Are the Conservatives that bad?

Original post by AlecRobertson

This card again - *sigh*.

Labour were in power, it occurred under their watch. Therefore it is their fault.

Ahahahaha what ridiculous logic.

Just because it happened under their watch doesn't make it their fault.

The global financial crisis happened because of a lack of legislation, put through Parliament by Labour. But do you know what the Conservatives were saying? They wanted even less regulation! The crisis may well have happened sooner under the Tories.

Also, the crash in the USA occurred under Bush's Republican administration - the political party closest in line with the Tories over here and the party you seem more likely to support.

Reply 225

Manitude

Original post by scrotgrot

Yeah, problem is there are these league tables and quotas for sanctions. You seem smart and likely to know your rights, they target those they expect will not know how to appeal. But there are these horror stories about people sanctioned for missing appointments that never happened, for going to funerals, job interviews...

Not really sure we should be so meekly grateful we don't live in the USA. We can do better than those barbarians. We should be comparing ourselves to Europe. About the only thing they are worse than us about is the strictly contributory principle you often get there. No income based JSA and so forth so you get homeless on the streets. Other than that I'm pretty sure we're the stingiest country for benefits in Western Europe versus living costs.

Why does UC work better? I am interested to know.

The USA was just the first thing to come to mind, and I know a bit more about their welfare state (or lack thereof) than other countries.

I find UC is good as it's flexible. Basically you do 35 hours a week of work search but if you get a job offer then you only need to call up a number and say where you're working, when you start and how much you expect to get paid and they make a note of it. When you get paid they can see you have been paid and where necessary reduce the benefits you get. You can earn £111/month and still get full benefits then they deduct (I think) 65p in each £1 you earn over that. It means that if you have a zero hour contract and irregular work patterns then there is a bare minimum of fuss and no paperwork on the claimants end. I've done this in the past and the phone calls have been always less than five minutes. Then the remainder of time that you're not working is supposed to be spent looking for a second job or a better job. So long as you hit the 35 hours a week of work and/or work search and record it properly so they can see evidence of it then you're golden and won't get sanctioned.

AFAIK with JSA if you get some form of work then you have to switch to income support and I think you have to say update them every week saying how much you've earned so they can calculate it right. The Department for Work and Pensions can see how much you've get paid and deduct the correct amount from the benefits each month, and they make it very clear how to let them know if they've done it wrong.

Similarly the system is flexible so if you have a job interview at the same time as when a meeting is supposed to take place you either call up or let the people at the job centre know in advance and they're totally fine with rescheduling appointments. Again, I've done this in the past without fuss. This may be the same for JSA but I'm not sure. My brother was briefly on JSA a few years ago and I remember him finding the system quite awkward to work around.

Reply 226

41b

5

Original post by Manitude

The USA was just the first thing to come to mind, and I know a bit more about their welfare state (or lack thereof) than other countries.

I find UC is good as it's flexible. Basically you do 35 hours a week of work search but if you get a job offer then you only need to call up a number and say where you're working, when you start and how much you expect to get paid and they make a note of it. When you get paid they can see you have been paid and where necessary reduce the benefits you get. You can earn £111/month and still get full benefits then they deduct (I think) 65p in each £1 you earn over that. It means that if you have a zero hour contract and irregular work patterns then there is a bare minimum of fuss and no paperwork on the claimants end. I've done this in the past and the phone calls have been always less than five minutes. Then the remainder of time that you're not working is supposed to be spent looking for a second job or a better job. So long as you hit the 35 hours a week of work and/or work search and record it properly so they can see evidence of it then you're golden and won't get sanctioned.

AFAIK with JSA if you get some form of work then you have to switch to income support and I think you have to say update them every week saying how much you've earned so they can calculate it right. The Department for Work and Pensions can see how much you've get paid and deduct the correct amount from the benefits each month, and they make it very clear how to let them know if they've done it wrong.

Similarly the system is flexible so if you have a job interview at the same time as when a meeting is supposed to take place you either call up or let the people at the job centre know in advance and they're totally fine with rescheduling appointments. Again, I've done this in the past without fuss. This may be the same for JSA but I'm not sure. My brother was briefly on JSA a few years ago and I remember him finding the system quite awkward to work around.

It's nice that the reforms work. 111 a month is a bit low though.

Reply 227

Manitude

Original post by 41b

It's nice that the reforms work. 111 a month is a bit low though.

I agree it's not a huge amount it's better than nothing. Until you're earning around £400/month you can still claim benefits. I accept that's not a huge amount but it's enough to live on, especially as housing benefit is done separately (for now, I think I heard somewhere it might merge with universal credit in the future which would be a positive thing in my opinion as it would make the welfare system easier to understand).

UC works on the principal that "you're always better off in work" and it has definitely been constructed in a way that means this isn't just a made up tagline. It's structured in a way that means you always end up with more money by doing work, even just one hour a week.

Reply 228

Gigabit

14

Original post by ibzombie96

Ahahahaha what ridiculous logic.

Just because it happened under their watch doesn't make it their fault.

The global financial crisis happened because of a lack of legislation, put through Parliament by Labour. But do you know what the Conservatives were saying? They wanted even less regulation! The crisis may well have happened sooner under the Tories.

Also, the crash in the USA occurred under Bush's Republican administration - the political party closest in line with the Tories over here and the party you seem more likely to support.

Sorry to disappoint you but it does make it their fault.

Going by your logic, if I crash my car it's not my fault but rather the person that was watching and said that you should wear a seat belt.

The issue with the Labour party is that they will not be accountable for anything! They still haven't apologised for all the people they put out of work, nor the disgrace the economy was left in. The Tories apologised and they weren't even in power!

(edited 9 years ago)

Reply 229

Original post by AlecRobertson

Sorry to disappoint you but it does make it their fault.

Going by your logic, if I crash my car it's not my fault but rather the person that was watching and said that you should wear a seat belt.

The issue with the Labour party is that they will not be accountable for anything! They still haven't apologised for all the people they put out of work, nor the disgrace the economy was left in. The Tories apologised and they weren't even in power!

No - you're simply regurgitating an unintelligent UKIP line. What I'm saying really is not radical - it's repeated by lots of people who know what they are talking about - even if you don't believe me.

The crisis was a systematic failure of the banking system, wherein people thought the use of derivatives could minimise their risk exposure. Of course, they minimised their personal risk, but that didn't make the system any more reliable - the risk was still there and to assert that individuals' risk minimisation leads to systematic stability is just to make the fallacy of composition. As well as the failure of the risk management practices used by people. This risk management was, of course, undertaken to minimise the risk of buying debt that the debtor cannot pay back - but in the mid-2000s, the sub-prime morgage and REPO markets were doing extraordinarily well from the packaging and tranching of high interest subprime debt.

It seems you really don't understand economics at all. You made the mistake of assuming government debt works like private debt earlier, and now you're confusing correlation with causation.

So, I ask again, do you think that the conservative Republican George Bush was to blame for the crisis in America? What about for 9/11? It did happen under his watch, after all, and that seems to be the only reason you attribute blame to politicians.

And just to tackle your ill-thought-through analogy: Labour don't drive the car. Even the Tories don't drive the car. If you actually believed in the free market (as you seem to have claimed in the past), you should understand that it is market forces that drives the car - the sum of our demand and supply functions interacting with each other. Labour, in you r analogy, should have been in the passenger seat not telling the driving to put his seatbelt on, and the Tories would, in your analogy, been in the back of the car telling the driver to hurry up. Because whilst Labour deregulated the market, the Conservatives were all the while insisting the deregulation happens faster.

Look, I'm a Conservative voter because I agree with their neoclassical, liberal approach to economics. Although it is clear you also support the Conservatives, it angers me to see people doing so with no intelligent reason.

Reply 230

scrotgrot

16

Original post by Manitude

The USA was just the first thing to come to mind, and I know a bit more about their welfare state (or lack thereof) than other countries.

I find UC is good as it's flexible. Basically you do 35 hours a week of work search but if you get a job offer then you only need to call up a number and say where you're working, when you start and how much you expect to get paid and they make a note of it. When you get paid they can see you have been paid and where necessary reduce the benefits you get. You can earn £111/month and still get full benefits then they deduct (I think) 65p in each £1 you earn over that. It means that if you have a zero hour contract and irregular work patterns then there is a bare minimum of fuss and no paperwork on the claimants end. I've done this in the past and the phone calls have been always less than five minutes. Then the remainder of time that you're not working is supposed to be spent looking for a second job or a better job. So long as you hit the 35 hours a week of work and/or work search and record it properly so they can see evidence of it then you're golden and won't get sanctioned.

AFAIK with JSA if you get some form of work then you have to switch to income support and I think you have to say update them every week saying how much you've earned so they can calculate it right. The Department for Work and Pensions can see how much you've get paid and deduct the correct amount from the benefits each month, and they make it very clear how to let them know if they've done it wrong.

Similarly the system is flexible so if you have a job interview at the same time as when a meeting is supposed to take place you either call up or let the people at the job centre know in advance and they're totally fine with rescheduling appointments. Again, I've done this in the past without fuss. This may be the same for JSA but I'm not sure. My brother was briefly on JSA a few years ago and I remember him finding the system quite awkward to work around.

Bold 1: 35 hours of "work search" is unnecessary, counter-productive, and there are not enough jobs in the market. It is also disgusting that people are even being hounded about this if they have a job. Broadly speaking, people don't choose to work part-time hours, it's just that there aren't enough hours in the market for everyone to have a full-time job; and for those who do choose to work part-time, there's usually a good reason for it like having kids to bring up or caring responsibilites (which furthermore saves the state money).

It looks like it's not enough any more to have a job: you have to have a full-time job or you're not "striving" hard enough. No surprise there really, since the Tories have made it easy for anyone to just "have a job" by promoting zero hours contracts and so on.

Bold 2: That's because as far as I know the project has been so delayed and incompetently done that the only people they've transferred onto UC yet have been unemployed single people - the easiest people to process. Just you wait.

(edited 9 years ago)

Reply 231

Babada Boopy

5

They're slightly better than Labour, not that it means much

Reply 232

JoshDawg

Original post by benji385

I don't wanna judge which parties are bad or good, but I am also sick of the false promises. Id rather have them not promise anything.

We've got Ed Milliband saying he wants to under promise so he can over deliver. To me that sounds like we'd be fortunate to get any good thing coming out of that government, even if he manages to tie his shoe we should be fortunate.

Reply 233

Manitude

Original post by scrotgrot

Bold 1: 35 hours of "work search" is unnecessary, counter-productive, and there are not enough jobs in the market. It is also disgusting that people are even being hounded about this if they have a job. Broadly speaking, people don't choose to work part-time hours, it's just that there aren't enough hours in the market for everyone to have a full-time job; and for those who do choose to work part-time, there's usually a good reason for it like having kids to bring up or caring responsibilites (which furthermore saves the state money).

It looks like it's not enough any more to have a job: you have to have a full-time job or you're not "striving" hard enough. No surprise there really, since the Tories have made it easy for anyone to just "have a job" by promoting zero hours contracts and so on.

Bold 2: That's because as far as I know the project has been so delayed and incompetently done that the only people they've transferred onto UC yet have been unemployed single people - the easiest people to process. Just you wait.

It may well be unnecessary but if you don't do it you get sanctioned. These are the terms that everyone on UC agrees to so if you don't do it then it's the claimants fault, not the government. If you have a job (say 5 hours a week) then it's expected that you deduct the time you spend working from the 35 hours. If you're only working 5 hours a week then you should be looking for a second or a better job because 5 hours is not enough.

The only incompetence I've seen that relates to the benefits system is that the way we're expected to electronically record our work search is not fit for purpose. I do everything on paper and bring my paperwork to the job centre every week and this is acceptable to them after I explain my reasoning.

You seem desperate to have a dig at the big bad Tories because of zero hour contracts but a zero hour contract for only a few hours a week is better than having no job at all when you're on UC. Granted that's not as good as having a full time job which is why it makes perfect sense that you are still required to look for work when you have a part time job and are on UC.

Reply 234

scrotgrot

16

Original post by Manitude

It may well be unnecessary but if you don't do it you get sanctioned. These are the terms that everyone on UC agrees to so if you don't do it then it's the claimants fault, not the government. If you have a job (say 5 hours a week) then it's expected that you deduct the time you spend working from the 35 hours. If you're only working 5 hours a week then you should be looking for a second or a better job because 5 hours is not enough.

Hahahaha are you really serious? Guess if they don't like the terms they can just draw down some of Daddy's trust fund and live off that for a while, or if they're really hard up, I've heard air is both free and very nutritious. Because this market is not coercive at all, is it?

The only incompetence I've seen that relates to the benefits system is that the way we're expected to electronically record our work search is not fit for purpose. I do everything on paper and bring my paperwork to the job centre every week and this is acceptable to them after I explain my reasoning.

But wasn't half of the point of the project to reduce administrative costs through moving everything to an IT system? Instead they've wasted literally billions on repeatedly failing to develop an IT system and even now it still doesn't work. This part isn't evil - just hilariously incompetent.

It's not just me (and, to be fair, you) who thinks this, people from across the political spectrum agree that at least the IT part of it has been a complete farce. But when that was part of the whole philosophy behind the programme you have to ask some questions.

You seem desperate to have a dig at the big bad Tories because of zero hour contracts but a zero hour contract for only a few hours a week is better than having no job at all when you're on UC. Granted that's not as good as having a full time job which is why it makes perfect sense that you are still required to look for work when you have a part time job and are on UC.

No it doesn't. I am not making a judgement here on zero-hours contracts. I am saying that the fact that zero-hours and other below-full-time contracts exist is not in most cases due to the employee's choice but due to the small amount of work that exists in the market. We live in a highly automated post-industrial knowledge economy with an elastic demand for labour. If we accept that this is preponderantly a supply-side problem, then there is absolutely no reason to make anyone look for more hours if they don't want to.

The problem is the right wing tend to blame every market failure on those entitled normal people pumping up demand by daring to exist. And if it's something whose injustices their voters have experience of, like housing or hospitals, no worries, just blame the supposed bloated demand on immigrants. And they love to punish them for the abdication of responsibility by those who are profiting from restricting supply.

(edited 9 years ago)

Reply 235

benji385

6

Original post by JoshDawg

We've got Ed Milliband saying he wants to under promise so he can over deliver. To me that sounds like we'd be fortunate to get any good thing coming out of that government, even if he manages to tie his shoe we should be fortunate.

Its funny he says that cos if there is one politician who over promises than thats him

Reply 236

Original post by The_Mighty_Bush

What? Yes, there are. Learn some history. Money was not created by the state. Also Bitcoin is money.

So you are saying that hyperinflation is impossible with state-backed fiat money?

What is this then:

You don't know what you are talking about.

I agree with your sentiments exactly and it seems we share very similar views from your previous posts, but I thought I should point out that it is fallacious to argue against something by asserting the verity of something else. The post to which you responded said something along the lines of 'a currency can only be stable with government backing'. Now, it is no a valid counter-argument to prove that even with government backing, a currency can become unstable. The previous poster's assertion was that a government is necessary for a currency to be stable, not that a government cannot **** it up...do you see that they are not two sides of the same coin?

Reply 237

The_Mighty_Bush

3

Original post by ibzombie96

I agree with your sentiments exactly and it seems we share very similar views from your previous posts, but I thought I should point out that it is fallacious to argue against something by asserting the verity of something else. The post to which you responded said something along the lines of 'a currency can only be stable with government backing'. Now, it is no a valid counter-argument to prove that even with government backing, a currency can become unstable. The previous poster's assertion was that a government is necessary for a currency to be stable, not that a government cannot **** it up...do you see that they are not two sides of the same coin?

Yeah, that's a good point. It's not the same to say but it does put into question the assertion in my opinion as the worst cases of hyperinflation occured under state control and not in a free market.

In a freerer system we actually see far more stability.

Reply 238