one extra shift?

The second problem is that people forget what is really happening. They forget that the money is a gift from the people of the country to them and start to think that it is theirs by right. Thus Mr Harker declares:

"not since China's one-child rule has there been such a penalty for having kids"

 I'll just let that stand.