Sitrep: London looting and riotingFollow

Justice Society of America if Google is to be believed.

Free money every year! That I have to pay back at 0% intrest over the next 30 years, so long as I earn over 15k/year. Yaaay.


Jobseeker's Allowance. It's supposed to be there to support you if you're between jobs. You go to your local job centre and sign on for it every fortnight.

Jobseeker's Allowance is £53.45/week if you're between the ages 16 and 24, and £67.50/week if you're over 25.

You can get other stuff on top if you're registered as disabled or are a single parent etc.

First off, I already mentioned that the reason many of those people can't get jobs is because of where they're living, not because there aren't sufficient jobs *anywhere*. And they're living there because that's where the social services have set them up to live. This is doubly prevalent in the UK, btw.

Also, how much of the UK's GDP is being spent providing that housing and medical care and food? The US government, even with its ridiculous recent spending increases, spends 25% of its GDP. The UK spends 50% of its GDP. Can you even for a second entertain the possibility that us conservatives might just be right and that by taking that much money out of private hands, you cause the problem of fewer jobs in the first place?

It's a catch-22. You tax that money away to pay for social services which are needed by those who can't find jobs. But the people can't find jobs because you've taxed the money away from their potential employers. I'd laugh at the ironic symmetry, but it's not really funny.



I didn't say that welfare "causes" social problems. I said that welfare makes existing social problems worse by institutionalizing them within a population. If you are poor and there is no welfare, you'll fight to not be poor anymore. There are good odds that you or your children will not be poor. If you are poor and on welfare, the odds that your children will also be poor and on welfare are dramatically higher than the odds of your children being poor if you were poor without any welfare. Welfare turns poverty into a generational problem. And, as I pointed out earlier, this effect is amplified when the government actually designates areas in which to put welfare housing (council housing), since everyone who isn't on welfare eventually moves away, taking the jobs with them. This leaves the welfare recipients stuck in an area in which they can't get jobs and can't get out of the system.



That's not my solution though. That's the straw man version of my solution which you've chosen to pretend is the only alternative. To be fair to your point though, I will acknowledge that once you get as far along in this process as the UK and France have (in terms of housing specifically), it's incredibly hard to undo. You have these large populations living in areas which can't sustain them. That's a hard knot to untangle.

I'm kinda using those examples as reasons why we *shouldn't* pursue that same course here in the US. We're not quite as far along (although some inner city areas are similarly bad). It's hard to fix the problem, but relatively easy to avoid it. You just have to choose *not* to make the same mistakes.



So since it's hard, we should just give up, right? It's exactly that sort of attitude that makes this such a big problem.



Every person I've met who's ever been on welfare has given more or less the same story. Some manage to get off welfare, but only because they have a strong work ethic. If you have even a decent streak of "find the path of least resistance", you'll find it easier to work the system instead of working a job. A hell of a lot of people fall into that trap, and a large percentage of them never ever get out of it.



No. I'm arguing that if the government didn't intervene in the first place, her parents would have been far far less likely to fail. Never underestimate the maturing effect of having to provide for yourself and your family. When we have a government which makes it easy for parents to sit on a couch and collect a disability/welfare check, why be surprised when the number of people who end out sitting on a couch collecting those checks increase? And why be surprised when people who do this turn out not to be very good parents?



WTF? What does this have to do with anything? But for the record, over the last two decades, the amount of money spent on education programs designed to help troubled kids has increased dramatically. It hasn't helped though, has it? It's because the left continues to believe that the way to solve social problems is by spending more money. It never occurs to them that what they're doing is counter productive.

The public school system isn't ever going to be able to correct for bad parenting. Anyone who thinks so is freaking moronic.



Unemployment rates don't work that way. Also, in this particular case, both of them were employed. They both developed mysterious back injuries (the type which creates lots of pain which needs medication, but of course doctors can't really definitively say exists or doesn't) and quit their jobs to take disability and welfare (for the kids). It's almost hysterical because I know the family well and they'll have some get together at the grandparents house and there's a whole huge extended family, some of them into their 80s, all healthy and walking around, and these two mid-30s people hobble in making a big deal of using their canes and grunting and groaning and moaning the whole time. Then they plop down on chairs and complain about their lives the whole time, whilst everyone else looks at them in disbelief.


Gee. What a coincidence that the only two people who have some mysterious injury which prevents them from working is that one married couple? Both of them? Within a year of each other? Sorry, it's BS. They could work if they want to. They choose not to. A choice that is made possible because they can work the system.




And pretty much zero prospects for ever having a better life. I'd rather suffer a few hungry nights if I know that I have opportunity available to me to improve my life. People in prison have food and a place to stay. I just don't think that in a free society those things should be given more weight than the opportunity to make something of yourself of your own free will.

Edited, Aug 11th 2011 5:03pm by gbaji

Yeah, that's exactly how that works.



Speaking of not working! Two flaws with that:

1. Government is terrible at determining what will create new jobs. What usually ends out happening is that the government creates incentives for doing things, which may or may not create very many jobs, but which businesses will happily engage in to get more profits. Add in a bit of lobbying, and pretty soon what you have is a process where companies figure out how to work the system to maximize profits without having to employ very many people at all. All because the government has inadvertently made things that don't create jobs more profitable than things that do.

2. If this actually works, then government wont get any additional revenue anyway, right? Think about it. Social programs are measured by how much they spend. Loss of revenue is seen as "bad". Thus, they'll call for more revenue. And what will they target? The very deductions they created in the first place. They'll label it "corporate welfare", or some such and get their water carriers to attack big business for taking them, while people are being denied necessary social benefits!


What do you think is happening right now? Think "deductions for corporate jets". Everyone's up in arms about this, right? Obama made a point to single that out as a deduction that does nothing except let rich people stay richer. But what they managed to avoid telling anyone is that the Democrats deliberately reinstituted that deduction as part of their own stimulus bill. That deduction falls on a yearly falling schedule from the time you purchase a new jet. It was intended to help bolster jobs in the aerospace industry.

The utter irony being that the very deduction that the Dems and Obama are loudly attacking today is likely also being used in their own calculations of jobs "created or saved" when defending their own recovery act.

So no. That doesn't work. The far left, in its ravenous desire for more more more tax revenue, will not allow those evil corporations to keep those deductions. It's a tactic to slip the higher taxes in, knowing that they'll attack the deductions later. You know this, of course, but choose to pretend that this works anyway.



If your objective is purely to raise more tax revenue, sure. I don't agree with that agenda, though. I believe that if you want to create jobs, you need to give the free market as much elbow room as possible and stand the hell out of the way. Most things business will do, absent any government intervention at all (except to prevent harmful actions) will tend to create jobs. We can't accurately predict what those jobs will be, or what form they will take. That's the whole point. We need to stop trying to use government to control the market. It just doesn't work in terms of the broader objective to create jobs.



Again though, what you propose has never actually ever worked. Once you get the government in charge of choosing what things are rewarded and what things are penalized in terms of the job market, the temptation to use this power for political ends will become too strong. Best to not meddle in the job market in the first place.



Do it the other way, and they wont need to travel that far to find a job in the first place. Allow something to turn a profit and someone will do it. Employment will follow that profit motive. The left just hates this because it's not controlled enough for them. They want to create jobs, not just stand back and trust that they'll be created on their own. And that's where you guys go wrong. And lots of other people suffer for it IMO.



Nope. I don't. Again, largely because your own political "side" wont allow it to work.

Consider that with unemployment rates this high, anyone looking for workers can find them very easily unless they need very specialist skills.

Consider, then, that available positions are almost entirely filled.

People unwilling to work isn't really a problem now because there are substantially not enough jobs for those that do and don't have one. Any job will have an enormous surfeit of applications.

Do you not understand? If jobs are full, then JSA will not somehow magically solve unemployment. It might help certain individuals and companies, but it can't have any real impact on the unemployment rate.

Every time the government totes improvements to the job centre as a cure, I wonder what kind of idiot actually believes them. Now I know.

Dumb? It's hard to hear you talk with America's **** lodged so deeply in your throat. In your case, 'soft' power seems to be a bit of a misnomer.

Try not to choke.

Okay, the fuck are you talking about? Oh, oh! This is some kind of witty banter about how my government bows to Washington, right? Awesome, you're so smart Kavekk.


As far as the whole job vacancy thing goes, there are plenty of jobs around. They're just shitty jobs. I don't see Polish immigrants struggling to find work. You know why? Because they take the jobs that are available and the sponges on permanent JSA think they're too good to do.

Get off your high horse, the simple fact is a lot of people are too fucking lazy to work, and the government has made it far too easy for them to not have to.

Some people have legitimate problems which stop them from being able to work, a significant fraction of the unemployed do not. This is basically as simple as I can make it for you.

I kinda like the visual of america's **** shoved down some whiney lil teen-brits throat.

Friday movie....

I wouldn't mind coming over there to stomp some chavs for you.

To be fair, there's only so many office buildings that need cleaning.

Well, I heard those jokes about how many of them it takes to change light bulbs... one normal job must be employing half a dozen Polish.

Kinda pads their numbers a bit.

We live in the same country, you syphilitic wastrel. One where 'dumb' means 'mute', not stupid.

That was the point, stupid.



No, there aren't plenty of jobs around. There are very few jobs. One of my flatmates is a polish immigrant, as it happens, studying PPE, and she couldn't find a job in London. Funny, huh? And that's with the 'take sh*tty job' racial that all polish people have. I don't know, maybe she fucked up character creation.



Yeah, I never said that wasn't the case, what I said was that it isn't an immediate cause of high unemployment. I mean, I don't know how much it's the case - certainly, I've never seen anyone whining about it give any kind of figures, and one could certainly suspect that it's largely just the Victorian 'worthy poor' rhetoric resurrected, given a quick make over and then and raped by the tory propoganda machine, fond as it is for necrophilia... but I don't care about that right now. That's not what we're arguing about.

What we are arguing about is whether there are a significant number of jobs going undone because the company can't find enough workers. Unless this is true, you can't point to forcing people to work as a solution to unemployment. This is what you have to prove to vindicate your claim, and what I have to disprove to vindicate mine. Do you understand?

I'll start with this.

As an aside, I'm not against forcing people on JSA to take a job. The system already does that. Is it perfect? Probably not, though anecdotally I've seen it happen to a couple of people. But what proposals to fix this tend to do is bar people from JSA even when they are looking for work - probably because there's a strong financial incentive to do so. Also, because they're the conservative party. I mean, we CAN talk about the minutea of that as well, if you want, but I have the sneaking suspicion you're not actually familiar with the rules.

Edited, Aug 12th 2011 4:45pm by Kavekk