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Heroic Knight
 
Group: Basic Members
Last Login: Thursday, October 09, 2008 7:51 PM
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| Flannel: Why not give him the benefit of the doubt? Costs us nothing, and doesn't piss him off. Ian and raggedhalo: Despite my right-wing economics, I really support that version of the welfare state (Tart persuaded me onto it a couple of years ago). I'd love to see some more in-depth analysis of the effect/cost of both the policy and its implementation in the UK. Have the Greens done this at all? I'm concerned by the massive unemployment caused by the reform, what the Citizen's Wage would be set at and would like to know the 'real cost' to tax payers on moderate to high incomes. As it turns out, I'm quite a big fan of part time workers, and am happy for my taxes to help defeat the poverty trap. If some people benefit by being able to laze around doing nothing, then so be it - that's a price I'm willing to pay - people deserve the opportunity to work. I hate to say it, but that's actually a policy that could get me voting Green...but then, they're probably anti-war appeasers, and want us all to wear clogs...so I'm probably safe 
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Prodigal
Group: System Moderators
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The problem with Citizen's Income style schemes is they don't account for people being stupid.
The main reason, as far as I can see, that we have 'benefits' and a national health service and so forth - other than 'we are nice people and like to be nice to people' - is that we don't like seeing people starve on the streets / die of preventable diseases etc and indeed people who do those things tend to impact us negatively because they commit crimes like stealing food or they serve as a pool of transmissable diseases we can catch.
If you give everyone a 'basic income' for doing nothing, which should be enough to cover their basic food / shelter / healthcare needs, then most people will be fine and will take care of their food / shelter / healthcare needs. Unfortunately some people will instead spend the money on something else entirely, and then they will find themselves starving on the streets / dying of preventable diseases. At which point we either have to give them more stuff to bail them out of their situation, or we're back to the pre-benefits situation that we didn't like in the first place.
The idea behind the more complicated benefits system we have is that it is tied to certain things (especially Housing Benefit / our socialised medicine system), so you can't spend all your money that you were meant to spend on having somewhere to live (which gets you off the streets) and getting medical care (so you don't spread disease) on something else. The system probably doesn't work very well (just at a first glance it seems to have a bit of a gap when it comes to nutrition), but just tearing it up and replacing it with a very simple system will probably not work, for the above reasons.
Maelstrom: Jessily the Wemic, previously Tourmaline of Weaver
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Heroic Knight
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Last Login: Thursday, October 09, 2008 7:51 PM
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Xollob (4/2/2008)
My recommendation, a 2 tier service, one for real people, and one for pond life whose sole contribution to society is to provide jobs in our prison service.
Ideally the pond life tier requires the said pond life to live in said areas, work full time, ideally in the crappy customer service and facing roles found in call centres and the DWP, only they deal with their own kind not real people, and if they go on the sick, they still have to work anyway, or else they get sent to a special pond life ward or sick estate where there supervised 24 hours a day.Are you serious? Also - call center work is far from the crappest job you can have. Though the ridiculousness of your idea astounds me! Xollob (4/2/2008)
The flip side is that the pond-life, if they behave and dont commit any criminal offences lose their pond-life status and get treated like real people again."Arbeit Macht Frei"? Seriously? Why leave it there? What about indentured service for people who can't pay their debts and forced military enlistment of criminals? Perhaps we could use the female pond life as surrogate mothers so our 'better' people can use their superior DNA to breed a stronger next generation without inconveniencing the fathers/mothers and drawing them away from their work and fun? Forced blood and organ donorship from pond life would also help save the more valuable lives of the rest of us. In fact, why not remove free healthcare - they're only costing us money anyway? Ad Infinitum...
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Heroic Knight
Group: Basic Members
Last Login: Thursday, October 09, 2008 7:51 PM
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| CheesyPig: Actually, giving people cash is a better way of allocating their resources than giving them vouchers etc (which is essentially what paying someone's housing is). The reduction in red tape means there's more money to go round, and the system is harder to abuse (both good things), I feel people have the right to save where they can and allocate cash as they wish - different people place different values on accomodation/food/clothing/entertainment, giving them cash rather than vouchers allows them to maximise their combination rather than living to a prescribed selection. Economic Analysis supports this (or it did when I studied it some years ago). I agree that we dont want to see people starving or on the streets, but no system is perfect, those people have been given a chance to get out of poverty (and it's the poverty trap this is seeking to solve). Other measures would be needed to solve the problems of homelessness, crime and financial naivety. Drug rehabilitation and regulation, policing and education are needed to solve these - not easy, but you should look at it as a separate problem - which I think it is. We need to treat adults as adults, but support them where/when they need it. To my mind, that's part of the role of government.
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Champion
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kessboy (4/3/2008)
Ian and raggedhalo: Despite my right-wing economics, I really support that version of the welfare state (Tart persuaded me onto it a couple of years ago). I'd love to see some more in-depth analysis of the effect/cost of both the policy and its implementation in the UK. Have the Greens done this at all? I'm concerned by the massive unemployment caused by the reform, what the Citizen's Wage would be set at and would like to know the 'real cost' to tax payers on moderate to high incomes. As it turns out, I'm quite a big fan of part time workers, and am happy for my taxes to help defeat the poverty trap. If some people benefit by being able to laze around doing nothing, then so be it - that's a price I'm willing to pay - people deserve the opportunity to work. I don't think your economics are very right-wing. That's a compliment, by the way. (TWEIF = This Will End In Flames. It must just be an rpgnet-ism)
-- -- -- Eos: Manius Shard. Upset. FnH: Officious Guard no.1
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Champion
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Ian: This £150 pounds a week plan. I dont get it. You're saying that everyone in the country gets an extra £150 whether they work or not?
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PD - Machupa Kivull - Sandy coloured great-coated Gnoll
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FOIP is short for 'torture me for more info'
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Prodigal
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Shven (4/3/2008)
Ian: This £150 pounds a week plan. I dont get it. You're saying that everyone in the country gets an extra £150 whether they work or not?Exactly. Then anything that you earn is taxable at 10%/22%/40%/50% depending on how much. Gets rid of the situation you experience where you're working but barely better off, and reduces form filling considerably.
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Joe Rooney, the Enemy Of Fun
Insurrection LRP: high fantasy in a dystopian setting. First event: 24-26 October 2008, in Leicestershire. Book online!
Bladelands: Raoul Ortez - heretic, medium, bodyguard and scumbag
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Wag
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Ian Sturrock (4/3/2008)
Marios, did you not read part (a) of the short section of mine that you quoted? I would hate to start pushing Rule7's "no personal attacks" rule to the limit by calling you "pretty fucking thick", as I don't want to get banned, and in fact I know you're pretty smart, when you want to be, so I'll just assume you had a brain fart for a moment...
Yes, I read that - are you trying to say that you think sacking 95% of the DSS staff will free up enough money to pay everyone a basic income without a large increase in tax? I'm not an economist but that seems to imply that the Department of Work and Pensions has administrative costs that are some multiple of the total amounts of benefits which they hand out, which doesn't seem terribly reasonable.
Had a quick look about:
http://www.dwp.gov.uk/publications/dwp/2006/dr06/annexa/table2.asp
Total budget 130 billion, of which ~120 billion is direct benefits and something under 10 billion is administration - something like a 7.5% overhead on the entire system which strikes me as rather low considering the size it operates on.
According to this government spending on social security benefits is 28.2% of all government spending - it's the equivalent of something over 80% of Income Tax returns.
http://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn13.pdf
150*52*60 million ~ 470 billion pounds a year. (I'm assuming Basic Income replaces child benefits - if children/parents of children get a 'reduced Basic Income' that would make a difference, but not a significant one given the scale)
So you'd save 10 billion pounds (at the cost of making lots of people suddenly unemployed), but increase the cost of the DWP by something larger than (470-120) 350 billion (larger because some benefits go beyond the remit of 'basic income' - disability grants to institutions, for instance).
Even if this didn't lead to less people working and a reduction in the Income Tax returns which largely pay for the system currently, you'd still need to pay for that 350 billion. Income Tax currently pulls in 160 billion - tripling Income Tax (however it's distributed) doesn't strike me as a slight increase. Obviously, if you were to increase it threefold you'd probably get less than a threefold return as people go to greater lengths to hide their money/move it out of the country/leave the country.
For people not already in receipt of benefits, would an extra 150 pounds really justify tripling their Income Tax? With Income Tax so high, haven't you just gone straight back to initial 'unemployment trap' problem?
I'm curious how people work out budgets for this sort of thing.
Marios
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