The state here is offering a conditional offer of reduced benefits in the future as consideration for a current obligation to work without choice on projects that will be run by private contractors for profit with, no doubt the threefold aims of:
a) Undermining market rates of pay for similar work;
b) Providing profit opportunity for a few contractors at cost to most in society;
c) Supporting the notion that the provision of services in the community can be done at undervalue or no cost and without appropriate skills being needed – in the process deliberately seeking to undermine the notion of the welfare state.
As such, in this exchange the state is exploiting its position of power to exploit and is in the purpose seeking to favour a few whilst pursuing an ideological endeavour to reduce pay, undermine social services and provide an unpaid pool of labour for the so called ‘big society’.
You can tell he does a lot of work for the public sector unions, can\’t you?
Yehbutnobut, as I say a lot, on blogs of both wings.
If this work ends up paid at minimum wage, after the same (evil, but that’s a separate story) deduction rates that other minimum wage work would have on benefits, but still at minimum wage, I’d support it.
If not, it’s basically slavery.
I’m not pro this either, state intervention being a bad thing. These people will work on the wrong things at the wrong price, and undermine those people engaged in these things without subsidy.
This is where Citizens Income is such a good idea. No-one has some special status as “unemployed” it’s up to them to make the living they can, with the CI providing a minimum standard of living.
The problem the Tories are trying to address is the disincentive to work of benefit withdrawal rates. This is not the right solution, however, too much social engineering and lots of expense to run it.
I’m kinda with Richie on this, though he has a completely different solution in mind, maybe he thinks what we’ve been doing the last 40 years is OK?
The day to day to costs of seeing if people are actually turning up and then working even if they do turn up plus the constant search for suitable make-work (that will be a health&safety field day) will cost a fortune. If it is privatised (=corporate socialism) then some friends of the tories will be making a lucrative raid on the public purse but that is hardly the answer to returning millions to work.
Henry Hazlett(if my memory serves) speaks of demobbing an army, in that the money which paid for the army can be returned to the economy to enable new /expanding business to employ all the demobbed soldiers. That would seem to be the viable solution.
However we live in a country whose so-called government is borrowing 250-300 thousand million a year more than it is getting in tax. They can’t cut tax if they are to have any chance of getting out of their borrowing rut( unless they make really huge cuts in the state which neither this government nor any of the other dross are willing to do-it would cut and compromise their power).
As you pointed out a few blogs ago Tim, the economy has done very well in creating jobs to replace those lost so far (although lots of the new jobs are part-time only). It has not done all that well in creating extra new jobs. I am sure that it could if 200 thousand million plus of tax rip-off was returned to peoples pockets. That isn’t going to happen. What I think will happen is that the longer people stay on the states enforced payroll the more rights they will gain. This is bad to an extent but it is also right to an extent. Not everyone is a scrounger and if people find themselves part of this there is no way the state should be able to treat them as some kind of Todt slave labour force. Most of the work they do will be beetle-tracking anyway because if they do anything useful they will be undercutting workers already employed.
This is more political gimmicks. The way to create work is huge cuts in state thieving and dictat to create jobs and then most of those on benefits will have jobs to find. A small number of people can be sent out into the cold with some assurance that they can and will find jobs in a reasonable time. However, to send millions out into a system being bled dry by the state is a bad plan.
Ritchie is still an idiot tho’.
Dickie does have some reasonable arguments against the plan. It is a fudge. Does no one in Government have the balls to call out the poverty industry on their specious use of statistics and their detachment from the real world, to cease subsidising buy to let landlords and to make work pay by simply reducing benefits to a subsistence level. This is a bureaucratic answer to a simple problem of too many people receiving too much money they haven’t earned.
Hell, the easiest step in the right direction would be to tax them like normal income. Then those in receipt of large sums don’t see a massive difference between being on benefits and not being on benefits. All politicians look for policies it is difficult to argue against and that imo is a winner. To a lesser extent but I’m sure still a winner with taxpayers would be lowering the age child benefit is paid out for and restricting it to the first one or two children.(for new claimants only)