But the PM is in trouble. Her halo is slipping. The country has turned on her covid response and increasingly mistrusts her motives.
So yesterday she went back to basics and promised more money for the poor children: increased Family Tax Credits and Best Start payments.
This mirrors the US where Biden has increased child benefits against a great deal of evidenced opposition.
A typical critic says:
While money can help in the short run, the truth is that no country ever got out of poverty because of income redistribution (a point economist Thomas Sowell took great pains to demonstrate in his work). If such ‘redistribution’ could deliver such a happy outcome, the U.S. should have no child poverty at all. ~ Veronique de Rugy
The thrust of US opposition is that more 'free' money into poor families with children reduces work effort. That effort could run the gamut of none-at-all to less. But workless families and children don't mix well when risks of health, education, and safety outcomes are weighed up.
Since Labour took office the number of children dependent on a benefit has risen by 21 percent or 36,000.
It's a dereliction of duty to simply keep upping benefit incomes with no thought to how children in workless families fare. Many are at the bottom of the heap and will face lifelong struggles. How do parents with no work responsibilities integrate their children into that world?
But the PM is hostage to her promises and hellbent on delivering measurable income increases unrelated to work effort, while simultaneously and steadfastedly ignoring the unwanted side effects.
Lindsay Mitchell is a welfare commentator who blogs HERE.
5 comments:
You have to be able to maintain your voting supporters somehow Lindsay, even if it means buying them. After all it worked with the media.
This way you can not only maintain but also increase the base of your stud for breeding benificiaries(voters). To her mind they are little more than "useful idiots".
Spot on analysis. We know of course that most beneficiaries support
Labour.
A party that robs Peter to pay Paul and always depend on the support of Paul. And this is what this regime is counting on.
Giving poor people money because they have children just incentivizes them to have even more kids.
Our welfare system takes money from the middle classes via taxes and gives it to the feckless in society. So it's no surprise we have all the societal problems we see today. The welfare system has created a feral underclass and until this process is stopped our problems will only expand.
The saddest part is that a person on a benefit only puts out an equivalent amount of energy… so it goes nowhere. It is not the way that you teach self-sufficiency.
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