Cut all the benefits/welfare, fix the economy

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Probably for the best you generally have to grossly exajerrate how AS affects you in order to get it in the first place which even disability advisors will tell you to do which I think is very misleading advice when it comes to benefit fraud n what not. But there you go.

On another note while were bashing the welfare state. I've got some beef with the way we support people with "direct payments" who have disabiities particularly learning disability.

Basically the labour government created a white paper known as "valuing people" back in 2001 which aimed to give people with learnining disability all the help and support they needed to be included and part of society. But something one of my lecturers pointed out during my nurse trainning was that that usually we exclude them from the job market and simply give them a measly amount of benefits to live on, most of which goes towards living costs n housing benefit etc. Then tell them they can go out and do what any other person would do, but oh don't think of getting a job. Instead you are limited to a trickle of pocket money given to you by the government which then limits them to what they can afford to do anyway.

So in effect a chunk of the population who have learning disabilities are being effectively excluded from the workforce. Yet in countries such as Greece they will try to get any able bodied person with a learning disability some kind of work even if its doing relatively mundane jobs like directing the traffic or showing tourists where the toilets are. It gives them a sense of worth to feel they are doing something productive for their community whereas we say oh yes be included but don't think you can get too carried away with being normal cause you only have so much money we can give you.

Seriously annoys me that contradiction

Let me broaden the subject.
The "Bell Curve" says that half the population are by definition below average intelligence.

So if a coal mine closes in West Virginia and throws 1000 not too bright 50 year old men out of a job then the dippy liberals say "they should be retrained to fit into the modern world"

So, you are going to take a 50 year old IQ 85 coal miner and "retrain" him to be a computer programmer, are you?

Exactly. I believe the NAS has been campaigning against this recently.

The Labour government is incredibly horrible, no wonder we're in such an economic mess.



You do not need to be particularly intelligent to be successful in business. As long as you're not utterly stupid you can do it.

No one said anything about training anyone to do anything, either.

Well that kind of did happen to a lot of the communities in the Northern part of England. For those who had the academic and practical know how it was an opportunity to re-train although usually it was to re-train into a public sector job such as nursing because there was not really any alternative plan on what kind of industry or work should replace coal mining or steel works in these regions.

It was also an opportune time for Entrepreneur's to emerge and develop businesses or go self employed which was another alternative route. But this simply isn't feasable for like you say a chunk who fall into that area of the "bell curve" assuming that the bell curve is an accurate model representative of the population.

I think my main issue with the Thatcher period of government (which was when all of this social upheveal took place, but really the writting was on the wall in the previous decade with the rise of service industry and the fall of traditional large scale manufacturing) was this idea of selfish enterprise. That businesses are simply there to make money with no consideration of any other factors and no sense of social responsibility just simply the focus on making personal profit.

To me that is rather abhorrent and ignorant way of operating a business. I do not think it is something you should legislate for, i think if you go into business you should have a moral obligation or an expectation that you invest in the community that your workforce form part of. Businesses setup in this country by the Quacker christian movement are a great example of this sort of approach.

This is no differnt to how the Patricians of the Hanseatic League would operate as they realised in order to increase profits they needed to invest in better technologies and management of the trading cities they operate in. Its no good expanding a businesses and increasing production if there is not going to be the increased demand of a larger, healthier, happier population to consume your produce.

I think at some point I would like to start up my own social enterprise or organisation but I have never seen the appeal of simply going into a business with the intention of making a load of money in a great big pot for myself. I don't see that as the means to an end of a good and well lived life

The current campaign is this I believe



A lot of people with AS are handled in a very poor manor in the job centre system. Most of my time is spent working with Disability Employment Advisors at these places who are overworked overstretched and usually need support themselves to understand how to manage a claiment who has AS so that they are helped into an appropriate role.

The prospects service that the NAS runs is only available in certain parts of the UK outside of London but even they are not 100% in helping to get people jobs. Employers are probably the main barrier I hate to say and they are the ones that need convincing to take on an employee with a "disability"



I can't quite recall gordon brown holding a gun to the head of these investors in Hedge funds making them buy toxic debt in the US housing market myself. I mean deary me I thought the dying mantra of the right wing was "the more free the market the more free the people" god forbid if they had legislated the banking sector anymore I'm sure some of those good friends of the tory party would of been miffed that they couldn't make money out of nothing so easily anymore

You will have to furnish details of this worldwide looting for me, I was under the impression that Hitler came to power in 1933 and it wasnt until 1938 that Hitler started absorbing other German countries until Britain and France declared war and started the second world war in 1939.

Your not getting this worldwide looting and stealing notion from the British Empire and confusing it with evil Nazis are you?
If you look at the history of British Imperialism, you will find it surpasses the evil of theNazis, but as it was all funded by the bankers anyway, it was not in thier interest to demonise and destroy it.

i have not much interest in economics, and i will probably get blown out of the water here, but there are only "4 current topics" (i use the "recent posts " facility when i come to WP), and i rarely post serious comments in discussions such as this because i do not learn by reading, but from my personal reasoning which is devoid of advanced education.

anyway, welfare is like stimulus i think. every cent you pay a person on welfare ends up back in the economy quite quickly. it stands to reason that people on welfare spend all their money on food and rent and other sundries. they have no capital or savings.

attempts at stimulating the economy by providing (for example) "baby bonuses" are less likely to be effective due to the fact that a substantial percentage of recipients of the bonus do not need the money, so they put it in the bank and add it to their "savings".

i think savings are the bane of a healthy economy in a way, because the money is put into hibernation, so it disappears from circulation.

there is the argument(in my mind) that savings are a boon to banks who use them to generate profits by re lending savings at a higher interest rate than the interest they pay on deposits, but that is a very narrow boon, and only serves to make banks robust and therefore the deposits of savers more secure.

i am glad that china works it's backside off for a very small margin (they benefit from the economy of scale) because i have a business where i source much of my product from china for a very cheap price, and i sell the product to my customers for a lesser price than competitors who source their product from australia could offer, and i make a greater profit than they do despite my cheaper prices.

so my customers are not out of pocket by dealing with me, and my customers customers are also not out of pocket, but i make a healthier profit than i would if i used the australian equivalent.

because i make more money by buying from china, i spend more money in australia, thus contributing to our economy.

i often wonder where "money" comes from in the first place. obviously it is printed at the mint, but where is the justification of bringing money into existence?

i reason it this way (and if i was educated in economics i would not have to reason it):

imagine a closed world where there are 10 people living in it and there is a system of government consisting of only us ten. each person has $100. we (the government) printed the $1000 that we all share in.
i provide food for the other people and they pay me. they provide other goods and services for me and i pay them.

does that mean that after 30 years of business, we are all worth (as a sum total) only $1000 still? no. if i produce and harvest $2000 worth of food, then money will have to be printed to buy it. the money is valid because it is underwritten by the value of my produce , and it i can spend it by giving it to the other people in the 10 person community in return for their products. they can then produce more products (like wood and wool), that i, and the rest of us can now afford.

what i am trying to say is that industry is the generator of money, and if i produce $10,000 worth of food, then, if there is a demand for it, $10,000 more will have to be printed by our system of government and given to me before i will give it to them. the $10,000 is valid because it represents the agreed worth of my produce.

i guess if i scale that notion up to the current population of the world, then i can see where the origin of money is.


anyway, there should be a more appropriate thread for me to post in now.

Early on the looting of the Jews in Germany. The gold-banks in Switzerland did a bang up business with the Nazis. Later on the looting of art and gold from all over Europe where the Germans occupied and were in control.

Yes. There was an initial boost to the German economy as many unemployed Germans were put back to work, but it was not a sustained or sustainable growth. There were the autobahns, to be sure, but that was a political ploy, not a genuine growth policy for Germanyh. Hitler's game plan (and that of his Nazi buddies) was war and grabbing land. Their ultimate goal was to resettle the portion of the East west of Ural mountains. The steppe was to become German farm land. The Nazi technique for getting rich was to loot and kill.

To find out just how successful Germany was, visit Germany at the end of 1945. The result of German Nazi policy was lots of rubble.

ruveyn

@bold: Also, a motorway network can be a terribly useful thing when you desire to move your army from one side of your nation (which happens to be bordered by enemies) to the other.

@Nambo: I think the Nazis win at evil, on account of all that genocide and holocaust thing. And before that old chestnut about British concentration camps pops out: That's CONCENTRATION not DEATH camp. Two different things, until the Nazis started to turn the former into the latter.

The underlying problem is that Asp-Z doesn't understand the function of money and how it relates to work. Money has no value in itself. It is merely bits of paper with awful art on it or maybe just little bits of magnetism on a tape or some numbers written in a book. People don't work for money. They work for food or a place to live or clothes or whatever they need or want.. As technology gets cleverer it produces more and more of these needs with less and less work. But how come these days with all that "less work" people are asked to put in more hours and their spouses have to put in more hours just to get that food and housing and whatever else they need? And when their jobs disappear to China or India how're they supposed to work to make money to buy what they need? America keeps howling to the world that it's the land of the free but a man out of work is not free. Most of the nation is in debt that they cannot pay and people in debt are not free. The point of civilization is that people within it get enough to eat and a place to live with some security and whatever necessities they need and if that doesn't work, whether under communism or capitalism or socialism or what ever the hell you call it then civilization is failing. The flag of the USA is not the Stars and Stripes, it is the credit card which means debt which means you are not free.

The economy is booming not just because of a lack of monetary handouts to unemployed people but also because of a lack of government regulations. There are no worker safety regulations so employees die in industrial accidents far more often than in countries that have such regulations. But that lack of safety regulations means that companies can grow at an amzing speed because safety regulations slow things down. So there is growth but for all the dead and maimed employees it came at a pretty high price.

There are also no regulations to protect customer safety. You can crank out lots of products cheaply if you don't have to pay any attention to what goes into them.

And there are no regulations to protect the enviroment. Again, you can make money quick and easy and grow the economy fast fast fast if it's ok to dump your waste in the closest river.

Although they surely do have fast economic growth, I think it has come at such a high price to individuals and the enviroment that it makes a very bad role model.

Actually, I think its the communists that win at evil, they where responsible for the deaths of 20 million Christians, and they discovered rather than "gassing" the victims first, it was easier to just bury them alive.

Next on the list comes the Americans, do some research on what the Americans did to the Germans in thier camps after the war, whereas Auchwitz had barracks, food, a swimming pool, a theatre, a brothel, the Americans rounded Germans up, millions of them, left them exposed in a field with no food, no water, no shelter, no room to even lie down, covered in diarria, drinking urine until they died a slow and horrible death.
And this was after the war had ended!
The British and Canadians treated the Germans well but not the Americans.

Churchill however, he rivals Hitler in his evilness, Churchill developed antrax with the intention of wiping out every German man, women and child, fortunately parliament stopped him, he also developed the modern day practice of bringing warfare to civilians when he started bombing people in thier homes, Germany didnt even have any 4 engined bombers as such a wicked enterprise was against thier morality, I read a book about the Spitfire once, its first kill was against a German bomber that was to attack a British warship, but the german bomber was to only attack if that ship was at sea, for fear of harming civilians if at port.

And dont even talk about Dresden, or the American Mustangs the following morning who flew along the river strafing the nurses and patients they had managed to rescue, or the elephants escaped from the zoo.

As for the "Holocaust", did you know Hitler wanted the Jews removed from Germany, especially as international Judaism had declared war on Germany in 1933, so Hitler wanted them out,l just as England had them banned for 400 years until Cromwell brought them back, but the Zionist West, wanting a Jewish sacrifice in order to get back thier "promised land" refused to take them, leaving them in Germany to face the persecution of Hitler, research the Kinder Transport and how Germany wanted all the Jewish children and thier parents out, but England would only take 10,000 of them, and charged Germany £50 a child to look after them.

Before the big corporations started investing in China for cheap labor I don't recall a hell of a lot of entrepreneurial success. If starvation were the answer Africa should be the most energetic place in the world.

Am I allowed to bring the Eastern Europeans into this discussion, or will I get banned from Wrong Planet, tracked down, arrested, and accused of being a racist? Because I know the government letting the foreigner's coming over here and taking our jobs, houses, education and sending benifits back to their own countries has taken a big part in causing debt for this country.

Immigrants are always scapegoats for bad government policy.

Welfare isn't like stimulus. At least, it isn't in the UK.

In fact, in the UK, it ONLY benefits people who can't be assed to work at all, because for everyone else, it loses them money or gives them no additional benefit.

Allow me to explain.

If you receive some sort of benefit while you work, for example DLA while you have a job, you're paying higher taxes in order to fund these benefits. So what usually happens is you end up paying either more or equal to what you get in benefits as tax.

For people without jobs, lot of this benefit money is spent paying for council houses provided by the government. This money, along with all other money going to the public sector, is NOT going back into the economy at all. Only money going into the private sector is going into the economy.

Now, while it's true that food purchases and such are funding the economy, the fact is that it's a small proportion of what would be put back into the economy if we weren't stuck in a welfare state.

If we scrapped all these benefits and people made their own money and everything they then paid for was from the private sector, they'd be making a substantial contribution to the economy.

Don't forget, this isn't just about forcing everyone to be entrepreneurs - the people who do choose that route will naturally create jobs for those who don't.

I have yet to see a valid argument against scrapping benefits. We're meant to be capitalist. Capitalism is about making money. Not getting things from the state - that's socialism.

Something else I find disgusting is EMA. It stands for Education Maintenance Allowance. Basically, it's a scheme which gives £30 a week to students. That's it. Free money to teenagers, basically. I'm a teenager and even I can see that EMA is wrong.

I saw a comment about how Labour didn't cause the banking crisis. This is true. But they caused the deficit without a doubt. And they did that by giving people free money and laptops for doing nothing while also punishing success with high taxes, then this rubbish with badly thought out bank bailouts was the icing on the cake. We have a national debt of over £4 trillion.

/rant

Last edited by Asp-Z on 20 Nov 2010, 3:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.