According to The Independent Cameron has told his ministers that their favoured target, the Welfare Budget, cannot take all of the strain of further cuts and conservatives they should look for cuts in their own departmental budgets. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 19957.html So, I guess we can either expect the Welfare Budget to be cut further or Cameron to go soon.

According to The Independent Cameron has told his ministers that their favoured target, the Welfare Budget, cannot take all of the strain of further cuts and conservatives they should look for cuts in their own departmental budgets. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 19957.html So, I guess we can either expect the Welfare Budget to be cut further or Cameron to go soon.

The entire basis of the welfare system, as envisaged by Sir William Beveridge, was that help is afforded at a time of need in return for contribution when the going is good.

Your school leaver would, ultimately, contribute throughout the course of his/her working life. The worker who reaches retirements gets something called a pension. It's not rocket science. And you don't need a 1.0 in economics from Oxford to understand that basic principles.

In the second paragraph you have answered your own question.

People are not asking for a direct link between contribution or entitlement. What they are saying is that the system is broke. And needs fixing.

Quote ="Dally"According to The Independent Cameron has told his ministers that their favoured target, the Welfare Budget, cannot take all of the strain of further cuts and conservatives they should look for cuts in their own departmental budgets. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 19957.html So, I guess we can either expect the Welfare Budget to be cut further or Cameron to go soon.'" The bit about linking the right to claim benefits to the payment of national insurance is interesting. Sort of like asking people to contribute to a system when the going is good, that they will ultimately benefit from when they hit hard times. It sounds eminently fair and makes great economic sense. I really don't see why some people have a problem with that.

Quote ="Dally"According to The Independent Cameron has told his ministers that their favoured target, the Welfare Budget, cannot take all of the strain of further cuts and conservatives they should look for cuts in their own departmental budgets. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 19957.html So, I guess we can either expect the Welfare Budget to be cut further or Cameron to go soon.'" The bit about linking the right to claim benefits to the payment of national insurance is interesting. Sort of like asking people to contribute to a system when the going is good, that they will ultimately benefit from when they hit hard times. It sounds eminently fair and makes great economic sense. I really don't see why some people have a problem with that.

As people keep explaining to you, there are a relative handful of able-bodied claimants who will never make any contribution. This is no indication of a 'broken system'. And since [ieveryone[/i gets a pension regardless of whether they drew other benefits or not I left that out of the equation.

Running around saying that the system is broken or open to widespread abuse without offering any [ievidence[/i is poor debating technique. All you've offered so far is [iopinion[/i.

Because what's being proposed there is linking the rights to benefits to [iprior[/i NI contributions. Otherwise it would have zero effect on 'benefits tourists'. Which leaves my student example to starve or freeze to death.

Somebody robbed our local newsagents a few months back. I think that is evidence the system is broken. Clearly all newsagents must close to prevent this happening again.

If that was the basic principle it could be achieved commercially, via simple insurance policies.
But, as I understand it, it is not the basic principle ... the pinciple is that, as members of a civilised society, those of us who are able to do so will look after those who are young, old, infirm, disabled, ill or unemployed.

The notion that we can't afford it is entirely spurious.

In that case we should close down The Sin Bin. Because this is a place where opinions collide and debates / arguments ensue.

Unless you are a university professor conducting empirical research, pretty much everything is opinion. Reference The Sin Bin, pretty much every post, on every thread, is someone's opinion.

Which is it this week anyway: are they all coming here and taking our jobs or taking our welfare payments?

[iDemonisation[/i is having a few days off.
There all too busy fighting for bankers bonuses in Brussels.

But we were only blessed with the banking geniuses that broke the economy because of the huge bonuses they could trouser. It is accepted as a given that somewhere else, there are plenty of other banks that would pay these geniuses the same as what they earn here.

The geniuses only thus stay because of the bonuses they can earn, which they can't beat elsewhere.

But, you may ask, if they are that good, why didn't an "elsewhere" offer them a tad bigger bonus, and they would have secured the services of their desired genius, so they could have bankrupted their banks instead of ours?

Is it then that we pay the biggest bonuses? Or do we just pay bonuses that attract second rate bankers, because the top bonus earners work elsewhere? So the argument would be that we already have second rate bankers, but we don't want third rate bankers? Why not? How much worse could they be?

And what do your base your opinion on? That is what you are basically being asked. You appear to have formed your opinion based on no evidence at all. Merely hearsay. There are plenty of resources on line so when the likes of IDS paints a picture of a work-shy poor do you just accept it? If so why?

Not quite up to speed with how this is supposed to work, are you?

It's quite simple. When you express the opinion that something is 'evident', be prepared to back it up with something more than idle speculation based on other people's unsupported opinions. Or accept that your opinion is not based on facts.

I have based my opinions on articles in the media, notably The Times and The Telegraph. Along with the experience I have accumulated throughout the last x number of years, most particularly in 2 jobs that involved a lot of contact with people at the 'less fortunate' end of society.

Seemingly, for some, that is not good enough. It appears they want empirical research, or university level referencing to primary sources. Or perhaps they just don't like what I am saying because it doesn't square with their socio-political views. Probably the latter.

Anyway, I will bear this all in mind, next time someone links to The Guardian or Indy and quotes it as gospel.



I trust you will now be challenging all 'opinions' with the same rigor that you challenge mine. Could make for an interesting few weeks on The Sin Bin.

Fook me, here we go again.

Why is it that right wingers always claim the "bullied victim" card whenever they are called out on their facsist opinions?

Makes a change from the Sin Bin 'intelligentsia' resulting to personal abuse. Which is always a sign that they are doing well in an argument. Particularly amusing when those involved are mods / site admin team and the thread gets locked to save their blushes.

FA - I have long argued that the argument about executive pay (and that for bankers) has been somehow allowed to be brushed off with reference to some vague concept of international competition or 'going rates'. The fact is that some of the nonsensically high pay levels and bonuses being paid are a downright failure of the way western economies work.

These people are not taking any real 'risks' on themselves but are being rewarded as though they were entrepreneurs risking their own money and livelihoods. If they did take that risk, and agreed to being personally bankrupted if they screwed up, they'd have a case. But that patently isn't so.

No they don't want "empirical research". People just don't care for people posting platitudes. Even Dally backs up his position with his links to the Daily Mail.



You don't need to bare anything in mind, just learn the difference between posting platitudes and having a real discussion.

I heard something on the radio the other day about how the bonus culture came about. It went along the lines of banks used to be partnerships with the senior bankers the partners (obviously). When banks moved to a shareholder based business the partners had to give up the potential high rewards partnership based businesses give to the partners (basically carving up the profits no further than the partners). So as compensation for giving this up bonuses were introduced for the former partners.

I think it's clear the bonus culture as gone a lot further than that in recent years and has become a way to offer massive rewards for as you say little real risk to a lot more people. I forget how many employees at one of the US investment banks were on $1m bonuses but it was several hundred so way beyond the senior bankers who could be considered the equivalent of the former partners.

Nobody has suggested otherwise.

But that is not the point.

It is an opinion piece – however good or bad or indifferent.

You have claimed that there is "widespread abuse" of the system. You have been asked for evidence of that "widespread abuse".

You have still not provided any.

In which case, you have now suggested that, unless a newspaper editor is also "a university professor conducting empirical research", no media reports or content can ever be taken as anything other than "someone's opinion".

It would mean, for instance, that no newspaper ever published anything that was not opinion.

Which is quite clearly errant nonsense – and amusingly sees you destroy your own pretence that editorials constitute evidence.

As a little exercise, perhaps The Video Ref (or anyone else, for that matter) can analyse [url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/9911912/Food-watchdog-to-ask-shoppers-how-much-horse-is-acceptable.htmlthis report[/url from the [iTelegraph[/i and explain which bits of it are mere opinion, given that political correspondent Peter Dominiczak is not also "a university professor conducting empirical research".

I can see that banks will want to reward and encourage those who make squillions in profit for the banks by their activities.
To my mind the issue is not about bonuses per se, but about the giving of bonuses as reward for risky dealing.

When I wirked for the NFC we had a bonus scheme that was based on departmental profits and paid 1/4ly, not in cash but in shares. We had an internal invoice system known as "Comp 23" and the simplest way of ensuring you hit the bonus target in any particular 1/4 was to issue a Comp 23 on the final day of that 1/4 and then issue a credit the following day. Of course it meant we then started the next 1/4 in a negative balance but that could always be made up, or seldomly meant we might miss bonus that 1/4.

The banks simply seem to have taken that to a stratospheric level.

How do you de-link the two? The riskier the trade the bigger the profit (if it comes off) so the higher the bonus.

How about a return to a simple salaried pay structure where the best traders / bankers are rewarded with a high basic salary in return for trading consistently and profitably? Pay rises (if any) to be made in relation to how the [ibank[/i does overall not how individuals do in terms of profit that can be laid solely at their feet. Given they will be on high salaries anyway that should be reward enough for whatever profit they contribute.

All these stupidly high bonus do is reward a select few out of many thousands of employees and encourage the exact opposite of any kind of collective responsibility and sense of company identity. The few can milk the cash cow for a few years, walk away and hang the consequences. So IMO bonuses are just another symptom of the short term-ism that pervades society, politics and business these days. They need to be done away with completely IMO.