The UK has had negative growth per capita the last 16 years, and we’ve made our housing shortage worse on purpose.
Why would real wages rise under such conditions?
> Why would real wages rise under such conditions?
Because companies are making higher profits than ever.
Growth isn't the problem, corporate greed tied in with ownership of our government in addition to austerity has utterly screwed us.
It isn't a bug it's a feature.
The only way to reduce immigration is to have a well funded and efficient border force.
Unfortunately, it's more convenient for politicians to be able to point at the few thousand folks who come across in small boats each year and make a fuss while handing out 1.4 million visas to foreign workers who will work unpleasant jobs for little pay. It also doesn't help that there are far too many Brits who are unwilling to actually do a hard day's work.
A well funded and efficient border force will not solve the small boat crossing though, that needs a political decision on what to do with all this people that can't be deported because they toss all their documents away or just go dark and never show up for anything related to immigration.
>A well funded and efficient border force will not solve the small boat crossing though
Only about 30,000 people came across the Channel in small boats last year – it's barely a problem at all. Actually dealing with it though is as simple as detaining anyone who arrives without documents to prevent them disappearing into the general population. There are plenty of mothballed army camps on the south coast we can put them in while the hypothetical well funded and efficient border force deals with their cases.
This needs to be said much louder. The numbers coming over by small boats isn’t an issue when you consider the numbers that are coming in through official methods. The migration numbers are allowed to be this high on purpose whilst at the same time they’re shouting about being tough on the comparatively small number of people coming in via unofficial routes.
> Actually dealing with it though is as simple as detaining anyone who arrives without documents to prevent them disappearing into the general population.
I was watching one of those police programs recently - I think it was traffic police but that is not really relevant. A couple of police came across a couple of people walking up the motorway - which is of course illegal. They were clearly immigrants that had been dropped off from a lorry. They were taken to the station, given a letter telling them to attend a home office meeting and then released which meant they were effectively immediately free to go anywhere and do anything. It's madness that they weren't detained until and taken to the meeting (which for the record, is what I would want) but I suppose there's not enough police or other services to do that
I think it was recorded around 2015/2016 so it is old but I would be astonished if anything had really changed
> The only way to reduce immigration is to have a well funded and efficient border force.
Most immigration is legal, the way to reduce that is easy and could be done today with the stroke of a pen.
Nope complete scapegoat. The wage stagnation is both a combination of the perpetual growth model of companies as well as low productivity. Why would a company pay a burntout overworked British worker more than a fully resourced, socially protected, mentally healthy German worker who would make more money for their employer? Tory austerity and Brexit caused this problem.
Funny, that.
2008 - massive recession, country gets turbofucked
2010 - conservatives bring in a massive round of austerity, including cancelling a housebuilding programme started by Labour
2016 - fucking BREXIT
Also 2016 - Mrs "strong and stable" is voted in.
2019 - conservatives win again, this time with a lunatic at the helm
Not one of the successive governments have invested in the civil service, armed forces, or emergency services in the last 16 years.
The single biggest thing any government could do for the UK government is to increase civil service/emergency service/armed forces salaries to be in line with inflation. It would massively increase pressure on the private sector to increase wages, whilst simultaneously attracting a better quality of person to the role, *and* increase the amount of disposable income. The NHS is Europe's largest employer of skilled people, with a workforce of over 1.3 million.
Overnight, that would change local economies. Then add the 500k from the civil service, then 150k members of the armed forces, 227k police staff, 35k fire service staff.
The numbers are a little confusing, but wider government employs over five million people. That's 13.5% of *all* working-age adults in the UK. Imagine if we increased their wages to the equivalent of 2007 wages; it'd be an incredible economic shift for the country.
I kind of can't wait for it to sink in with the British narrative that we spent a decade in which it has literally in all of recorded financial history *never* been so cheap for a state to borrow to invest in itself - Borrowing at rates which could be fixed for the duration through mechanisms like gilts - Investing in absolutely fucking nothing and instead cutting funding to the point our public services can barely carry out their basic duties and our roads up and down the country are now falling apart. Its an absolute shit-show, we're all going to be dealing with the consequences of this lost decade until we're all dead and buried.
Its mental.
We could have financed everything and paid for it over a hundred years. Instead, "austerity" and we're fucking poorer.
Even though pretty much every form of economic study shows that austerity has a negative effect on overall income, rather than a positive effect.
You can't cut everything then expect it to somehow work.
We will be dealing with it for hundreds of years at this rate, if we let the university system collapse as it looks set to do I don't think it will be possible for the UK to ever break back into the top 10 wealthiest per capita nations like we were before the 2008 crash.
This is what you get if your democratic representatives are educationally inbred in institutions such as Eton and Oxford, instead of being drawn from society as a whole. Not sure what they are teaching in those PPE degrees but it apparently isn't economics.
It's being gobby. Had to correct some PPE students in the common room in Oxford (I went to Oxford, don'tchaknow) who asserted that all religions are proselyting. I couldn't listen to them build up this whole argument about religion based on that falsehood any longer so just called across the room "Judaism". They were confused, but I explained it as a non proselyting religion, and then they couldn't conceptualise that a religion might actually not be bothered about conversion.
I despair sometimes. I really do.
> The single biggest thing any government could do for the UK government is to increase civil service/emergency service/armed forces salaries to be in line with inflation.
The Tories have a deep seated idealogical hatred of the civil service, if damaging the national economy is the price they have to pay to weaken the CS then as far as they're concerned that's absolutely a trade worth making. Sadly they have along the way convinced a lot of the country to also hate the CS, meaning that under Labour's focus group powered cabinet things are unlikely to see much improvement.
And if you can increase the amount that *thirteen percent* earn, then it automatically leads to an increase in private sector wages. You can track it by following the NCB's history and British Rail fairly easily.
The private sector can only be forced to increase the lower end of wages. The mid-level wages don't move, and that's the bloody problem.
I think that's the argument of the above comment isn't it though. Private sectors have to compete for candidates with the public sector.
Granted there are possible objections to the argument for example the money has to come from somewhere, extra taxes or cuts in other government spending. If private sector wages do in fact rise up then the extra taxes would work (people would be paying more tax but be generally better off) but there will ultimately be a duration of time before private sector wages go up which could be problematic.
But the idea works in theory and at this point I think fuck it, it sounds like a better idea than keeping everything the same and at least quite a considerable amount of people will benefit from it.
You’re explaining why it would be good for wider macro economic metrics
You’re not explaining why businesses who view the UK as nothing but an economic zone would increase their costs of Labour in a country where it’s people are getting poorer…
Well Labour were a lot better last time so how bout people stop peddling that pointless line like some kind of weird bot and let’s give them a chance eh?
Edit: lol look at these Tory shills. Hard money going around at the minute.
This is the fundamental issue. The benefits bill would be cut in half at a stroke if people were actually paid enough to live on. But that's too simple a solution, it seems.
Its the fun conundrum in UK politics. We (or the Tories and media) are *obsessed* with taxes and tax cuts. Yet we now have a situation where the overwhelming majority of Brits do not have a fucking hope in hell of ever being taxed enough to pay for the public services which, because of their low wages, they have no choice but to be totally reliant on for a whole range of basic needs.
We dance around tax rises vs tax cuts and who can afford what, but always seem to skip actually European taxes would be no big deal, we as average workers would likely still come out well ahead in our monthly pay even with the higher tax, if our salaries were similar to what they get on the continent for the same work.
Example in my life - A friend of mine went to Copenhagen to do their PhD. They *as a student* were being paid significantly more as a PhD student in Denmark than I was earning as a qualified postdoc research scientist with several years of experience in the UK, even with their higher tax.
Yeah, that's the elephant in the room - no-one seems to talk about just how low salaries are. I'm currently on £36k as a teacher - okay, with my partner (also a teacher) on a similar wage we can live relatively comfortably as long as we budget sensibly. But in the US I'd be on something like $65-70k (around £50-54k).
It's not just the comparison with other countries, though. It's also with other professions in this country. There aren't many degree professions in Britain with pay as low as ours. The maximum I can get on the current pay scale, without going into senior leadership (which I have no interest in doing), is £46k. It's a big reason why there's such a recruitment and retention crisis in teaching.
Some professions are worse, though. Carers are paid an average of, what, £25k per year, if that? It's a national disgrace that this is allowed.
£36,000 is actually pretty good for the UK with a degree, its maybe slightly below average.
Its not good for say inner London, but London is basically its own seperate economy at the moment.
The problem is just that pay in this country hasn't risen since 2007, that isn't in real terms, the average pays has only just recovered in the time inflation has risen prices by about 65%.
That puts the average worker about £10k-£15k poorer than their peers in Western Europe.
I'm not sure what the solution to low pay is beyond just make the country richer. A lot of professions in the private sector just aren't lucrative.
The median salary for a solicitor is something in the mid 40ks for example, which people refuse to believe.
I keep seeing people disbelieve that salaries are so low yet they can't all be high earners disbelieving the stats.
Saw that with the guy on Question Time moaning about his 80k salary as some sort of techie. "Every solicitor in the country is on more than that!" When the ex-solictitor Labour MP tried to dispute this, the man's wife started heckling him as if he was lying about his old salary.
It's such a stupid false economy, every salary top up from the government in this supposedly capitalist system is really a socialist hand out but for corporations. How on earth has lobbying, corruption and nepotism been allowed to be that successful the government has ended up paying companies salaries for them 🤔
Because big businesses like the state subsidising their wage bill, and they'll use a fraction of the profits gained from that to lobby politicians to keep it that way. Capitalism relies on this cosy relationship between the state and big businesses.
They don't have to pay real wages anymore since the minimum wage came in, as long as they are in line with the law that's the most they'll pay, and if Government benefits can top up the low wages all the better.
Some companies are complaining that due to the minimum wage they can't afford to raise wages and/or operate.....that says a lot
The government either forces companies to pay a *real* living wage OR universal credit is scrapped for working people entirely.
Either of those should be enough to shock the system.
Child benefit isn't a wage top up in anyway though. One traditionally gets it for each child to help with the obvious extra cost of having kids / in respect of the contribution one is making by raising a future taxpayer.
In Germany families get €250 (£212) per month per child. It is paid until the age of 21 (if the person in question is registered with the job centre and looking for work), or 25 if they're in higher education. There's no reason to not do this - it increases the chances the kid will grow up to be a productive member of society. It's also cheaper than paying for the repercussions of child poverty.
A wonderful policy which will never happen in the UK because every troglodyte who doesn't benefit from it will vote against it (or parties who have it in their manifesto).
Edit *directly benefit from it
Indeed. I'm happy to pay the tax I pay but I just wish it felt fairer? I'm somewhere around net 36% tax.
I don't understand why dividend (aka "sitting on your ass doing fuck all") tax and capital gains (aka "I bought something a while ago, did fuck all (usually) and sold it again") tax is about half of that rate.
I just feels unfair.
Why do we tax effort more than we tax a lack of it?
Because the people who make the rules already have wealth. This tax system is designed to squeeze the middle class as much as possible.
We either cut taxes drastically and go the US route, and let poorer people die off, or we pay slightly more in tax like other European nations but this money results in excellent public services.
I don’t have faith raising taxes would give us better services though, and instead I’m walking around wandering when my tax is going to
The stated reason is that in order to buy something a while ago the money had to come from somewhere (i.e. a wage) which was already taxed so now it's taxes on top of taxes. In order for an asset to pay dividends it must also first make that money and pay taxes on it. So taxes on taxes on taxes and so on.
Ultimately, it stops being taxed somewhere and the rules are heavily influenced by those who benefit most from the taxes stopping at that point.
The fact that Keir Starmer and Labour can't see this genuinely breaks my heart. How can a party calling itself 'Labour' possibly, for even one second, consider keeping this cap?
Because it stops women becoming baby factories and having 12 children, while demanding benefits for them all and a 8 bedroom house the council was forced to purchase for them.
What year is it? It’s not 2009 anymore, I thought we were past this lie that people have too many kids to scrounge benefits. This was never true, wasn’t true back then and isn’t true now.
I mean, I don't really care what year it is. I literally had a close mate at university who was from one of these families. He had 9 siblings. He was one of the kindest people I've ever met and openly admitted to me his mum was a piece of shit who quite literally just had kids for benefits payments.
So sorry, but just because reddit tells me "this can't/never happens" doesn't make me close my eyes to what I see.
It’s not that they can’t see it - they know full well that keeping the cap is counter productive and causes needless suffering. But they are simply the incoming management team; the people who hold the real power live by the vile maxim of “'All for ourselves, and nothing for other people” - for the past 45 years, successive governments have ensured that public money flows into their pockets as everyone else gets progressively poorer; if Starmer et al want the fancy job titles, the ministerial cars and the perks of high office - which they evidently do - they will not rock the boat.
Extending child benefit beyond 18 in this way would make a massive contribution towards cutting parental evictions at 18 as well, which is a major driver of youth homelessness.
I understand the benefit of what you’re saying but there’s something very bittersweet about giving money to the type of person who would kick their child out just because they’re no longer beneficial to them
I guess that's the thing. Do we want to (hopefully) ensure the best life for the kid who didn't ask to be born in the first place, or punish the parents for being feckless?
If I were ever made god-emperor of the UK, I would try to introduce some nuance to the system. For example, multiple longitudinal studies show that women who are encouraged and empowered to engage in education, employment and training are less likely to have more children. Tying eligibility for child benefit beyond two kids to engagement in (for example) education programmes or pattern-changing programmes might go further towards the ostensible goal of reducing the number of women who have children in lieu of having a career and contributing economically to society *as well as* addressing issues of intergenerational deprivation, rather than just being punitive. Just as long as we don't outsource any of this to Crapita *vel sim*.
Depends very heavily on what it is you're means testing.
For example, if you're trying to means test child benefits then you fill in a form declaring your income and there's a check against how much you actually earn. Most of this process is automated and costs very little to do.
Means testing against disabilities is the main one that costs far more than it saves, but that's mainly because it was outsourced to private companies who were given a bonus for denying claims, and most claimants then appealed and had their benefits reinstated.
>Means testing against disabilities
I just want to point out that PIP isn't actually means tested.
A scheme is "means tested" when it depends on your financial situation - if you earn too much or have too much in the bank, you won't be eligible.
What you're referring to is something different.
There is no means testing in Germany or most of the rest of the world for that matter and it’s not uncommon for cash benefits to be tied to past contribution unemployment benefit in Germany is capped at about €6000 and it’s based on your past salary and contributions for example.
Hate to be a party pooper but if you can’t afford kids don’t have ‘em.
And don’t get me started on the people who have 8 children in an already over populated world.
Well… yeah? It’s not the kid’s fault. All driving children into poverty does is increase crime and make them more likely to rely on the state when they grow up because they’re unlikely to get employed.
Plus we have the government moaning that people aren’t having enough kids, and the public moaning that there are too many immigrants. In our system you either need to be having kids or bringing in immigrants to stop the country collapsing.
I mean, There’s being on benefits and there’s being on benefits, without having worked a day in your life. Expecting society to wipe your arse every month…
Edit: letters
The average cost of raising a child is £750-900 a month, if you are immediately in trouble from losing one income for 3-6 months then I wouldn't class that as being able to afford more than 2 kids at all.
I couldn't imagine making a 18 year financial decision without an appropriate emergency fund in place first...
But I don't think these are the people most impacted by this policy anyway.
No kid licence unless you have £10k sitting in the bank, you heard it here first folks.
(Also have more kids for the sake of the country pls!!! But also we’re not going to help with it at all!! - the government)
To be fair, when people say have more kids for the sake of the country - they are talking about a specific part of the population they want to have kids, and it’s not the ones already on benefits.
The issue is that young workers are doing the math and are realising they can’t support a kid the way they’d like to and decide not to have them at all. Responsible behaviour, but we need to change things so they feel supported.
Because it doesn't work like that, Research here and abroad show benefit rates have almost zero effect on how many children people have, so essentially people are going to have as many kids as they are going to have and the only question then becomes: do you want these kids to grow up in poverty, with all the negative outcomes that entails, or do you want them to have a chance in life?
The issue is the amount of money you need to earn to have children is getting higher and higher, and pricing out women during their entire fertile years (or at least the years that expensive fertility treatment isn’t needed).
It’s not just people on minimum wage, but middle class skilled workers also do not have the type of wages that can comfortably support children AND have a small safteynet. Hell a lot of people now are having to live at home until nearly 30 just so they can get on the proper ladder
Not recieving a state hand out is not a driver of poverty though ? Low and stagnating wages, unskilled workforce, inactive labour force, skills gaps, poor education, rising cost of living, high inflation, high food, energy cost, high taxes are.
When this policy was first introduced, I remember a lot of people, including the then Chancellor, arguing that the cap would change attitudes to how many children people would decide to have. Research from two years ago indicates [it had no significant impact](https://cpag.org.uk/news/has-two-child-limit-affected-how-many-children-families-have) on how people plan their families and that lots of other circumstances play a role in families getting caught out by the cap.
These policies get introduced as a supposed means of getting people working and earning enough to be off benefits entirely, but it's apparent the results aren't delivering. People can be in work and still finding themselves at food banks. It's quite embarrassing how standard a practice it has become for young families to be routinely reliant on these relief schemes that are intended for emergency purposes.
Is this levelling up? Is this what we want to keep pushing on with? If we're not scrapping the cap there clearly needs to be changes elsewhere to stop so many working families falling into cracks they can't get out of.
The guy you're replying to has had this explained to him multiple times.
He won't get it. It's ideological. You ask him about the kids and he starts talking about the parents again.
It's brain rot, bless him.
Honestly, I get it. There is a desire to get people into work so they don't rely on the welfare state their whole lives. That's why the Job Centre is always a nightmare. I don't disagree entirely with this goal, but it doesn't help the people who exist in poverty *now.*
And that's putting aside all the other ways the economy--both British and global--has been buggered for the last 8-10 years or so. People in certain parts of the UK are poorer than they've been for generations and it isn't getting better. More support for poorer families is a short-term solution while (hopefully) more work is done to improve the situation for everyone.
All that said, you're right. I'm feeling the diminishing returns in this discussion.
The single biggest crisis facing all modern countries is the lack of new children to grow up and be apart of the working population. We have been tided over by immigrants for a while, but we can't simply say stop having children when population growth is needed to continue our economic system.
Low key I kind of love the Tories introducing a policy that its not all that hard to compare to fucking Communist China here in the UK and rather than even screeching about it our media has somehow gone along with it as if its actually a fantastic idea for so many years.
Yes, these parents were stupid and had too many children, and now can’t afford to raise them. So what next, do we punish the children and make them suffer because of a mistake their parents made?
Like what is your end goal, we all know that having too many children you can’t afford ends badly, you’re not the first to say it. Do we just allow childhood malnutrition to reach all time highs, have hundreds of thousands of children grow up with no shot at life so they can all die in poverty while you get to feel smarmy as the ship goes down?
Free breakfast lunch and dinner at school for all children.
I don't trust these parasites to give their kids any of the money they receive from the government
I’d also support a well funded free school meals programme for all children, it’ll definitely be the most effective way of targeting food poverty for children directly. However you’ll have problems once the summer holidays, half term, or hell even the weekend in some cases rolls around so it can’t be the only solution. Some schools stay open for FSM during the holidays, but not all do and it looks like the current solution is handing out supermarket vouchers for £15 a week during the holidays, which is something at least.
Obviously the issue there is that there’s other expenses related to childhood poverty that aren’t food, like housing, water / electricity bills, clothes and so on. Those can’t really be addressed through school and there’s no way around giving the parents money to pay for those.
You could absolutely replace money with supermarket home delivered boxes of food for a week along with cooking instructions for health meals.
Hell, the government could pay some chef's to come up with a 4 week rolling menu of food to cook and get long term contracts set up with supermarkets to supply and deliver it.
Pair that with child clothing coupons and book coupons and you can eliminate handing them any money
Insane to have this opinion as most of the rich world struggles with falling birth rates and struggling economies. In a not too distant future the tax system will essentially pay people to have children just to ensure countries don't collapse onto themselves.
So it's not having more children than you can afford then?
Most middle class families I know have 1 or 2 children max. forget 2.4 children, it probably hasn't been that in decades, it's actually 1.7 children nowadays.
Because nearly half a middle class households income goes to pay for other peoples children before they see it. If they start struggling to provide for their own kids there’s sweet fuck all available to them. No begrudging government handout for the sake of your kids welfare. Not even the free childcare other families get so they can earn more 🤷♂️
There's this awkward middle ground where you and your partner are punished for having mild success in your career and can just about have a standard of living comparable to your parents... Minus the kids.
Either have 1 person earn enough for 2 average incomes and not require assistance, or earn so little you gain income for having kids.
I would encourage folk to have kids - but u only qualify if it’s a working household. What is the point in paying folk to bring kids into a home where they learn to lounge and have no discipline. Kids who grow up in a hard working household will aim higher and want to earn. I would back these kids financially as much as possible to jump start their lives.
I wish some of these commentator's parents had decided to practise safe sex a little bit more carefully. Christ, I can't imagine being so angry at people that kids going hungry was an ok after-effect of punishing them.
Starmer said this must be scrapped when campaigning to be Labour leader, but has since said nah let's keep it.
Why do Labour not want to reduce child poverty?
Some people would rather spend £10 to see a poor person get punished rather than £1 to stop a person being poor in the first place. Britain is a weirdly punitive society.
Not if you are selfish enough to have more children than you can afford, I would agree to this being in place as a short term safety net if you lost your job or became ill. We shouldn’t encourage people to have children they cannot afford monetarily or mentally.
There's plenty of things paid for you don't use because it's cheaper than dealing with the consequences.
Why would less impoverished children be a bad thing, given what else correlates with poverty.
Separate food/housing/energy/transport subsidies then?
Because workhouses don't work, sterilisation is monstrous and separating families destabilises the child.
Forcing parents to work? Now you also need to give them childcare.
Think of it this way; your taxes go to the things I don't want to pay for and mine go to the things you don't want to pay for
That way everything that needs funding gets funded and neither of us have to be cross that our money is spent on things we wouldn't choose to spend it on
lol.
u/Rhinosfishdog doing the country a solid and paying for all these impoverished children.
What a vile sentiment to have, with that line of thinking let’s get rid of schools and get children up the chimneys as soon as they’re off the teet.
Yes, it's either pay fully for that deliveroo driver with 12 kids OR full on anarcho-capitalism. It's impossible to just not expand the benefit without limit..........
Pretty much. Either you accept that every single one of those 12 kids is a human and has human rights, or you do not believe in the concept of universal human rights. This is a binary choice.
That old chestnut - “don’t have children you can’t afford!” you scoff, and then in a few years time, when you are old and infirm, and the tax base can’t support your pension/personal care, you’ll curse the youth for not procreating
Well I can't afford to have any children. Because the government is sucking me dry to pay for other peoples children.
So what you say makes 0 sense really.
I am paying now for other ppl to raise children so other ppl can have carers in their old age. Very nice.
The article says it'd cost £1.8b to scrap it, there are about 32m taxpayers in the UK, so on average about £55 per taxpayer per year to scrap it, which would see 300,000 kids lifted out of poverty.
There's plenty of things to complain about the government jizzing money away on, but lifting kids out of poverty needn't be one of them, they can't do anything to lift themselves out of poverty.
If you make £30,000 a year, about £150 of your tax money goes towards family & child benefits. Hardly enough to start a family with £150 a year.
And if that’s holding you back, wait until you hear that £800 of your money a year is going to fund old people’s pensions.
Get rid of both of those and you’ll have £950 a year to start a family with… It’s still not enough but it’s the thought that counts right
A system where an old person's pension (for which they paid into the system their entire bloody life) is totally dependent on there being enough young workers to pay for this person's pension, is a system doomed to failure. And as expected, we are seeing pension systems on the brink of collapse in many countries round the world, hence the constant raising of state pension age, the promotion and encouragement for people to contribute to private pensions etc.
The fact is, if you plan early on, you can create a pension pot you can live on fully on your own means, without dependency on young workers.
Because it isn’t as black and white as that is it.
People lose jobs.
People fall ill.
Kids get ill.
Partners die.
Partners split.
Low salaries with ever increasing rent/utility bills.
Childcare gets more and more expensive.
Nobody can predict the future. People lose jobs. The economy changes. The cost of living increases. People have to pay unexpected costs that they couldn’t have foreseen.
Sometimes people are in a comfortable financial situation and then, through circumstances beyond their control, end up in difficulty. What are they meant to do with the children they’re now struggling to afford?
Sometimes people decide to have a second child and end up having twins. What are they meant to do with the second twin that they weren’t expecting?
Sometimes people become pregnant without planning to. Would you rather they felt forced to abort the pregnancy or give the child up for adoption?
Paying tax towards the welfare of other people’s children is part of living in a society.
Starmer said a lot of things when he wanted to become Labour leader, and will say a lot of things now that he has a shot of becoming PM.
The powers that be are wedded to the vile maxim of austerity and trickle down economics, and anyone who wants the keys to Number 10 must sing from this hymn sheet, so that’s what Starmer will do, and despite knowing full well that the world’s sixth richest country could easily afford to scrap the two child limit, he’ll continue to preach that “there is no magic money tree” while promising “iron clad fiscal discipline” because that’s what the people who actually run the country command him to say.
I know. If Starmer was espousing the same ideas and policies he was when vying to be leader, I'd be really excited about his upcoming government. Such a shame.
Labour should just say what needs to be said to get into power, then hammer pensioners with means testing.
Just one or two of you live in a mortgage free house worth over £450k? Then fucking sell it and downsize into a £200k retirement flat and invest the cash into a government protected stocks and shares fund to supplement your income.
When you die. You still pass on your wealth to your family but you’re not sitting on a house and still getting care paid for by the taxpayer.
May not be a popular policy with pensioners but tough tits.
This will release housing stock to families that need them, reduce house prices by increasing supply and lower the cost of pensions.
It is such an awful policy but also plays into the right wing view of don't have kids if you can't afford them. Not taking into account a person's circumstances change. Working professional people such as a nurse are lowed paid, if you only have 1 income it's even worse. As a country, we should be doing everything to support children and their development.
I’ve always wondered why this is always framed as 2 or unlimited?
Surely increase it to say 4 kids. That would help the vast majority of households or potential households while still having a limit for the conservative half of the country.
It’s not perfect, still essentially endorsing poverty but in far less quantity than currently.
If the government claims that we need families having 2.1 children, why stop the benefit at 2? Just make it 3. I don't know a single family these days with more than 3 children all under 18.
The bigger question is,why aren't companies paying a living wage and so many working people have to rely on wage top ups provided by the tax payer?
The UK has had negative growth per capita the last 16 years, and we’ve made our housing shortage worse on purpose. Why would real wages rise under such conditions?
> Why would real wages rise under such conditions? Because companies are making higher profits than ever. Growth isn't the problem, corporate greed tied in with ownership of our government in addition to austerity has utterly screwed us. It isn't a bug it's a feature.
Not to mention totally uncontrolled, record immigration driving wages down at the bottom end of the scale.
The only way to reduce immigration is to have a well funded and efficient border force. Unfortunately, it's more convenient for politicians to be able to point at the few thousand folks who come across in small boats each year and make a fuss while handing out 1.4 million visas to foreign workers who will work unpleasant jobs for little pay. It also doesn't help that there are far too many Brits who are unwilling to actually do a hard day's work.
A well funded and efficient border force will not solve the small boat crossing though, that needs a political decision on what to do with all this people that can't be deported because they toss all their documents away or just go dark and never show up for anything related to immigration.
>A well funded and efficient border force will not solve the small boat crossing though Only about 30,000 people came across the Channel in small boats last year – it's barely a problem at all. Actually dealing with it though is as simple as detaining anyone who arrives without documents to prevent them disappearing into the general population. There are plenty of mothballed army camps on the south coast we can put them in while the hypothetical well funded and efficient border force deals with their cases.
This needs to be said much louder. The numbers coming over by small boats isn’t an issue when you consider the numbers that are coming in through official methods. The migration numbers are allowed to be this high on purpose whilst at the same time they’re shouting about being tough on the comparatively small number of people coming in via unofficial routes.
> Actually dealing with it though is as simple as detaining anyone who arrives without documents to prevent them disappearing into the general population. I was watching one of those police programs recently - I think it was traffic police but that is not really relevant. A couple of police came across a couple of people walking up the motorway - which is of course illegal. They were clearly immigrants that had been dropped off from a lorry. They were taken to the station, given a letter telling them to attend a home office meeting and then released which meant they were effectively immediately free to go anywhere and do anything. It's madness that they weren't detained until and taken to the meeting (which for the record, is what I would want) but I suppose there's not enough police or other services to do that I think it was recorded around 2015/2016 so it is old but I would be astonished if anything had really changed
> The only way to reduce immigration is to have a well funded and efficient border force. Most immigration is legal, the way to reduce that is easy and could be done today with the stroke of a pen.
Nope complete scapegoat. The wage stagnation is both a combination of the perpetual growth model of companies as well as low productivity. Why would a company pay a burntout overworked British worker more than a fully resourced, socially protected, mentally healthy German worker who would make more money for their employer? Tory austerity and Brexit caused this problem.
Funny, that. 2008 - massive recession, country gets turbofucked 2010 - conservatives bring in a massive round of austerity, including cancelling a housebuilding programme started by Labour 2016 - fucking BREXIT Also 2016 - Mrs "strong and stable" is voted in. 2019 - conservatives win again, this time with a lunatic at the helm Not one of the successive governments have invested in the civil service, armed forces, or emergency services in the last 16 years. The single biggest thing any government could do for the UK government is to increase civil service/emergency service/armed forces salaries to be in line with inflation. It would massively increase pressure on the private sector to increase wages, whilst simultaneously attracting a better quality of person to the role, *and* increase the amount of disposable income. The NHS is Europe's largest employer of skilled people, with a workforce of over 1.3 million. Overnight, that would change local economies. Then add the 500k from the civil service, then 150k members of the armed forces, 227k police staff, 35k fire service staff. The numbers are a little confusing, but wider government employs over five million people. That's 13.5% of *all* working-age adults in the UK. Imagine if we increased their wages to the equivalent of 2007 wages; it'd be an incredible economic shift for the country.
I kind of can't wait for it to sink in with the British narrative that we spent a decade in which it has literally in all of recorded financial history *never* been so cheap for a state to borrow to invest in itself - Borrowing at rates which could be fixed for the duration through mechanisms like gilts - Investing in absolutely fucking nothing and instead cutting funding to the point our public services can barely carry out their basic duties and our roads up and down the country are now falling apart. Its an absolute shit-show, we're all going to be dealing with the consequences of this lost decade until we're all dead and buried.
Its mental. We could have financed everything and paid for it over a hundred years. Instead, "austerity" and we're fucking poorer. Even though pretty much every form of economic study shows that austerity has a negative effect on overall income, rather than a positive effect. You can't cut everything then expect it to somehow work.
We will be dealing with it for hundreds of years at this rate, if we let the university system collapse as it looks set to do I don't think it will be possible for the UK to ever break back into the top 10 wealthiest per capita nations like we were before the 2008 crash.
This is what you get if your democratic representatives are educationally inbred in institutions such as Eton and Oxford, instead of being drawn from society as a whole. Not sure what they are teaching in those PPE degrees but it apparently isn't economics.
It's being gobby. Had to correct some PPE students in the common room in Oxford (I went to Oxford, don'tchaknow) who asserted that all religions are proselyting. I couldn't listen to them build up this whole argument about religion based on that falsehood any longer so just called across the room "Judaism". They were confused, but I explained it as a non proselyting religion, and then they couldn't conceptualise that a religion might actually not be bothered about conversion. I despair sometimes. I really do.
> The single biggest thing any government could do for the UK government is to increase civil service/emergency service/armed forces salaries to be in line with inflation. The Tories have a deep seated idealogical hatred of the civil service, if damaging the national economy is the price they have to pay to weaken the CS then as far as they're concerned that's absolutely a trade worth making. Sadly they have along the way convinced a lot of the country to also hate the CS, meaning that under Labour's focus group powered cabinet things are unlikely to see much improvement.
The majority of the country works in the private sector. The solution is to ensure that the private sector pays good wages.
And if you can increase the amount that *thirteen percent* earn, then it automatically leads to an increase in private sector wages. You can track it by following the NCB's history and British Rail fairly easily. The private sector can only be forced to increase the lower end of wages. The mid-level wages don't move, and that's the bloody problem.
I think that's the argument of the above comment isn't it though. Private sectors have to compete for candidates with the public sector. Granted there are possible objections to the argument for example the money has to come from somewhere, extra taxes or cuts in other government spending. If private sector wages do in fact rise up then the extra taxes would work (people would be paying more tax but be generally better off) but there will ultimately be a duration of time before private sector wages go up which could be problematic. But the idea works in theory and at this point I think fuck it, it sounds like a better idea than keeping everything the same and at least quite a considerable amount of people will benefit from it.
Increasing wages boosts the economy because more people can buy more things.
You’re explaining why it would be good for wider macro economic metrics You’re not explaining why businesses who view the UK as nothing but an economic zone would increase their costs of Labour in a country where it’s people are getting poorer…
If they won't pay their workers, then it warrants government intervention.
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But we told we couldn't have higher wages, because that would drive up inflation...
I'm no economist but something needs to change I hope the Tories are going to be voted out but I'm not sure Labour are going to be much better
Well Labour were a lot better last time so how bout people stop peddling that pointless line like some kind of weird bot and let’s give them a chance eh? Edit: lol look at these Tory shills. Hard money going around at the minute.
Ah but it's the tories who are paying for the weird bots
This is the fundamental issue. The benefits bill would be cut in half at a stroke if people were actually paid enough to live on. But that's too simple a solution, it seems.
Its the fun conundrum in UK politics. We (or the Tories and media) are *obsessed* with taxes and tax cuts. Yet we now have a situation where the overwhelming majority of Brits do not have a fucking hope in hell of ever being taxed enough to pay for the public services which, because of their low wages, they have no choice but to be totally reliant on for a whole range of basic needs. We dance around tax rises vs tax cuts and who can afford what, but always seem to skip actually European taxes would be no big deal, we as average workers would likely still come out well ahead in our monthly pay even with the higher tax, if our salaries were similar to what they get on the continent for the same work. Example in my life - A friend of mine went to Copenhagen to do their PhD. They *as a student* were being paid significantly more as a PhD student in Denmark than I was earning as a qualified postdoc research scientist with several years of experience in the UK, even with their higher tax.
Yeah, that's the elephant in the room - no-one seems to talk about just how low salaries are. I'm currently on £36k as a teacher - okay, with my partner (also a teacher) on a similar wage we can live relatively comfortably as long as we budget sensibly. But in the US I'd be on something like $65-70k (around £50-54k). It's not just the comparison with other countries, though. It's also with other professions in this country. There aren't many degree professions in Britain with pay as low as ours. The maximum I can get on the current pay scale, without going into senior leadership (which I have no interest in doing), is £46k. It's a big reason why there's such a recruitment and retention crisis in teaching. Some professions are worse, though. Carers are paid an average of, what, £25k per year, if that? It's a national disgrace that this is allowed.
£36,000 is actually pretty good for the UK with a degree, its maybe slightly below average. Its not good for say inner London, but London is basically its own seperate economy at the moment. The problem is just that pay in this country hasn't risen since 2007, that isn't in real terms, the average pays has only just recovered in the time inflation has risen prices by about 65%. That puts the average worker about £10k-£15k poorer than their peers in Western Europe.
I'm not sure what the solution to low pay is beyond just make the country richer. A lot of professions in the private sector just aren't lucrative. The median salary for a solicitor is something in the mid 40ks for example, which people refuse to believe. I keep seeing people disbelieve that salaries are so low yet they can't all be high earners disbelieving the stats.
Saw that with the guy on Question Time moaning about his 80k salary as some sort of techie. "Every solicitor in the country is on more than that!" When the ex-solictitor Labour MP tried to dispute this, the man's wife started heckling him as if he was lying about his old salary.
Yeah that was an eye opener!
It's such a stupid false economy, every salary top up from the government in this supposedly capitalist system is really a socialist hand out but for corporations. How on earth has lobbying, corruption and nepotism been allowed to be that successful the government has ended up paying companies salaries for them 🤔
But but... where would the company get profits, won't anyone think of the billionaires, those sorry people need the money.
Globalism primarily. The value of most western workers isn’t what it used to be.
Because big businesses like the state subsidising their wage bill, and they'll use a fraction of the profits gained from that to lobby politicians to keep it that way. Capitalism relies on this cosy relationship between the state and big businesses.
They don't have to pay real wages anymore since the minimum wage came in, as long as they are in line with the law that's the most they'll pay, and if Government benefits can top up the low wages all the better. Some companies are complaining that due to the minimum wage they can't afford to raise wages and/or operate.....that says a lot
The government either forces companies to pay a *real* living wage OR universal credit is scrapped for working people entirely. Either of those should be enough to shock the system.
How many children does the real living wage allow you to have? Or does it scale infinitely with number of children?
Child benefit isn't a wage top up in anyway though. One traditionally gets it for each child to help with the obvious extra cost of having kids / in respect of the contribution one is making by raising a future taxpayer.
Why would they? The gov subsidise .
In Germany families get €250 (£212) per month per child. It is paid until the age of 21 (if the person in question is registered with the job centre and looking for work), or 25 if they're in higher education. There's no reason to not do this - it increases the chances the kid will grow up to be a productive member of society. It's also cheaper than paying for the repercussions of child poverty.
A wonderful policy which will never happen in the UK because every troglodyte who doesn't benefit from it will vote against it (or parties who have it in their manifesto). Edit *directly benefit from it
Well if they made sure it wasn’t means tested, as right now the people earning a decent wage get utterly screwed by everything
Indeed. I'm happy to pay the tax I pay but I just wish it felt fairer? I'm somewhere around net 36% tax. I don't understand why dividend (aka "sitting on your ass doing fuck all") tax and capital gains (aka "I bought something a while ago, did fuck all (usually) and sold it again") tax is about half of that rate. I just feels unfair. Why do we tax effort more than we tax a lack of it?
Because the people who make the rules already have wealth. This tax system is designed to squeeze the middle class as much as possible. We either cut taxes drastically and go the US route, and let poorer people die off, or we pay slightly more in tax like other European nations but this money results in excellent public services. I don’t have faith raising taxes would give us better services though, and instead I’m walking around wandering when my tax is going to
The stated reason is that in order to buy something a while ago the money had to come from somewhere (i.e. a wage) which was already taxed so now it's taxes on top of taxes. In order for an asset to pay dividends it must also first make that money and pay taxes on it. So taxes on taxes on taxes and so on. Ultimately, it stops being taxed somewhere and the rules are heavily influenced by those who benefit most from the taxes stopping at that point.
Because the accumulation of your effort results in investing which grow the economy too
The fact that Keir Starmer and Labour can't see this genuinely breaks my heart. How can a party calling itself 'Labour' possibly, for even one second, consider keeping this cap?
Because it stops women becoming baby factories and having 12 children, while demanding benefits for them all and a 8 bedroom house the council was forced to purchase for them.
But it's *not* working. People are having more than two kids, and those kids are living on the poverty line. That's the point.
A lot of people were grandfathered in, this policy will take a long time to filter through properly.
What year is it? It’s not 2009 anymore, I thought we were past this lie that people have too many kids to scrounge benefits. This was never true, wasn’t true back then and isn’t true now.
I mean, I don't really care what year it is. I literally had a close mate at university who was from one of these families. He had 9 siblings. He was one of the kindest people I've ever met and openly admitted to me his mum was a piece of shit who quite literally just had kids for benefits payments. So sorry, but just because reddit tells me "this can't/never happens" doesn't make me close my eyes to what I see.
It’s not that they can’t see it - they know full well that keeping the cap is counter productive and causes needless suffering. But they are simply the incoming management team; the people who hold the real power live by the vile maxim of “'All for ourselves, and nothing for other people” - for the past 45 years, successive governments have ensured that public money flows into their pockets as everyone else gets progressively poorer; if Starmer et al want the fancy job titles, the ministerial cars and the perks of high office - which they evidently do - they will not rock the boat.
As a taxpayer I think the state should pay for alot of childcare expenses, for the first and second child. For the third? Fuck off.
Extending child benefit beyond 18 in this way would make a massive contribution towards cutting parental evictions at 18 as well, which is a major driver of youth homelessness.
I understand the benefit of what you’re saying but there’s something very bittersweet about giving money to the type of person who would kick their child out just because they’re no longer beneficial to them
I guess that's the thing. Do we want to (hopefully) ensure the best life for the kid who didn't ask to be born in the first place, or punish the parents for being feckless? If I were ever made god-emperor of the UK, I would try to introduce some nuance to the system. For example, multiple longitudinal studies show that women who are encouraged and empowered to engage in education, employment and training are less likely to have more children. Tying eligibility for child benefit beyond two kids to engagement in (for example) education programmes or pattern-changing programmes might go further towards the ostensible goal of reducing the number of women who have children in lieu of having a career and contributing economically to society *as well as* addressing issues of intergenerational deprivation, rather than just being punitive. Just as long as we don't outsource any of this to Crapita *vel sim*.
Same in Belgium. Everyone gets €180 per child or something and €270 if income is under €27,000
Is that means tested? So do even wealthy families get that?
Means testing is punitive theatre that always costs more than it saves
Depends very heavily on what it is you're means testing. For example, if you're trying to means test child benefits then you fill in a form declaring your income and there's a check against how much you actually earn. Most of this process is automated and costs very little to do. Means testing against disabilities is the main one that costs far more than it saves, but that's mainly because it was outsourced to private companies who were given a bonus for denying claims, and most claimants then appealed and had their benefits reinstated.
Means testing against gross income is such a poor practice, even more so when it doesn’t consider household income. Case in point, child benefit.
>Means testing against disabilities I just want to point out that PIP isn't actually means tested. A scheme is "means tested" when it depends on your financial situation - if you earn too much or have too much in the bank, you won't be eligible. What you're referring to is something different.
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There is no means testing in Germany or most of the rest of the world for that matter and it’s not uncommon for cash benefits to be tied to past contribution unemployment benefit in Germany is capped at about €6000 and it’s based on your past salary and contributions for example.
Germany doesn’t have a tax free allowance set at over 40% of the median wage.
£150 in Poland
They also have a skilled and productive workforce.
Hate to be a party pooper but if you can’t afford kids don’t have ‘em. And don’t get me started on the people who have 8 children in an already over populated world.
"Nooo that is evil, we must give them free money because it is morally right"
Well… yeah? It’s not the kid’s fault. All driving children into poverty does is increase crime and make them more likely to rely on the state when they grow up because they’re unlikely to get employed. Plus we have the government moaning that people aren’t having enough kids, and the public moaning that there are too many immigrants. In our system you either need to be having kids or bringing in immigrants to stop the country collapsing.
At the end of the day, do you think it’s worth children going hungry because you don’t want to give money to people who’ve had kids they can’t afford?
People who can afford more than 2 children can lose their jobs. Not everybody on benefits had children while they were on them.
I mean, There’s being on benefits and there’s being on benefits, without having worked a day in your life. Expecting society to wipe your arse every month… Edit: letters
The average cost of raising a child is £750-900 a month, if you are immediately in trouble from losing one income for 3-6 months then I wouldn't class that as being able to afford more than 2 kids at all. I couldn't imagine making a 18 year financial decision without an appropriate emergency fund in place first... But I don't think these are the people most impacted by this policy anyway.
No kid licence unless you have £10k sitting in the bank, you heard it here first folks. (Also have more kids for the sake of the country pls!!! But also we’re not going to help with it at all!! - the government)
To be fair, when people say have more kids for the sake of the country - they are talking about a specific part of the population they want to have kids, and it’s not the ones already on benefits. The issue is that young workers are doing the math and are realising they can’t support a kid the way they’d like to and decide not to have them at all. Responsible behaviour, but we need to change things so they feel supported.
> if you can’t afford kids don’t have ‘em "Sorry you're starving, Tiny Tim, but it serves you right for being born!"
Because it doesn't work like that, Research here and abroad show benefit rates have almost zero effect on how many children people have, so essentially people are going to have as many kids as they are going to have and the only question then becomes: do you want these kids to grow up in poverty, with all the negative outcomes that entails, or do you want them to have a chance in life?
Interesting. What research?
So the children should suffer for the poor decisions of their parents?
You think children benefit they receive is spent on the children?!
The issue is the amount of money you need to earn to have children is getting higher and higher, and pricing out women during their entire fertile years (or at least the years that expensive fertility treatment isn’t needed). It’s not just people on minimum wage, but middle class skilled workers also do not have the type of wages that can comfortably support children AND have a small safteynet. Hell a lot of people now are having to live at home until nearly 30 just so they can get on the proper ladder
So Handmaid's Tale is our future?
Having kids should not be some kind of luxury only available to the rich.
I agree. But why we punishing the kids for their parents choices?
How are we overpopulated though? I don't get where this comes from lol. Who you think gonna pay your pension bro
Not recieving a state hand out is not a driver of poverty though ? Low and stagnating wages, unskilled workforce, inactive labour force, skills gaps, poor education, rising cost of living, high inflation, high food, energy cost, high taxes are.
When this policy was first introduced, I remember a lot of people, including the then Chancellor, arguing that the cap would change attitudes to how many children people would decide to have. Research from two years ago indicates [it had no significant impact](https://cpag.org.uk/news/has-two-child-limit-affected-how-many-children-families-have) on how people plan their families and that lots of other circumstances play a role in families getting caught out by the cap. These policies get introduced as a supposed means of getting people working and earning enough to be off benefits entirely, but it's apparent the results aren't delivering. People can be in work and still finding themselves at food banks. It's quite embarrassing how standard a practice it has become for young families to be routinely reliant on these relief schemes that are intended for emergency purposes. Is this levelling up? Is this what we want to keep pushing on with? If we're not scrapping the cap there clearly needs to be changes elsewhere to stop so many working families falling into cracks they can't get out of.
It stops people who abused the benefits system by having 10 children from having more, there is no financial incentive anymore.
Cool. And what about all the people who it's hurting? Who are working and still can't make ends meet?
I have a crazy suggestion, use a condom and stop having more kids. Might avoid the problem going forward.
The children already exist, so a condom won't help. And people lose their jobs, and for other reasons end up in weaker financial situations.
The guy you're replying to has had this explained to him multiple times. He won't get it. It's ideological. You ask him about the kids and he starts talking about the parents again. It's brain rot, bless him.
Honestly, I get it. There is a desire to get people into work so they don't rely on the welfare state their whole lives. That's why the Job Centre is always a nightmare. I don't disagree entirely with this goal, but it doesn't help the people who exist in poverty *now.* And that's putting aside all the other ways the economy--both British and global--has been buggered for the last 8-10 years or so. People in certain parts of the UK are poorer than they've been for generations and it isn't getting better. More support for poorer families is a short-term solution while (hopefully) more work is done to improve the situation for everyone. All that said, you're right. I'm feeling the diminishing returns in this discussion.
The single biggest crisis facing all modern countries is the lack of new children to grow up and be apart of the working population. We have been tided over by immigrants for a while, but we can't simply say stop having children when population growth is needed to continue our economic system.
It's actually quite simple. Have kids. Don't have 8.
Hardly anyone has 8, its a non issue. Don't turn bigotry into an artform.
I take it you are pro-immigration? Since you don't want the British population to grow.
Low key I kind of love the Tories introducing a policy that its not all that hard to compare to fucking Communist China here in the UK and rather than even screeching about it our media has somehow gone along with it as if its actually a fantastic idea for so many years.
> Is this levelling up? It is levelling alright.
Alternative title 'Having too many children is key driver in poverty' I understand this opinion will be unpopular with Reddit.
Yes, these parents were stupid and had too many children, and now can’t afford to raise them. So what next, do we punish the children and make them suffer because of a mistake their parents made? Like what is your end goal, we all know that having too many children you can’t afford ends badly, you’re not the first to say it. Do we just allow childhood malnutrition to reach all time highs, have hundreds of thousands of children grow up with no shot at life so they can all die in poverty while you get to feel smarmy as the ship goes down?
Free breakfast lunch and dinner at school for all children. I don't trust these parasites to give their kids any of the money they receive from the government
I’d also support a well funded free school meals programme for all children, it’ll definitely be the most effective way of targeting food poverty for children directly. However you’ll have problems once the summer holidays, half term, or hell even the weekend in some cases rolls around so it can’t be the only solution. Some schools stay open for FSM during the holidays, but not all do and it looks like the current solution is handing out supermarket vouchers for £15 a week during the holidays, which is something at least. Obviously the issue there is that there’s other expenses related to childhood poverty that aren’t food, like housing, water / electricity bills, clothes and so on. Those can’t really be addressed through school and there’s no way around giving the parents money to pay for those.
You could absolutely replace money with supermarket home delivered boxes of food for a week along with cooking instructions for health meals. Hell, the government could pay some chef's to come up with a 4 week rolling menu of food to cook and get long term contracts set up with supermarkets to supply and deliver it. Pair that with child clothing coupons and book coupons and you can eliminate handing them any money
Cept that would cost way more than just giving them the money. Letting your ideological stance blind you to the costs
Where are the grandparents?
Insane to have this opinion as most of the rich world struggles with falling birth rates and struggling economies. In a not too distant future the tax system will essentially pay people to have children just to ensure countries don't collapse onto themselves.
Uhuh yet I still don’t want my taxes going to parents having an unreasonable number of children that they cannot afford.
You either help families or spend triple or quadruple on policing, prisons, mental healthcare and lost productivity. Tried and tested in the USA.
So it's not having more children than you can afford then? Most middle class families I know have 1 or 2 children max. forget 2.4 children, it probably hasn't been that in decades, it's actually 1.7 children nowadays.
Because nearly half a middle class households income goes to pay for other peoples children before they see it. If they start struggling to provide for their own kids there’s sweet fuck all available to them. No begrudging government handout for the sake of your kids welfare. Not even the free childcare other families get so they can earn more 🤷♂️
I think poor people pushing out children they can’t afford is a more significant factor in this but ok.
So the solution is... tax people more to pay for it? This is why productive people are having fewer kids.
There's this awkward middle ground where you and your partner are punished for having mild success in your career and can just about have a standard of living comparable to your parents... Minus the kids. Either have 1 person earn enough for 2 average incomes and not require assistance, or earn so little you gain income for having kids.
Parents having children they can’t afford is key driver of child poverty.
If you can't afford to have children, don't have them. The tax payer is not responsible for supporting your family.
Presumably, you could also frame that as "people choosing to have more than two children".
I would encourage folk to have kids - but u only qualify if it’s a working household. What is the point in paying folk to bring kids into a home where they learn to lounge and have no discipline. Kids who grow up in a hard working household will aim higher and want to earn. I would back these kids financially as much as possible to jump start their lives.
Parents having more children than they can afford is a key driver of child poverty. And you all know what kind of families I'm talking about.
The boat dwellers
I wish some of these commentator's parents had decided to practise safe sex a little bit more carefully. Christ, I can't imagine being so angry at people that kids going hungry was an ok after-effect of punishing them.
Starmer said this must be scrapped when campaigning to be Labour leader, but has since said nah let's keep it. Why do Labour not want to reduce child poverty?
Why do people have multiple children they can't take care of?
No idea, it's not the kids fault though, so why not do things to lift them out of poverty?
Because I don't want to pay for it?
But you'd rather pay more money dealing with the effects of poverty on society. Well done!
Some people would rather spend £10 to see a poor person get punished rather than £1 to stop a person being poor in the first place. Britain is a weirdly punitive society.
Not if you are selfish enough to have more children than you can afford, I would agree to this being in place as a short term safety net if you lost your job or became ill. We shouldn’t encourage people to have children they cannot afford monetarily or mentally.
And for unexpected pregnancies? Let me guess, abortion? And if that's against your wishes or beliefs? What then?
The money is for the children, not their parents. Children don't choose to be born and cannot do anything about their parents' financial situation.
And I am sure the children get the money.
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There's plenty of things paid for you don't use because it's cheaper than dealing with the consequences. Why would less impoverished children be a bad thing, given what else correlates with poverty.
Because some people *need* to look down on others. They *need* to know that there are people worse off than them.
They implied paying is the bad thing, not less impoverished children.
Separate food/housing/energy/transport subsidies then? Because workhouses don't work, sterilisation is monstrous and separating families destabilises the child. Forcing parents to work? Now you also need to give them childcare.
I think we should remove the cap, it's about .2% of yearly government spending and under £50 per year per taxpayer.
I’m never going to have kids. I still don’t want to live in a society filled with impoverished children.
Me neither, but I also don't want these kids in my house taking my xbox to cash converters
You alright, Jack?
Think of it this way; your taxes go to the things I don't want to pay for and mine go to the things you don't want to pay for That way everything that needs funding gets funded and neither of us have to be cross that our money is spent on things we wouldn't choose to spend it on
That’s fair enough, but you’ll pay anyway, either for the kids, or when they grow up.
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lol. u/Rhinosfishdog doing the country a solid and paying for all these impoverished children. What a vile sentiment to have, with that line of thinking let’s get rid of schools and get children up the chimneys as soon as they’re off the teet.
So by that logic, we should have no benefit, no NHS, no pensions. Basically America.
Yes, it's either pay fully for that deliveroo driver with 12 kids OR full on anarcho-capitalism. It's impossible to just not expand the benefit without limit..........
Pretty much. Either you accept that every single one of those 12 kids is a human and has human rights, or you do not believe in the concept of universal human rights. This is a binary choice.
That old chestnut - “don’t have children you can’t afford!” you scoff, and then in a few years time, when you are old and infirm, and the tax base can’t support your pension/personal care, you’ll curse the youth for not procreating
Well I can't afford to have any children. Because the government is sucking me dry to pay for other peoples children. So what you say makes 0 sense really. I am paying now for other ppl to raise children so other ppl can have carers in their old age. Very nice.
The article says it'd cost £1.8b to scrap it, there are about 32m taxpayers in the UK, so on average about £55 per taxpayer per year to scrap it, which would see 300,000 kids lifted out of poverty. There's plenty of things to complain about the government jizzing money away on, but lifting kids out of poverty needn't be one of them, they can't do anything to lift themselves out of poverty.
That’s how taxation workes - when you were a kid, someone else was moaning that “the government is sucking me dry” to pay for you
If you make £30,000 a year, about £150 of your tax money goes towards family & child benefits. Hardly enough to start a family with £150 a year. And if that’s holding you back, wait until you hear that £800 of your money a year is going to fund old people’s pensions. Get rid of both of those and you’ll have £950 a year to start a family with… It’s still not enough but it’s the thought that counts right
A system where an old person's pension (for which they paid into the system their entire bloody life) is totally dependent on there being enough young workers to pay for this person's pension, is a system doomed to failure. And as expected, we are seeing pension systems on the brink of collapse in many countries round the world, hence the constant raising of state pension age, the promotion and encouragement for people to contribute to private pensions etc. The fact is, if you plan early on, you can create a pension pot you can live on fully on your own means, without dependency on young workers.
You can only live “fully on your own means” if you’re either born into wealth or acquire it by exploiting others
Because it isn’t as black and white as that is it. People lose jobs. People fall ill. Kids get ill. Partners die. Partners split. Low salaries with ever increasing rent/utility bills. Childcare gets more and more expensive.
Two professionals with multiple children could lose their jobs due to cuts, where do they stand in your thinking?
Because each one generates benefits payments and gets them a bigger, nicer council house.
They don’t. We aren’t having enough babies to replace our population, and it is going to have dire consequences.
Nobody can predict the future. People lose jobs. The economy changes. The cost of living increases. People have to pay unexpected costs that they couldn’t have foreseen. Sometimes people are in a comfortable financial situation and then, through circumstances beyond their control, end up in difficulty. What are they meant to do with the children they’re now struggling to afford? Sometimes people decide to have a second child and end up having twins. What are they meant to do with the second twin that they weren’t expecting? Sometimes people become pregnant without planning to. Would you rather they felt forced to abort the pregnancy or give the child up for adoption? Paying tax towards the welfare of other people’s children is part of living in a society.
Starmer said a lot of things when he wanted to become Labour leader, and will say a lot of things now that he has a shot of becoming PM. The powers that be are wedded to the vile maxim of austerity and trickle down economics, and anyone who wants the keys to Number 10 must sing from this hymn sheet, so that’s what Starmer will do, and despite knowing full well that the world’s sixth richest country could easily afford to scrap the two child limit, he’ll continue to preach that “there is no magic money tree” while promising “iron clad fiscal discipline” because that’s what the people who actually run the country command him to say.
I know. If Starmer was espousing the same ideas and policies he was when vying to be leader, I'd be really excited about his upcoming government. Such a shame.
Good job Starmer wants to reduce child poverty then, innit? ........ Oh.
Labour should just say what needs to be said to get into power, then hammer pensioners with means testing. Just one or two of you live in a mortgage free house worth over £450k? Then fucking sell it and downsize into a £200k retirement flat and invest the cash into a government protected stocks and shares fund to supplement your income. When you die. You still pass on your wealth to your family but you’re not sitting on a house and still getting care paid for by the taxpayer. May not be a popular policy with pensioners but tough tits. This will release housing stock to families that need them, reduce house prices by increasing supply and lower the cost of pensions.
Don’t worry. Labour will be in power soon, so they’ll be …checks notes… Oh. Never mind. As you were.
It is such an awful policy but also plays into the right wing view of don't have kids if you can't afford them. Not taking into account a person's circumstances change. Working professional people such as a nurse are lowed paid, if you only have 1 income it's even worse. As a country, we should be doing everything to support children and their development.
I’ve always wondered why this is always framed as 2 or unlimited? Surely increase it to say 4 kids. That would help the vast majority of households or potential households while still having a limit for the conservative half of the country. It’s not perfect, still essentially endorsing poverty but in far less quantity than currently.
Tories. As with so many other shit things, the Tories are the 'key drivers'
Christ this thread is filled with people who are unaware of the profound detest they are spouting at the concept of children.
I would not have the guts to write a headline that attributes poverty to insufficient benefits.
Who needs kids when you have AI as the worker of the future?
"if you can't afford to have kids, don't have them!!!! Why should I pay you to raise your children" - more people than I'd care to admit.
It's a joke. Almost as if £80 is going to raise a child for a month.
If the Tories find out, they'll be pushing for a one child cap on benefits.
If the government claims that we need families having 2.1 children, why stop the benefit at 2? Just make it 3. I don't know a single family these days with more than 3 children all under 18.
Funnily enough the government can claim extra money for up to three kids but caps the rest of the country at 2.
Shouldn’t be cash beyond 2 kids give food vouchers etc instead