This’ll work, oh yeah

For those thrown into uncertainty and unemployment, the government needs to raise the rate of universal credit and legacy benefits – to £260 a week. That’s equivalent to the value of 80% of weekly earnings on the national living wage.

GDP’s down 30% this quarter. Maybe. This is just the time to raise the reservation wage, right?

10 thoughts on “This’ll work, oh yeah”

  1. If you pay people to be poor you’ll never run short of poor people. Don’t they teach that in economics class?

  2. So GDP is – according to the Grauniad – down 30% to 70% of norm and the aforesaid Grauniad wants to give the unemployed 80% of “national living wage”. That’s nearly twice the Old Age Pension – so is that going to be doubled or are Pensioners expected to survive on half the income of sofa-dwellers?
    So how much is left over for those actually working?
    Grauniad never liked “Make work pay” – but “Make idleness pay” is a new low.

  3. Yeah, but no. I’ve been saying this the Great Navigators indicated a few weeks back that HS2 was still a runner:there is no no reality. It’s business as usual, but now the great grandchildren are stuck with the bill.

    Reminds me of a vox pop Al-Beebra did at the time of Lehman’s collapse. Down in Bristol. Reporter speaking to a typical crunchy granola woman of the hardship to come as she dangles her toddler in an artisan coffee house, and asks her what she thinks of it what came, absurdly, to be called ‘austerity’.

    “What I’d like to see is more childcare for mothers who want to work”.

    I paraphrase, but slightly.

    And bear in mind, these tosseurs already think they’ve been through hardship to make a veteran on 1939-45 blush.

    And don’t get me started on that lot…

  4. By Kate Bell

    Who is Kate Bell?

    Kate Bell is head of the TUC’s rights, international, social and economics department

    Ah, the TUC. So a horny handed daughter of toil?

    Kate Bell’s “work” experience:

    Policy Adviser on Work and Pensions
    Labour Party
    Sep 2013 – Jun 2015

    Freelance Policy Consultant
    Freelance Policy Consultant
    Sep 2010 – Sep 2013

    London Campaign Co-ordinator
    Child Poverty Action Group UK
    Jan 2012 – Aug 2013

    Director of Policy Advice and Communications
    Gingerbread
    2003 – 20107 years

    Research Fellow
    Center for American Progress
    Jun 2008 – Sep 20084 months

    Ever wonder why the trade union movement is completely fucked?

  5. Raise unemployment payouts?

    FFS man. I know people who work under-the-table who are pissed right now because they can’t lounge at home and collect unemployement because benefits have already been raised to or above the level of un-reported pay they’re getting.

  6. Le Roi Jean Quinze

    Because of people like me?

    And various unsavoury bits and bobs of case law, IIRC.

  7. VE Day 75 Years On – Totalitarianism Has Almost Won

    …In his book The Road To Serfdom — published in 1944, while the war was still raging — Hayek made little distinction between Nazism and Communism. Both, he argued, were ‘totalitarian’, ‘collectivist’ ideologies inimical to freedom and prosperity.
    .
    Nazis and Communists, as far Hayek was concerned, were just different ends of the same turd.
    .
    Since today is not just VE Day but also Hayek’s birthday, it might be worth speculating on what he would have made of the strange, strange world we inhabit today.
    .
    There are lots of clues in The Road To Serfdom, which he wrote partly as a warning to Britain that its wartime regime was itself straying dangerously close to the authoritarianism of the Axis powers it was trying to defeat…

    Delers spot on

  8. Locally there’s ‘outrage’ that some ‘essential workers’ are low/minimum wage and the govt has promised $1billion to top up their pay, likely we will see a rise in minimum wage pushed through to support the ‘essential workers’

  9. The Meissen Bison

    Le Roi Jean Quinze: Because of people like me?

    That’s a touch obscure, Woy.

  10. Le Roi Jean Quinze

    By way of response to Steve’s question, Mr B.

    It took me so long to descend from my celestial throne, I didn’t notice Agammamon had slipped in before me.

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