Thats the worst part about public assistance, good intentions aside, it teaches the recipients that they don’t have to work…that they will simply be taken care of. That’s horribly corrosive.
I do quite a bit of hiring for my current employer; it’s largely low-skill labor - jobs earning perhaps 10 USD an hour. As you might imagine, we see constant turnover to our competitors. Our biggest competitors is the local university, which offers better wages, but the other? It’s actually government assistance. Many find the work too difficult and elect to fall back on welfare instead.
Then them pay more so it’s worthwhile. One of the benefits of public assistance is that it forces salaries up and makes it harder to exploit workers on high unemployment times by taking benefit of the dire conditions of the worker to get them to work in a job that they wouldn’t do if they had another option. Think about it, if somebody doesn’t think work is worth the pay and they’d rather have less money than take a job, then it’s not worth it. Many people are forced into jobs that are not worth it because they have no other recourse (because the alternative is starvation), but that’s wage slavery. A job should have fair compensation, not just the lower you can get by with as an employer.
Or do they realize they’re actually losing money by working? I mean, let’s say you’re full on welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing, etc, etc.
You get a job that pays basically nothing. You lose all/most of your benefits. So now you don’t make enough to buy food, have housing, etc, etc. The system is set up to trap people in it. If you have nothing, it’s certainly better than dying in an alley. If you then attempt to have anything more than nothing, they will penalize you the exact amount (or more, because there are usually 3-10 different agencies who all expect any income to go directly to whatever thing THEY cover and ignore everything else) that you make from whatever job you have.
So… live in poverty and work 40 hours a week at a hellish job, or live in poverty and not work. It isn’t hard to see why many people do the latter. I know plenty of people who got jobs and then had their standard of living degrade. Hell, I know people who got Disability and lost quality of life. One guy I know’s food stamps dropped from a couple hundred dollars a month to $8 a month because he got SSDI. Then his housing subsidization went away because he “made too much money”. So he now loses money compared to when he was unemployed and doing odd jobs/carpentry for people for $20-$50 a pop ever so often to buy smokes.
It’s a stupid system designed to catch “cheats” (who barely existed) that basically forces you to jump from unemployed to middle class or actually end up worse off than you were. Given the choice, it’s not hard to see why many people just say “fuck this” and don’t bother. The net gain is basically nothing per hour. Would you do a crap job for $1-2/hour? Probably not and especially not if you ended up paying for it.
For example: Basically you make nothing. So Housing Organization pays for 90% of your housing. Food stamps cover 100% of your food. Some other organization covers 90% of other things. You make $100 dollars. Housing Organization says, great, you can pay $60 of that towards housing. Food stamps says, awesome, you can pay $50 of that towards food. Other organization says, amazing, you can pay all of your toiletries/whatever we covered now! So you’re now down $30+ for having the temerity to try to do something.
Zak, I find this really surprising given the amount of stick you give the US for being run in the interests of Big Capital Letter Industries (Oil, Arms, etc.), plus how active you are on the climate change thread. I’d be interested to know what it is about the UK’s left wing parties that makes the Tories the party that better represents your interests?
To be quick, to not derail things. Tony Blair and Murdoch persuaded me to vote Conservative a few elections ago. Many of the people left in positions of power in New Labour were Blairites (some still are, probably more will get a run in the sun after Miliband going?), which was basically ‘Tory in Labour’s clothes with close connections to Murdoch’. That is a hugely toxic association, enough to make me vote for born-with-silver-spoon-in-mouth-relative-of-the-queens Cameron. He was a moderate compared to the New Labour we were left with! But his moderate days are over, the hard line neo-fascist loving members of the Tory party are driving the bus now. It’s going to hurt anyone except the richest this term. Goodbye NHS etc, pretty much.
To put it another way, Tony Blair was such a good plant most people didn’t see it until he couldn’t run for anymore elections, i mean the facade really did crumble with the ‘dodgy dossier’ stuff, but that was right at the end, and the damage he had done to the Labour Party means they will take a longtime to recover from that, Ed might have been able to make that change more rapid, his brother was seemingly being groomed as a Tony Mk II, so that was good he didn’t get the reigns of Power and his more reasonable brother did.
Also consider the Liberal Democrats. How good a party were they under Charles Kennedy? Damn good, honest decent people with no Murdoch or Big Oil corruption. I reckon just as Tony Blair was a plant to ‘ruin’ the Labour Party (i.e. make it more right-wing, pro big business, american war interests lap-dog etc), so to was Nick Clegg, mainly because having a real third party option, that importantly was not corrupt (in the way our normal red/blue - Republican/Democrat - Labour/Tory parties now are) was too uch of a threat for those that really care about this. So yeah good job and i expect some good ‘promotions’ for Nick Clegg, just as Tony Blair has been recieving since he left politics (not as high profile off course, we are only talking about the Liberal Democrats here, a smallish party, now tiny!).
Who planted Clegg into the Lib Dems, exactly? And how did he get voted for by the party? Are they all plants? (edit: The royal mail?)
What examples of Murdoch or Big Oil corruption do you have of the party under Clegg’s leadership?
Interesting that you consider the party to be great under Charles Kennedy – the party itself didn’t. Half of the residing MPs signed a letter for his resignation. How do you reconcile your statements with that? (Personally I’ve always liked the fact he was a drunk).
Nick Clegg is still MP for Sheffield Hallam, so he’s got another ~4 years before he can retire into the good life of arms deals like Tony Blair.
This is why I tend to think replacing everything with a basic income would work out better. Then at least the marginal gain of working would be (wage - taxes), not (wage - taxes - clawbacks). A basic income might be a disincentive to work, but it can’t be a worse disincentive than the sum of the current systems. Plus it would help a lot of the working poor.
‘Them’, the ‘bad guys’, the shadowy figures sitting in exclusive mens clubs playing the world like a game chess all about their own personal profit generation?
His background is interesting, Cambridge and worked for the Finnacial Times. He, like Tony, is a pretty charismatic guy, and he also ‘talked’ a great Libdem talk, but less good at the walk part. I voted for him once (maybe twice?) before the coalition thing with the Torries. I even went to a speech he was giving back in…the mists of time, and he was right on the money talking about the issue of lobby’s in Parliment being a threat to Democracy and the rich getting richer stuff etc. He was completely convincing, and that is why i guess he got voted for. Again much like with Tony Blair. So no they are not all ‘plants’.
Well, they did do a coalition with the Torries? He did work for the Finnancial Times? Sort of difficult setting that in balance with the kind of guy and Politician he seemed to be? Tony Blair was Murdochs man, i didn’t say the same of Clegg. He might even hate Murdoch, but for sure the fall in power of the Liberals under his term as Leader is a bit too spectacular perhaps?
Before the end (whenever that was exaclty) Charles built the Lib Dems into a very solid decent sized third party in the uk. He was a great Politician and speaker, and sadly also a drunk, which is what all the problems became about ultimately.
In a shocking result, Kennedy was elected for the Social Democratic Party (SDP), making him at 23, the youngest MP in the House of Commons. Ambitious and popular, he quickly emerged as a potential party leader. In 1994, after the SDP and Liberal Party had merged, he became President of the Liberal Democrats, a position he held for the next four years. In 1999, after the resignation of Paddy Ashdown, Kennedy was elected party leader.
He took the party through two general elections, during which time they increased their seats in the House of Commons from 46 to 62. However, he faced criticism for his laid-back leadership style, and there was considerable speculation regarding his alcohol consumption. From December 2005, some within the party were questioning his leadership and calling for a leadership election. On 5 January 2006, Kennedy was informed that ITN would be reporting that he had received treatment for a drinking problem. Kennedy decided to pre-empt the broadcast and admit his condition openly. He called a leadership election at the same time, stating that he intended to stand.
The admission of a drinking problem had seriously damaged his standing and twenty-five MPs (nineteen of whom were front bench MPs) signed a statement urging him to resign immediately.[1] As support for him ebbed away, Kennedy resigned as leader on 7 January, saying that he would not be standing in the leadership election. Deputy leader Sir Menzies Campbell took over as interim leader and was elected as leader on 2 March 2006.
Paddy Ashdown was another great LibDem leader and i voted for him on a number of occasions, and he probably deserves equal credit for the size of the party when Kennedy took over. But in general both men were a complete breath of fresh air in the political scene, honest and credible and decent, which is rare for a politician these days, often as they are corrupted by some corporate interest or plain out shills for hire.
It will be interesting to see what work Nick Clegg gets after that, as in whom he works for. These things do really all matter in relation to time in office (which is why i consider Tony Blair a traitor to his country (and Party!), and certainly deserving of some kind of penal time for his role in the dodgey dossier affair and everything around it).
If our Brit friends need to start a revolution, we’re kind of old hats at it. Too bad about not having any weapons, but maybe we can sneak something in through Ireland.
Link to a story here about Mark Carney the govenor of the Bank of England (shame its the mail, saying that they are anti ukip) about the amount of immigrants causing lower wages as well as too big a demand on schools, healthcare and the welfare state.
Still apparently it is all just scaremongering from the uk government.
Data presented in the article:
-Immigration at a record four year high (600.000 new EU immigrants in the last four years)
-Pay rises at a 4 year high (even higher if you account for reduced inflation, sine the pay rises have just gone over the CPI, for the first time in 6 years this year real purchasing powers of employees have gone up. A really good piece of data)
-Employment at a record 4 year high
So, apart from the usual dataless fearmongering in the article I see absolutely nothing there that sustains the statement that immigration is pushing wages low. Of they are releasing this info along with the graphs, why the hell don’t they provide at least statistical correlation??!
The subtext to that comment was about the issue of Islamic radicalization, so erm, Americans can relax and not need to smuggle in arms for us to defend ourselves, it is aimed at those brown muslim guys so you mostly should all be down with that?
What now for Labour? I posted my thoughts on a probable push back to New Labour, and according to this article in the guardian that seems to be the case, and it also contains a larger right-up of the issues around that than i would have time to post myself:
‘The return of the Blairites is the last thing Labour needs’:
We can’t say we weren’t warned. David Cameron has lost no time since the election in turning his government sharply to the right. Under the banner of “blue collar Conservatism”, the Thatcherites and neocons have been let off the leash.
New strike ballot voting thresholds of 40% will make most industrial action illegal – this from a government backed by less than 25% of the electorate. New restrictions on freedom of speech are being lined up in the name of British values. After a pre-election austerity pause, prepare for the most savage benefit and spending cuts yet – and what one Tory minister has promised will be a “flood of privatisation”.
But the Tories are not the only ones out to shift politics to the right. The Blairites have seized on Labour’s defeat to launch a bid to take back control of the party. More than two decades after Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson created New Labour, they are demanding a return to its 1990s embrace of corporate power and a mythical “centre ground”.
An orchestrated parade of former party luminaries grown fat on privatised directorships has denounced Ed Miliband’s modest departures from the New Labour script, echoed by his brother, David, and a clutch of hopeful Blairite candidates for the leadership. Aspiration and middle England had been abandoned in favour of the poor, they claim, while the “wealth creators” – by which they mean its owners – have been abused and threatened with spiteful taxes.
It’s as if the financial crash of 2008 never happened. Their media cheerleaders have even taken to describing the resurrected Blairites as “modernisers” again, two decades after their Britpop heyday. It’s a straightforward power play, of course. But it’s also a time-warped failure to grasp the impact of the economic crisis, and their own legacy.
It wasn’t just the western economies that crashed eight years ago, but the economic model that underpinned it. That model was also the foundation of New Labour politics, whose consequences were played out in the election. They were dependent on a City boom that imploded on an epic scale, and the assumption that working-class and leftwing voters had nowhere else to go.
The fallout from that mistake was clear last week: in the haemorrhage of votes to the Scottish National party, Ukip and the Greens, and the reluctance of many working-class voters to turn out at all. Miliband shifted Labour, but not enough for many to take on board – or to distinguish it from the rest of the political establishment.
Last week’s increase of 0.8% in the Conservatives’ vote can be seen as any kind of triumph only when set against poll-fuelled expectations and their success in turning the coalition’s unpopularity into the destruction of the Liberal Democrats. Nor is Labour’s inability to increase its own vote by more than 1.4% so hard to work out.
The party failed to kill off the urban myth that Labour overspending caused the crisis, and gave credibility to Conservative claims about the economy by signing up to austerity-lite; Miliband’s personal ratings were never within spitting distance of Cameron’s; falling oil prices finally increased real wages; and the SNP “threat” was mercilessly deployed to scare off English voters.
