What is compassionate about a nation having a welfare system?

[Kasz216]

Squilliam said:

Kasz216 said:

Squilliam said:

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.

The new system is something like you have to be in work or training within X number of months of recieving the benefit. I think its 3 months like what you're saying essentially.

But I totally agree there needs to be a good gap between what you can earn when you're on welfare and what you can earn coming off of it. Otherwise considering costs like transportation etc incurred by working people would not be better off if they came off of the welfare system. It is probably better to subsidise a job by say $100-150 from the government than it is to pay someone $200 to not work. You get far more productivity out of your population and the people employed remain employable unlike the situation where if you're out of work for more than 6 months your chances of actually finding a job become slim.

In my country the WINZ (work and income New Zealand) is actually employing private job agencies to find jobs for people. So arguably the best possible system is in place given the profit motive to encourage employment agencies would make them far more efficient than a government agency, especially one which tends to employ less skilled people.

Couldn't agree more.  I really like the way you guys run things in New Zealand (and Australia) with a lot of these things.   It just generally seems smarter then what I see out of the US and Europe.

I mean me, I'm not like Mafoo where I'm hardcore anti-government, so much as I'm anti-incompetant government.