Om Nick Ferrari show on LBC this morning. 7 to 7.15 or so. Dunno if they put it online.
Essentially, Shelter report about people being one paycheck away from not being able to pay the rent.
Amazingly, their release doesn’t include the fact that we have a system of housing benefit.
Then some bloke from the Methodist Church insisting that food banks show that there is poverty.
Err, no, food banks show that poverty is being alleviated.
We do have inequality in the UK. But by any historical or global standard we do not have poverty.
In the US, the divide is increasingly between the Government Classes and the rest of us.
You can download the show but it costs money: http://lbc.audioagain.com/presenters/7-nick-ferrari/101-the-whole-show
Food banks show we have charity.
If I give a can of beans to a Food Bank charity, the left see this as proof we are all going to hell because of evil capitalism.
If on the other hand a few extra £s in tax is taken off me, passed across a few well paid civil servants desks and eventually a few pence is left is given to someone in benefits so they can buy a can of beans, this is socialist paradise.
That’s the Murphy version of increasing the velocity of money. Didn’t you get the memo?
From a BBC article: “More than 2.1 million crisis loans and 216,000 care grants were paid out in 2011/12”.
I like using data like this to argue with doom-mongers who say the growth of food banks shows the UK has become or is about to become( it isn’t clear which ) a schithole. They say food bank use is up. I say for functional purposes food bank use is down – the function of that food bank being to get you through a short-term crisis. Previously Tesco was the food bank, and the voucher could be a £50 crisis loan from the DWP repayable through benefits. At which point the argument usually ends.
The Trussell Trust and their donors are excellent imv – they don’t ask for the donation to be repaid by docking your next month’s benefits and there’s even data showing they hugely outperform the EU sponsored food banks on the continent.