[garinda]

Originally Posted by Eric

What usually pees me off with some of the posts on here is happening again. Blaming the poor and the powerless for their poverty. "Welfare culture" ... bs ... it doesn't exist; it's created by a sensationalist media for the entertainment and reassurance of those wearing those blue leather blinkers, embossed with "13" ... the magic number used by tories to explain away with screw ups of the tory government (and forget about that "coalition" horse manure ... it's a tory govt. with a few whining Lib-Dems struggling to be heard). The story of someone cheating on welfare has folks calling for cutbacks on all the poor. Sure as hell ain't too many people using the scientific method here ... coming up with a general hypothesis based on a few isolated examples and wacky extrapolations ... very medieval.

Ok, if we are looking for "welfare bums", those living off excessive govt. hand outs, we should be looking in the board rooms of the major corporations ... that's where the big bucks are heading. The real bums are the "corporate welfare bums", who seem to be getting an undeserved free ride in this thread. Who put the world into the last recession A few thousand welfare cheats, or the big businesses whose executives proved they couldn't organize an orgy in a whorehouse, let alone run a business? These, by the way, are usually the guys who used govt. bailouts to give themselves performance bonuses. When the guy on the production line at GM screws up, he gets fired. When GM management screwed up, they got bailouts and million dollar bonuses.

The Government of Ontario spends hundreds of millions on welfare ... but, when GM and Chrysler went cap-in-hand for bailouts, it came up with five billion And the Government of Canada with about another twenty billion. The workers in the plants in Oshawa and Windsor took pay cuts and reduced benefits to help out ... more billions. And the US and European banks and financial institutions ... enough said.

The UK is a wealthy country ... no citizen should be left behind ... Share the wealth. Don't buy into the "trickle down" bs ... you know, "let the private sector create the jobs ... give them hand outs and tax breaks in order to create jobs". Kinda like Bell Canada ... give them breaks and incentives, and what do they do. Well, in my community they moved 465 call centre jobs to India for chrissake ... folks over there work for less. Makes good business sense ... trouble is, it puts folks in my community onto welfare where they can be conveniently blamed by local tories for being a drain on the economy.

Corporate welfare - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eric, I don't think I qualify for wearing true blue blinkers, but I think you're wrong, about the U.K. nowadays.

Many people are better off claiming benefits, than working for a living.

That system, not necessarily the people, is wrong, because ultimately it's not sustainable.

I answered you similarly, in this thread...

Originally Posted by garinda

Eric, some of what you say, I take.

Though without wishing to appear too much like a copywriter for the Daily Mail, on some points you're wrong.

In recent years we have had a situation in which people chose to live on state funded benefits, because it meant they were better off doing that, than working for a living. For this, the system was wrong. Not necessarily the people who took advantage of the situation, who wanted as much money as possible, to fund their family's living costs.

The jobs some people are no longer prepared to do, are now being done by eastern Europeans. Who can work here, thanks to the E.U.'s open borders policy.

State benefits should be there for people, who through no fault of their own, need them. They should not be an option, a choice. Which for some, it was. Long term we can't afford that option as a society.

This programme showed people helped back into the jobs market, who then decided they couldn't afford the loss in income, so who chose to go back to living off benefits.

'Yvette, who, with four kids, finds that a minimum wage from Poundland is no match for the benefits she was getting before. Even Hayley doesn't blame Yvette for quitting, which is out of character for Hayley, and means that there must be something wrong with the system.'
Benefit Busters | Last night's TV | Television & radio | The Guardian

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