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Squilliam on 28 October 2010
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Kasz216 said:
Squilliam said:

Welfare is actually meant to be an investment, funnily enough. It is supposed to be an investment in the human capital of a nation. One of the problems of any large society is that the people who are most likely to have children are the people most likely to screw their lives without assistance from the government. The only way to prevent that would be to curtail personal liberties, ala China because unfortunately those best able to raise the next generation are those least willing to do the work.

The largest problem is there no advantage to working a crappy job vs getting the same or more from welfare.

I'm interested to see how the new UK plan will work effects wise.  Allowing you to keep some benefits when you get your crappy job, making the crappy job worth more money.

I wouldn't know about the UK as I live in NZ. Personally if I was to choose between the American style of screwed up government and the UK style of screwed up government, I would have to choose the former, having lived in the UK for 9 months.

In New Zealand we have something in the order like that. You can earn $80 before your government 'welfare' gets docked at a rate of 70% per pre tax dollar earnt. Which effectively means that after $80 the person gets to keep $1 out of every $10 or an effective marginal tax rate of 90%! This is entirely screwed up but thankfully/hopefully it looks like it'll get fixed over the coming two years as we finally have a more sensible government in with a prime-minister whom ran a successful business before running for office.

So regarding that system, it can/probably work but only if it is actually designed properly. Otherwise it can act as a massive disincentive to work and can be even worse than not having it at all.



Tease.