The benefit-capping campaign is dishonest (From Worcester News)

I remain mystified why a person EARNING £35,000 pa (take home pay £26,000) with several kids, wife, mortgage, all relevant home expenses, car to buy and run is considered to have a decent quality of life.
But a similar person being GIVEN £26,000pa is being consigned to a life of poverty and deprivation.
I certainly haven`t been able to work it out - can anyone else?

The average earner would be paying an average mortgage of around £800 per month. The recipient of £26,000 pa would be paying rent of around £1,500 per month, usually paid straight to the landlord.
That would leave the earner with £1366 per month to live on. The recipient would have £666 per month to live on.

If that is the case Peter, then I wholehartedly agree that something should be done about the landlords charging exorbitant rents to the public purse.
Although, browsing through the WN property pages yesterday, £800 per month would get you a very decent house around Worcester which isn`t exactly the cheapest place in the UK
Perhaps the focus should be taken off the Bankers for a while and put on the private landlords housing benefit racket.

What is dishonest about accounting for the full taxpayer cost of the benefits needed to support a benefits claimant?

I would expect nothing less from the government since it would be dishonest in the extreme not to include the cost of housing for benefits claimants when this is covered by the taxpayer.

With the benefits cap, long term claimants will have to move to homes that they can afford and this will force landlords to reduce rents or end up with empty properties.

Even the Labour Party has had to recognise that this policy has overwhelming public support - they would love to have opposed it but they know it would be suicide to do so (it is highly amusing to see them trying to both support and oppose it at the same time).

What isn't being declared by the politicians is that the Huge amounts say £26,000 are being claimed by those who hide behind an army of highly paid Lawyers, and for Families that have many children thus demanding bigger houses (and getting them). There are also £Billions of benefits being sent out of this country, NOT TO OUR PENSIONERS who have worked all their lives and retired into warmer climates, but to Immigrants who are able to claim for children back home, (some may never come to this country, some may not even exist), the system for verification does not exist or is totally flawed.
So the Politicians don't, or dare not say, what is happening so they throw the net across all Benefits and in doing so will be hitting those on the lowest incomes and who have worked and paid into the system, and those on high claims will still be okay. I hear that the high rent claimers are joyfully waiting for when this stupid government pays the rent benefit straight to the claimant and not the landlords. There will be thousands quickly facing evictions.

anarchist wrote:
What is dishonest about accounting for the full taxpayer cost of the benefits needed to support a benefits claimant? I would expect nothing less from the government since it would be dishonest in the extreme not to include the cost of housing for benefits claimants when this is covered by the taxpayer. With the benefits cap, long term claimants will have to move to homes that they can afford and this will force landlords to reduce rents or end up with empty properties. Even the Labour Party has had to recognise that this policy has overwhelming public support - they would love to have opposed it but they know it would be suicide to do so (it is highly amusing to see them trying to both support and oppose it at the same time).

It's the spin that is dishonest because it leaves people who know little or nothing about the benefits system with the impression that claimants are receiving small fortunes in order to live in expensive and exclusive areas of London (mostly) out of choice, and that their standard of living is higher than the average. The rates of benefit are fixed for all claiments and are the same. Your solution, Anarchist, is to drive them away from these areas by eviction and relocation to 'cheaper' areas where they will have to rent again from an unregulated market. The standard of living for people on benefits is much lower than for the average wage earner. That is the case whether the claimant is living in an expensive property in Chelsea or in a council flat in Dagenham. The problem is that the taxpayer has to pay a higher subsidy for the Chelsea flat than the Dagenham flat but the net income in both locations for similar families is the same.
My case is that the taxpayer is the victim of an unregulated property market. Much of the £170bn paid out in housing benefit since 1999 should have been invested in public rented housing so that people on low wages or unemployed for whatever reason would not need so much from the taxpayer in housing benefit if they qualified.
The other dishonesty in the lack of discrimination between people who 'work' the system, people who cheat the system and those whose circumstances make them worthy of assistance from the taxpayer.
If you don't know what it is like finding yourself in dire straits through no fault of your own (unemployment, injury etc) and being faced with poverty, dislocation and the demoralisation of your family, often leading to break-up, then it is easy to attack claimants with absurd stories of living it up on the state - foreigh holidays, colour tellys, cars and so on - ann of which is impossible on the rates of state benefits.
You are quite right, Labour wants to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds on this because they are continuing a tradition of spinelessness of the Gordon Brown years when he borrowed when he should have taxed.

I really don't see any evidence to support your assertion that the benefits cap is designed to hide the excesses of the rich. If there is such a policy it is evidently a spectacular failure given the ongoing media coverage of the issue of executive bonuses. It is also a very popular policy so even if their motives are wrong, they are evidently doing something which the majority of the public support.

People in work often have to move when they find their income doesn't match their outgoings so I don't see why long term benefits claimants should be immune from similar pressures. In all probability 95% of the working population could not afford to live in the popular London boroughs (Chelsea, Kensington, Westminster, Marylebone, ...) so its hardly sensible to suggest that long term benefits claimants should be funded by the taxpayer to live in areas where most working people cannot afford to live.

In the same way that the publicity of benefits abuse and dependency obscures the needs of those who deserve support, the portrayal of the rich as leeches on the back of wider society fails to distinguish between those who seek wealth for their own ends and those who do so with a social conscience.

I want a low tax society not because I want to see rich bankers but because technologists very often use their ability to generate wealth to achieve wider societal benefits and see personal wealth as secondary to their main aims in life.

The indiscriminate punitive taxation of wealth that you advocate would be as popular as the benefits cap but the unintended consequences in killing off innovation and socially responsible wealth creation would leave us all much poorer in the long term.

The bankers have given wealth creation a bad name in exactly the same way benefits dependency has undermined the benefits system.

Anarchist,
You make a case for relocating people from where they thought they were settled with schools, friends and neighbours because they are being subsidised with housing benefit payments that bring their total dependency bill to over £26,000.
Most claimants are in genuine need. The saving from the benefits cap are in the region of (from memory) £250-£350m. These people are going to put themselves in the hands of various agencies and local councils to help them find settled accomodation again and will no doubt end up as tenants of private landlords in outer London or beyond, and will therefore be insecure accomodation.
I restate my opinion that this the core issue is housing, not state benefits dependency as the right (including visiting American commentators) persist in claiming.
Poor people, whether low paid or unemployed for the time being need settled and secure accomodation, as do the rest of us. Yes, people do move for work and up- or down-sizing. The sums spent on housing benefit could fund investment in low-cost housing which we will need anyway to be competetive as world economies and their populations continue to level out over the coming decades.
Council housing revenue accounts came into balance by the 1980s. When council houses were sold off and the proportion of owner-occupiers increased, the cost of labour went up. Market ideologues like New Labour and Thatcherites had the idea that you can drive down wages at the same time as increasing the cost of housing. What you end up with is the huge amount of housing benefit now paid to private landlords, and an attack on the poorest in the wealthy areas of the country in order to correct the problem.

Two words will solve the problem of parasitic private landlords siphoning state benefits:

RENT CONTROL