Unemployment Benefits and Welfare in general

Neccesary Evil in a post industrial society to stop people turning to crime? A ploy to quieten done the masses and stop a revolt? or a way for people to get something for nothing while other people work?

I was on the British version of Unemployment Benefits which is called "Jobseekers Allowance" and it was an utter joke, I got £51.75 and to get that amount I had to attend so many irrelevant one off courses and apply to so many jobs. Jobs that I knew I wouldn't get anyway.

Welfare Fraud is usually less than 1% of the welfare budget

How exactly do they detect "benefit fraud", anyway? Count the number of folk who don't scribble in the books?

HMRC get a tip off and they investigate that person.

Over the past five years I've received checks ranging from around $250/week (a.k.a. "OK, this is livable so long as I don't actually need to buy or replace anything ever") to $88/week (a.k.a. "You gotta be freakin' kidding me", which I'm pretty sure is exactly what I said to the woman who was handling my case that time around).

£51.75 per week or per month?

It's usually per week. You either get a direct debit (i.e. the money gets credited directly to your account) or you go down the Post Office to get your money slip.

I don't see benefit fraud as much of a crime. It's not that much in terms of actual monetary cost to the government. Its used as a ploy by politicians to get votes; white-collar crimes aren't 'real' crimes, y'know!

Tax fraud is a much bigger problem than benefit fraud. There's not a "No Ifs, No Buts" rule for companies like Vodafone UK.

Its £51.75 per week, sorry >.>

@whale: So how exactly do they find material for a tip-off, and what kind?

Well, they check to see if you're living within your means and they steak out at your house etc.

Necessary Evil sounds about right.

edited 21st Oct '11 4:36:10 AM by USAF721

Yeah, literally what Beer said. A waste of public money, really. Of course, its much harder to stake out a multi-million-pound mansion.

Don't you have some Sociological reasoning to add? I am shocked and appalled, young sir!

edited 21st Oct '11 4:44:00 AM by Inhopelessguy

You know, somehow I really don't care if someone's cheating the average amount of Unemployment out of the government. You're either going to voluntarily live in a state of rotationally picking which aspect(s) of your living situation you can live with getting cut off because you can't pay it that month, or you get just enough extra money compared to your under-the-table work to fund your latte addiction or something. Maybe even a muffin every once in a while when the month has five weeks.

Call me when they actually steal something of actual worth, like the lunch money of the kid next door or something.

edited 21st Oct '11 5:04:06 AM by Jeysie

Nah. Too much work.

The end-question is, should people who work be taxed for the benefit of those who decide not to? What about those who can't find a job? Those who are too handicapped to work?

To me those questions have different answers. If you're on welfare, you're living off people who are working - whether or not it's your fault. So for question 1, I would answer NO. Question 3 I would answer YES. Question 2 I would simply answer differently than the government currently does.

The way we currently offer welfare benefits requires that the recipient be trying to find a job. I would throw this out altogether. Instead, take whatever amount it is that you are paid weekly (let's say $250). Then divide it by the minimum wage (U.S. $7.25) and get that many hours of work out of them (33 or so). Right now we pay something to a welfare beneficiary and get nothing in return aside from a promise to look for work.

Instead, extra government works projects could be done. I have to emphasize the word EXTRA. That is, the government can't pay welfare recipients to do construction on a highway they were already going to do construction on and were going to hire a company to do it, otherwise, they knock those people out of work. Instead, they come up with something they weren't going to do to begin with. For example, babysit for people looking for jobs. Busing low-income people from their homes to work. Staffing a new public library they didn't intend to build. Building that library. Whatever.

All I'm saying is that when possible (not with severely handicapped people) we should be getting something out of the money we pay to people.

What of the folk who were previously employed: aren't they simply getting back what they "paid" in when they were hard at work?

That's how I look at it.

My political science class is going over this topic, actually. Funny. And there it was pointed out - and this is kind of important to those who think everyone on welfare is some leech of the system - that most people on welfare are white males with jobs. Not the stereotypical "welfare queen" of a black woman with lots of kids.

Anyway. Welfare is necessary. Otherwise you have a bunch of people with nothing, and you can't make something out of nothing. How do you expect people to get jobs if they don't even have enough money to eat? Or to pay rent? Or to buy gas? You'll find most places with strict welfare codes (like Texas and the south-east) actually have more people in poverty than those with looser codes.

There's also the fact that when Florida passed the "drug test for welfare" law, only 2% of applicants were denied. So, contrary to popular belief, most people on welfare aren't drug-bums, even in a state where 11% of the entire community wouldn't pass the test.

Besides, welfare comes out of taxes. Taxes people pay everyday, including those on welfare. Why don't they deserve it? It's very selfish to say that they don't deserve it because you (and apparently only you) pay for them.

Sure, to a point MRDA. But that point is pretty limited and dependent on how much you worked and whether you were paying taxes or not. Super rich people have all sorts of loopholes. Poor people don't pay taxes. And if you were paying taxes, only a part of what you were paying went to welfare. So it's pretty easy to exceed what you "paid in."

Think of it this way: There are way more people paying in than collecting. So the people collecting must be collecting more than what any single person pays in. If 100 people pay in $10 a piece, there's a $1000. If there are 10 people collecting, each person gets $100, or way more than what they would have "paid in" when they were working.

But I'm not about letting people starve. Just that we have stuff that needs doing and we might as well have the people we're paying do it.

Well, honestly, I wouldn't be mind given work to do while being on paid support. It's boring and soul-sucking sitting around the house for years on end with no way to be productive and use any of your skills except editing a wiki occasionally.

Granted, I would prefer the US government actually employed me, by hiring me for one of their secretarial jobs I applied to a month ago...

edited 21st Oct '11 5:03:27 PM by Jeysie

Uhm what?

Unemployed people don't just get what everyone else has put into the 'pot', they get what the govt specifies as benefit based upon their circumstances.

Unemployment benefits are a form of insurance.

@Ian I was just pointing out why the whole "you get out what you put in" didn't work.

@Vericrat

If you want to get technical, we get what the employer puts in, as employers pay Unemployment Insurance. That's why employers will do anything to get out of you getting to go on Unemployment if they can. I got swindled/slandered by not one but two agencies, and unfortunately while I got one overturned, the other has stuck.

Sure but those companies aren't just pulling that money out of Hammerspace, they're charging you a higher price for the goods or services they provide to pay for the Unemployment Insurance. It's indirect, but you're still "putting money in" as it were. But when you compare the number of people "putting in" to the number "pulling out" there's not much of a chance of someone only pulling out what they put in.

But that's not really here or there I was just responding to a single post that said you should be able to "get out" what you "put in."

I still think the best thing for the government to do *where possible* would be to work people for the hours that they pay them for. And it wouldn't even necessarily have to be "work" the entire time, one "working" person could bus unemployed people during their "hours" to locations to put in job apps or take job skills training or whatever. But at least part of the time the government should get work out of the money that is paid to welfare recipients.

Again, this is only where possible.