Inequality is lower than commonly measured:
Councils are offering benefit claimants discounts on nights out, beauty parlours and beach huts under a spiralling “welfare culture” taking hold in Britain.
A Telegraph investigation has found Universal Credit and mental health benefits claimants can receive concessions for drinks at bars, massages and eyebrow treatments via local government schemes, with discounts for jobless claimants also extending to football matches, comedy clubs, cinemas, saunas and spas.
Concessions offered by councils or independent businesses even apply to white water rafting, rowing clubs, yoga classes and ice skating.
Local authorities are also providing benefit claimants discounts on weddings and at leisure centres, while taxpayers foot rising bills.
None of these bennies count as income. Therefore they are not counted when measuring how many people are living on incomes less than 60% of median. So, that relative poverty is over-measured.
How important this is is another matter but it’s definitely true.
Living in the UK is like living in Humpty Dumpty land. “Words mean whatever I want them to mean”. I have new neighbour. She used to be in the Met, but she retired with a bad back and gets her pension and a disability pension. Imagine my surprise when she told me she now works for the Transport police.
Her father has been working on the place for months. He’s been putting up new fences, building new walls in the garden, plastering and redecorating. He’s got lots of time because he doesn’t work. He’s disabled. He’s got 3 cars,an old BMW, a brand new KIA SUV and a 23 plate Skoda. He’s obviously taught his daughter well…
I’m so old I can remember when all Labour MPs would automatically deny that such people existed. I imagine that they now admit that they do (at least in private). It’s an advance of sorts but not the advance needed – no one will take any action over it.
You then change the narrative.
Like I remember when student loan justification was about creating the skills the country needs. You point out that we didn’t get that and now it’s about “more rounded person”.
When I was young (many moons ago) there were means-tested student grants because TPTB recognised that we needed a few highly-educated people to fill the roles in industry that avoided Chernobyls (FYI the worst chemical plant problem was at a plant joint-owned by the National Coal Board and Dutch State Mines and, like Chernobyl it involved employees ignoring four different safety rules that were absolute red lines at ICI) and those in government that would deliver the good intentions in all political manifestos.
Even earlier there were “State Scholarships” (like the one my mother got) that assumed that enabling the students best able to benefit from an University education (rather than the second-class students selected on grounds of wealth (the rich brilliant students like Rothschild would get in anyway so that has no impact on them)) was to the long-term benefit of the country.
This all changed when Blair wanted half of all teenagers to go to University because less than 10% of jobs needed a University education (a lot of schools like to hire graduates as teachers but a degree is *not* an essential for teachers (one of my best teachers had no degree because he joined the RAF during WWII instead of going to university). So there is no longer an economic justification for student loans that will not be repaid.
If you want to pay extra taxes to create “more rounded persons” that is up to you – it won’t affect me that much longer …
to the long-term benefit of the country.
You have to have a notion of a country to benefit for this to work. Anywheres, famously, don’t. Neither, clearly, does our current ruling class.
I’m all in favour of going back to how things were before the 80s, but for this to happen we have first to agree that we have a nation worth doing this for. The best test is whether people would fight for it. Evidently, few now would.
You could do that a lot cheaper via subsidised chocolate.
Not that sort of “rounded” (at least, I hope not)
Not well enough if she didn’t get her motability Beamer in time.
On a separate note I am getting somewhat miffed by women regularly asking for free meals at my local community cafe when even I know that their nails, lashes and extensions cost more than enough to feed a family for a week.
If she had a bad back it is possible that a desk job in the Transport police would be tolerable – i remember that my father had to give up playing good quality hockey in his late 40s due to lumbago and switched to umpiring, when it eased off in his early-50s he went back to playing for several more years. The “disabled” father who builds walls is a less plausible “victim”.
As You have pointed out “Inequality” is habitually measured in terms of differences in *income before taxes and benefits” ignoring taxes, “benefits” comprising money given to those who qualify because their income is low, the cost of travelling to work (much lower for those with age-related bus passes or discounts and zero for those who don’t travel to work), free school meals, discounts at museums etc., the cost of buying lunch if you lack the time and/or skill to make a packed lunch or if your workplace lacks a place to eat one, the savings that I and other pensioners/non-workers can make by buying “reduced for clearance ” stuff in supermarkets [I can afford to pay full price but (i) I hate wasting good stuff (I can remember rationing) and (ii) there’s stuff that I try at half-price to see whether it’s nice but that I should not touch at full price – I have even tried some of the vegetarian stuff (there’s always a lot of unsold vegan/vegetarian food because Tesco finds it cheaper to pay money to vastly overstock on vegetarian/vegan “alternatives” than to combat the vegan prpaganda], and the massive subsidy given to people who have paid just enough in NI contributions to earn £1/week in state pension and then get £238/£363.25 per week (i.e. on to of Income Tax from which one gets no additional benefits from the state, nearly all the NI contributions provide zero benefit to the guy/gal paying them).
Reported “Inequality” is a fiction createed to justify confiscation of earnings to benefit the Labour Party’s paymasters and those virtually guaranteed to vote Labour and maintain them in power.
Michael Simmons of the Spectator did an excellent Reality Check podcast and IIRC cover piece on this subject recently. It’s only 6 minutes and worth a listen.
The incentives in our economy are really perverse.
Good, good.
What has to break must be broken.
Lawks, I remember squeals of outrage in the ’80s when council tenants got satellite dishes. But that outrage did not stop the march of entitlement. Nor did successive other outrages.
The post-1945 state must be broken on the wheel of its own greedy, self-indulgent folly. Pissing around with ‘reforms’ here and there to ‘get people into work’, ‘to make work pay’, all of that guff, tried every few years by that month’s Secretary of State for Fat-arsed, bad-skinned, lazy rentiers, does not ever work.
More bilge, please, and faster.
To get that money, the working man (father probably) has to earn the best part of £200 first!
The Personal allowance is a little over £12,500 a year. Anything over that is taxable. As well as the state pension, I have a work related pension and a military pension, on which income tax is deducted. Anyone on benefits/Universal Credit doesn’t have to pay tax on anything over that £12,500. Down the road from me is a family of husband, wife, and two sons. All unemployed, living in social housing, and claiming as many benefits as they can. They have three cars, several foreign holidays a year, and a life style I can only dream of after 45 years of constant employment. That lifestyle coming from my, and others, income tax. But am I bitter? Bet your f***ing life I am!
Anyone *solely* on State Pension doesn’t have to pay tax. Gordon Brown’s Pension Credit/Guarantee introduced a 100% tax on small occupational pension less than the difference between the basic state pension and the guarantee (and on that portion of larger state occupational pensions. Now Rachel Reeves has increased the tax rate to 120%.