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Kasz216 on 29 October 2010
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Squilliam said:
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.

That's... pretty dumb yeah... I mean give me welfare, here is how i'd set it up.

1)  After you go on unemployment, you have 3 months or so to find a job.

2) After 3 months you either work 20 hours a week for the government doing something like litter pickup, enevelop stuffing, sending emails, colecting census  info... whatever they need, government always needs more help with random stuff.  Maybe let the government bid for private jobs doing stuff like telemarketing.

Or, once every 2 years you can go to school for a semester or two and pick up training.

3) Repeat step 1... also actually try and place people in jobs.

It just... makes sense.  It keeps people in the habit of working, I know when i've gone long stretches without working I pretty much have to readjust everything to get back into it and dealing with near strangers on a day to day basis etc.

 

As for the Welfare thing, I don't see why it just can't be... If you make $200 dollars of non taxable welfare a week(making a number up)... welfare makes up the difference plus a bonus of half up to 150% of the number.

For example, say you get $200.  You find a job at a fast food restraunt that pays you $150, you can get $100 tax free.  So you get $250.


Basically until you make $300 with taxes taken out, you could get 100 from the goverment adding up to $300.

So the Welfare person working part time is getting paid $100 from the government and is making between 200-300

While the non working Welfare person is only getting 200.