The Benefit Trap Revisited

The other day I found out that a man I know, had given up work a couple of decades ago to 'care for his wife'. I was surprised at this information (which came from someone else), as nothing he had ever said, had suggested that he hadn't worked in decades, and as I had seen his wife occasionally walking about, so I had thought that he had only recently 'retired' early, and had a pension etc.

Many People Are Called 'Workshy' ....

 

In fact I might add that he had even encouraged this belief, by implication when talking about 'grafting hard' when in another city in the past. On top of this was the fact that his wife often visits her family, and they go on a holiday abroad to Spain once every year, so this was something of a surprise on a couple of levels.

1) That he was not working (or recently stopped work), and
2) That he could afford a lifestyle that includes the pub at weekends, and a holiday abroad every year, while on welfare benefits.

How The Benefit Trap Works ....

Amongst all the rows over who has been most affected by the public sector cuts introduced by this Government there was a couple of nuggets that simply had to be rehashed and mulled over. These were the impact that capping at state benefits at £26,000 (net!) may have on those on long-term welfare claimants.

Now lets start with a few points .... most unemployed benefit claimants don't get much more than the basic benefits, plus housing benefits .... so a man, wife and two children, living in a local authority rented accommodation, in the North West of England, might be on £100.95 (Couple Allowance) + £17.40 (Family Premium) + £115.14 (£57.57 per child) ..... a grand total of £233.49 pw or £12,141.48 pa in benefits plus an average of £84.24 per week in housing benefits paid direct to the landlords. This represents a net income of £16,521.96 pa (the housing benefit element will differ in areas, but the main benefit income will not).

Now in order to 'earn' that amount net, a 'worker' would have to be on a salary of £21,291 pa ..... i.e. a starting salary that is higher than that offered on many non skilled jobs ..... and this is where the 'benefit trap' starts, because in reality no one is going to get up every day, pay for transport etc without being a lot better off, so a salary of at least £500 pw (£26,000 pa) is the realistic figure that would get this particular claimant back to work (but note: If they are in expensive accommodation they may never want to come off welfare benefit payments, which is why housing benefits will be capped at at £400 a week).

For single people the incentive to work is greater as they are on either (£51.85 and £65.45 pw ... under or over age 25).

You, like me, may think that these levels of benefits for people with kids, represent a quite high hurdle against finding work, when they are set above the lower levels of wages currently paid in the UK, so imagine what happens when they have large numbers of children or like Kellie-Ann Cottam, who apparently suffers from a painful disability called Ehlers Danlos syndrome, and needs help to care for her four children (to three different fathers) ..... to maintain the same lifestyle, she said she would need to earn £60,000 (£41,710.40 net) a year to meet her family's needs.

Now let us be honest, she is basically unemployable, she has no skills (psychology graduates litter the lower levels of many offices .... salary around £18k, so no good to her with her lifestyle), that could ever give her a career that would give her the £60,000 a year, which she considers to be the reasonable equivalent to living off the back of those of us who have to get to work everyday for a lot less than that.

Through the government's motability scheme she has also been given a specially adapted people carrier for herself and her children, who are aged between seven months and 14 years of age, oh, and she also gets free prescriptions, school meals for the children and free trips to the dentist and the optician .... she has been on the Benefit System for ten years, so she has managed to have relationships that produced at least two children, but somehow not ever managed to come off welfare payments.

She in fact epitomises all that's wrong with the benefits system .... "I am so grateful for the benefits system, I don't have a husband, I don't have a breadwinner - the state is my breadwinner," she said. Well I didn't get asked if I wanted to be her and her broods 'breadwinner', and nor did anyone else ..... still in all fairness this lady has admitted that the 'Benefit Trap' exists for her and that shes in it, and she has tried to launch a self help scheme called “Challenge Britain” to try to end people’s reliance on handouts ...... presumably not for herself though.

Final word on this benefit system to a woman from Grimsby ... A pub regular called Amanda said: "Don't cut the benefits for the people who are really, really struggling. I don't think it's fair - we are struggling enough as it is. I live on £174 a fortnight and it's not fair." ....... the keys to this statement is that the interview was 'lunchtime' in the pub where 'Amanda' was 'a pub regular' ..... and she thinks she is 'really struggling'.

She should read the diary of an unemployed family from living in York in 1910, where a Mr Nevinson was having a very hard time..... if he didn't find a job, he and his family didn't eat. From his diary its apparent that the family were only eating about a third of the calories they needed.

"Up at five, walked round and round the town until 12. Nothing doing anywhere, so I was fairly sick of walking about. No breakfast, no tea and no supper. Went to bed around 7.30."

The Watsons - Victorian Poor

The diaries reveal that in one week the family had just tea and bread for most meals. Occasionally they could afford margarine or jam as well. Sundays seemed plentiful in comparison.

Monday:

• Breakfast - Tea, bread and margarine
• Dinner - Tea, bread and margarine
• Supper - Tea, bread

Tuesday:

• Breakfast -Tea, bread and jam
• Dinner - Tea, 3 stale buns
• Supper - Tea, bread

 Sunday:

• Breakfast - Tea, kippers, bread
• Dinner - three pennyworth of meat pieces boiled with potatoes
• Tea - bread and margarine, onions

PS: If you agree with me that the "Benefit Trap" has to be addressed, before Britain can ever tackle the welfare culture, then email this article or a link to your MP or your representative in Congress (the problem is the same in much of the US) .... China, India and Brazil don't have this problem, and people work.  

Animals On Parade

Ralph Moat, the chav gunman was buried last week and guess what, the white trash of the UK turned up to praise him as a 'legend' ... why is anyone surprised?

We spend 50 yrs of 'Socialism', creating council estates where *80 % have never worked, and who live off welfare benefits, with prostitution, theft, shoplifting, and drug dealing, as the preferred methods of benefit supplements, and then you end up with the sort of inbred retards, who consider murderers 'legends'.

The stupid cow who said this was unemployed mother of eight Theresa Bystram, 45, who took three of her chav brood on a 300-mile coach trip, so they could 'pay homage' at his graveside.

She said: "Raoul was a legend, a hero. I absolutely loved him. I never met him but we followed his plight and prayed he wouldn't get caught. We're not related but something in my head told me to come today. I'm glad I did. He kept them coppers on the run all that time. Fair enough, people died. But they must have deserved it."

We have to break up the benefit dependency culture in the UK before we end up with a sizeable population of those claiming benefits being fit people, who just are bone idle, stupid, and menace to our very society.

Where else but the UK could this useless woman, breed and get paid for it?

1. The first step is to stop the free house syndrome, where girls just get pregnant to get a guaranteed house ..... Bystram would never have got going on her breeding programme if not for this stupid welfare rule. This would go a long way to stopping teen pregnancies in the UK, which are the highest in Europe.
2. Then bring in 'work fare' for all non incapacity benefits
3. And finally, slash the numbers who are classified as 'disabled, or sick' - at least 50% of them are either reasonably fit, or wholly fit (I used to administer these benefits decades ago and they were a joke even in the late 70's)

Feral Street Gang, in Uniform, waiting for a crime.

Until we do, this underclass will thrive like cockroaches in the sewers of our society until they finally take over whats left. No wonder our best and brightest emigrate to countries where these 'untermensch' are not given state aid to proliferate.

*In the early 1970's about 65 -70% of council tenants worked, I had friends who lived on these estates and whose parents worked, now I'll bet its nearer 85% on most estates who have never worked .... that has to be wrong, and its why the UK is falling apart at the seams.

Genocide and Benefit Handouts

Today came the sad confirmation that the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Iraq had been found dead, after being kidnapped. The story, which is all too common in Shia Iraq, is that his companions were gunned down, and he was bustled off the street, never to be seen alive again. They were targets because they were Christians, which in the ignorant minds that pass themselves off as scholars, are 'crusaders'. In Iraq, the oldest Christian group in the world will be gone inside a decade (much like the genocide of Christians in Turkey in the last century).

This ethnic cleaning of Christians from Muslim lands has always gone on, but has accelerated around the globe in the last two decades, and our governments have turned a blind eye to virtual genocides (how else can you describe the removal of whole groups of people?), when it suits them.

Oddly, the bleating of Western Muslim minorities about their 'human rights', mean we have to use Christian soldiers to 'do something' when its Muslims being threatened (from Bosnia to Kosovo), although they kept rather quiet about Darfur, where it's a racist thing between Black and Arab Muslim groups (No Muslims marching on the streets of London for the Black African Muslims, being killed by Arabs).

I have mentioned this subject before, but it never hurts to discuss this again.

In many parts of the globe, Christians, who have often been there since before their Muslim tormentors arrived, are being forced to convert, or are driven off or killed by Muslims, with the connivance of the local authorities. This includes the practise of kidnap, rape and then forced marriage of Christian girls in Muslim lands. There have been reports of this and similar kidnaps from the Gaza, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Egypt as well as other areas.

We of course, continue to give state and charitable aid, to the very same authorities who allow this violence to continue, and who demand ever more rights for the 'religion of peace' in the West. They only respect strength and we have lost the will to fight back, and "White flight" to the US, Australia and New Zealand from the UK, is being partially driven by our politicians encouraging mass immigration of cheap uneducated labour from African and Muslim lands.

These immigrants are actually just another benefit family in the making, such as the Somalian community who actually apply for asylum in the Netherlands, then come to the UK because the welfare benefits are considerably better (See point 6 on this link although these 'official' reasons don't match that given by the Dutch - which was that after a crackdown on mass benefit fraud, 10,000 Somalis moved from Holland to Leicester.... presumably they had heard about how soft our system is) .

We are actually making the rope that will hang us, and smiling while we do so.

***************************************

This post is from the site No PC Views. if you are viewing it elsewhere, then it has been scraped or stolen. You may wish to view the post in its original context by visiting No PC Views (http://no-pc.blogspot.co.uk/)