So you'd happily put hundreds of butlers, cooks, gardeners and corgis on the dole?

Quite gladly. Imagine the saving to the country.

How much would it save? Net.

Thats a sensible idea!! It was used after WWII and some of my teachers at school in the 1970s had qualified through that programme. They were good solid teachers.

On the benefits issue, it seems very difficult to get on and off benefits. My daughter signed on last year for a week, but then found a job. However her dole money took 6 weeks to come through. If you are unemployed you may also have to wait four weeks+ for your first wage packet. Few families can go from benefits with no income for a month or the risk that if the job proves to be short term it will take months to get your benefits coming in. The system is slow and unresponsive and aimed at people going onto benefit and staying there.
Its also expensive to the tax payer. I worked a lot of extra time last month and nearly half of the pay went on tax and NI....wheres the incentive in being a tax cash cow for the state?

Langer7 - the much (mis)quoted Norman Tebbit get on your bike statement was not what he actually said. He was talking about his unemployed father in the 1930s and how he got on his bike and cycled to find work. He never once said get on yer bike.

But I understand where you are coming from now - you are right it's too easy to label everyone without work as lazy scroungers etc. in the same way not all public sector workers are Lesbian Diversity Outreach assistants on 50k per year (TM Daily Mail).
However, it goes without saying that there are people like that and they should be rooted out of the system. The welfare system needs to be a safety net not a way of life. There's something seriously wrong when we spend more on housing benefit than the Army and Royal Navy combined.

Having said that most people have to travel a fair distance to work - my girlfriend gets 3 trains, over an hour and a half journey sometimes to get to work. I still don't see what is wrong with having to travel to get work - it's common sense surely?

MattyWire 75 - no problem and I can quite understand why you may have read / reacted to my comment given your son. Out of interest which school does he go to?

he goes to our local primary school, but next september goes upto high school. He needs to go to a high school that has a specialist ASD provision facility and warrington has 2 of these (st greggs and bridgewater.) We have had meetings with the school, LEA, educational psychologist, parent patnership etc to make the transition to high school alot easier. Unfortunatly in warrington there are only about 6-8 provision places over both schools available for an authority with around 60 primary schools. So we just have to wait till 15th feb and see what happens next.

Will whether or not you are Catholics come into it vis a vis st. Gregory's?

If you go to Bridgewater you have to play union at school and not league. You don't want that!!

No, that has no bearing on children with statements of special educational needs.





small price to pay.

How about if child benefit was restricted to the first two or even three children....?

The reason why i have problems with the child benefit cut's is because it creates something. To start with it's people on £44000 +, then what happens. There would be no reason for the govt to slash it again at say £35000, then again at £30000 etc etc. Also whats to stop them to then look at universal healthcare? People earning over X amount have to have private health for example. Then you could in theeory end up in the ridiculous situation where the workers are funding the shirkers for everything. I like most pay my taxes and NI and expect to see some benefits back for my contributions. Maybe im wrong on this and being a little bit over reactive on this but i care about what the govt has planned.

I totally agree...

When I was a student I believed that anyone on over £10k should be taxed to the hilt (it was a long time ago)
Then when I was earning £10k I believed anyone earning over £15k should be taxed to the hilt...
Then when I was earning £20k I believed anyone earning over £30k should be taxed to the hilt...
etc etc...
I've now realised that step changes are bad things...step changes from 20% to 40% tax...step changes from child benefit to no child benefit...step changes from work to benefit.... they disincentivise.

I earn enough to be losing the child benefit...and the quirk of the system is that there is a point at which someone on £43999 will be better off that someone on £44001...which is bizarre. However I am very much the dominant wage earner in my family and have a full time and a part time job. As a result of higher tax rates and the loss of child benefit (and family tax credit) my part time job pays about as much as a paper round....its not a great reward for working hard.

Fundamentally as the years go on I (and most other folk) are paying more and more for less and less. It is annoying to have paid tax for thirty years (assuming £10k per year thats £300k!!) and not have taken a penny from the system while there are those who only take money out of the system.

You could create something similar to a tax code.
firstly if you're single
S
then if you earn more than 44k you get
N (no benefit)
less than 44k you get
CB.

When you are married you must supply both P60's to a post office (make it compulsory or fine them).
For couples getting married that are not already, make it part of the process.

then your tax code will be
M

and again if your joint income is more than 44k
N
less
CB

for people who live together but are not married treat them the same as married couples but they have to provide a council tax form too (to show they live together)
they could have a tax code of
D

It could be paid 2 ways through work, the benefit is paid into businesses and they know how their employees are paid so they pay it or not depending on codes.
For the unemployed it is paid the same way as it is now.

Now i'm far from an expert in anything so i expect to get ripped to shreads on this by the business/more financially savvy, but, it's an idea of kind.

TBF, that would happen wherever they decided to draw the line.

thats a good idea.

I think there is a lot of cutting they can do on the benefits of the people who dont work. Instead of hitting the hard working in the pocket. This should be addressed before they start hitting us in the pocket.

After they have cut the lazy ******* benefits then the above idea should be brought in.

A lad I know has just been laid off. He told me yesterday he isnt going to go and find a job as after all his benefits he is no worse off. Madness.

Better to draw a slope not a line...

An interesting thought???.....Now that the Government seem to have indicated that £44,000 is enough to live on, without the need for any state help, what about if NOBODY was allowed to earn above that figure for a 1 year period??

Using an extreme example, somebody like Wayne Rooney would allegedly be contributing about £12 million alone to cutting the countries deficit.....The Football Premiership alone would probably cut a huge chunk from our debt....With everybody else thrown in, I reckon we could wipe out a huge amount of the billions we owe....

communism at its best

As Call Me Dave likes to often point out....WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER, COMRADE!!!

and drive round in motorbilty cars whilst using them as company vehicles.
certain families try every trick in the book to illegally calim benefits and rob the tax payer and i personally cant wait for the new means tests come in,

Quirks like that happen all through the tax/benefits system. My inlaws are in receipt of various benefits due to their age and illhealth etc. M-in-L was told that she was eligable for an extra allowances for whatever reason it was and she gains £8per week. Unfortunately this took her over levels for other benefits and as a household they lost just over £10 per week.

Our daughter goes to college and due to our income levels doesnt qualify for EMA (JUST over the limit). Her college friends (apart from one other) get it. So she doesnt lose out we give her the money out of our pocket. As a result our disposable income is below that some of the families who get it.

The whole system needs to be looked at but for as long as the powers-that-be have one eye on their polictial survival as well as the benefit of the country, everything they do will be simply tinkering around the edges.

Do you get free school dinners these days?

There was a German woman where I used to work who had grown up in East Germany behind the Iron Curtain, I used to chat to her quite a bit about life in the old GDR. Her view was that yes there were shortages of things and you couldn't get the consumer goods you could in the West, things like food and furniture were always the same few brands on sale everywhere, but she said she thought when she got to the UK and saw the perception that everybody had of the GDR it was unfair. Her Dad is still an old style communist who will never accept the new regime, there's a lot of 'nostalgia' (probably with red-tinted glasses on) in the East about the 'old days' especially in the current financial climate. Although they had restricted access to a lot of consumer goods, stuff like food, housing costs, and fuel bills were heavily subsidised and as long as people shut up and played ball and didn't criticise the State, the State provided them with a decent pension, good levels of free education and healthcare. One of the things she said about it was that although you had restrictions on your freedoms, you couldn't go holidaying easily like you could here, people didn't have worries about the future, would they lose their job, would they get their house repossessed, would they be able to afford health care or social care bills, so because of that people lived more 'social' lives, ironically it's the type of stuff David Cameron wants with the Big Society, her Dad used to run chess clubs and woodwork and metalwork hobby clubs for teenagers in his free time, her Mum used to volunteer to teach people embroidery for free and so on, you had people participating in stuff for their local community just because it was a way of meeting people and having hobbies, rather than now they prefer to stay in playing with their gadgets and plasma TVs....most people in our kind of society tend to scoff at the idea of getting involved in the community for free, they tend to think 'whats in it for me', but it was part of life over there.

i was on jobseekers for 4 months after being told my contract would not be renewed after my lab apprehensive ran its course, couldnt get a job for love nor money as everyone i was competing against in interviews had at least a degree in chemistry compared to my HNC. thought sod it and now im at uni dodging taxes lol, only so i can hopefully get a job in a lab when i finish though. OR teach

bully's star prize.....tory nazi propoganda

in two.....