http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22148764,

Not very well thought out is it,

They should be bloody grateful for what they get etc…

we* are all lazy parasitic scum and caused this economic recession (along with everything else bad) according to the tories.it’s the least we deserve 😡

* i am on benefit myself (have been unemployed for a while).

They should be bloody grateful for what they get etc…

I am.

Its going to cause huge social breakdown in families and on estates, dwellings,as families move to cheaper parts, then theres the kids education as kids move schools and a huge knock on effect for landlords who suddenly find they have no tennants, and no way of paying the remortgaged bills.

Also to get 500 quid a week you need to earn 13 quid an hour over 39 hours.Wonder where those jobs are.

so this will impact 40,000 people. seems like a lot, but is it? what is that as a proportion of people on benefits?

I kind of agree with the cuts but dread the day i might have to sign on 🙁

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

knock on effect for landlords who suddenly find they have no tennants, and no way of paying the remortgaged bills.

Doesn’t bother me. The buy-to-let industry has artificially forced up house prices beyond the grasp of most first time buyers.

Good, I appreciate that not everyone who is jobless is a lazy gett but the ones who are just spending it on booze, Fags, and have 50 inch tv’s and sky should have it cut. I have a half decent wage but some people work 60 hours a week and get less than the 350 quid benefit cap per week. As bad as it sounds it should be food vouchers a bus pass and small amount of cash for emergencies.

I used to have 80 a week for food and petrol after all my bills when I lived with my ex.

Flaperon – Member
knock on effect for landlords who suddenly find they have no tennants, and no way of paying the remortgaged bills.

Doesn’t bother me. The buy-to-let industry has artificially forced up house prices beyond the grasp of most first time buyers.

+1 The sooner we can rename ‘housing benefit’ to ‘landlord subsidy’ the better.

So the cuts are going to REDUCE benefits to a maximum equivalent to a pre tax salary of £35,500 a year. Note reduce, I.e. come down from some where north if that.

And this is a problem how?

All this to save £110m?

geetee1972 – Member

So the cuts are going to REDUCE benefits to a maximum equivalent to a pre tax salary of £35,500 a year.

Per couple + offspring, not per person. And remember that includes benefits which working people could also be entitled to- child benefit, housing support, etc.

as stated on the other thread if a certain person hadnt sold off all the council houses there’d be no need to channel all this cash via benefits to all these private landlords

Also to get 500 quid a week you need to earn 13 quid an hour over 39 hours.Wonder where those jobs are.

Full of hard working people providing for their families?

£500 a week in 2011 would put you at the 63rd percentile of household incomes in the UK

Seems stupid. If the amounts for each individual benefit are more than is needed, then reduce them as appropriate. If the amounts from individual benefits are appropriate then the households who are getting over this arbitrary limit obviously need that much money.

it depends how you define ‘need’ I guess.
need because that’s how much it costs, or need because that’s what the life they’re to accustomed costs.

brakes – Member

£500 a week in 2011 would put you at the 63rd percentile of household incomes in the UK

According to the Children’s Society, the average working household income is £31,500. Obviously you can choose different stat sets, got sauce?

lazy of me, but it was the first one that appeared on a search.
Guardian article base on data from the institute of fiscal studies
I looked at the data spreadsheet that is attached to the article.

From ONS survey 2011

Key findings
In April 2011 median gross weekly earnings for full-time employees were £501, up 0.4 per cent from £499 in 2010.
For men, full-time earnings were £539, up 0.2 per cent, compared with £445 for women, up 1.4 per cent.
Median gross weekly earnings for all employees were £404, the same as in 2010.
Median gross annual earnings for full-time employees (including those whose pay was affected by absence) were £26,200, an increase of 1.4 per cent from 2010.
Median gross weekly earnings for full-time employees were highest in London at £651 and lowest in Northern Ireland at £451.
Between 2010 and 2011 the hourly earnings, excluding overtime, for full-time employees of the bottom decile grew by 0.1 per cent to £7.01 per hour, compared with growth of 1.8 per cent in the top decile to £26.75 per hour.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/ashe/annual-survey-of-hours-and-earnings/ashe-results-2011/ashe-statistical-bulletin-2011.html

It’s a nice calculator that- see what happens when you tell it you have kids?

The cap is said to be affecting 67000 households and 220000 kids. So, arbitrarily let’s say an average of 3 kids, with 2 under 14 and one over, and spin that wheel again- you are now in the lower 22% and living on the edge of poverty (if you spin it again with 3 overr-14s, you are bottom 14% and officially In Poverty)

Course, it’s all a wee bit meaningless due to geographical impact.

it depends how you define ‘need’ I guess.
need because that’s how much it costs, or need because that’s what the life they’re to accustomed costs.

Well you set the individual benefits to whatever a person needs if they qualify (what it costs). Then you know that if a person/household qualifies for benefits that total more than the £26,000, then they need those benefits. This avoids having a stupid arbitrary cap, which in turn avoids potentially forcing a number (however small) of people into poverty just to please a few daily mail readers.

What surprised me is the size of the saving being talked of. Some say £110m, some say £51m over 3 years, but nobody is coming up with a massive number. That’s only 11 Thatcher Funerals 😉

So, if it’s not to save a stack of money, it must be to “help people work”. Because there’s no shortage of jobs, and everyone who isn’t working, doesn’t want to, and there’s definitely not 23 applications for every single job on average.

it’s an easy thing to do though isn’t it? putting a limit on benefits is easy because you don’t have to assess individual needs just do some research into what everyone else has and mark a line in the sand. simple to apply and simple to sell to the public. quick win.

actually are the government trying to sell this as a big thing? or did the opposition and press pick it up as a stick to beat them with.

Nicely put northwind. Why don’t they save a few quid by scrapping working tax credit and forcing huge profit making companies like tesco that are subsidised by our taxes to make up for useless poorly waged contracts to make up a minimum wage. I work in a supermarket on a 33hr contract. It took ages to get to that. I keep asking for full time contract but never get. Meanwhile they keep bringing in new staff on shitter hrs thsn me! Made up for in tax credits. Load of crap. These companies can easily afford to give full time contracts. Acas says they could do zero hr contracts if they chose. Is this the choice you have if unskilled unemployed? Well great! I can see how benefits would be an alternative choice. These big companies can surely afford a living wage

I work in a supermarket on a 33hr contract. It took ages to get to that. I keep asking for full time contract but never get.

Get a proper job then. They are there if you look for them. How about this one ?

Trinity Mirror boss Simon Fox awarded £1.2m in less than four months

I bet he won’t be worrying about the bedroom tax, ’cause he’s got a proper job – see ?

And with a job like that you get “golden hellos”, and well as “golden handshakes”, I’m not joking.
You also get a “golden how do you fancy a nice fat bonus this year” regularly too.

And you don’t even need to be successful in business, failure is handsomely rewarded in the UK.

It sounds like a good idea to me.

Oh peasant – hoist by your own petard (or is that tailfeathers? whoops no, that’s pheasant)……..so if you ‘agree with the cuts’ but ‘dread the day (you) might have to sign on’, doesn’t that just lead you to re-evaluate your support for the cuts then? Or is this masochism corner? I love right wingers – ‘not in my back yard’ etc.

doesn’t that just lead you to re-evaluate your support for the cuts then? Or is this masochism corner?

It’s a pretty standard attitude among those who willingly swallow right-wing rhetoric. Thatcher relied heavily on the “this will hurt but it’s for my own good and I probably don’t deserve better” attitude, throughout her premiership.

Also to get 500 quid a week you need to earn 13 quid an hour over 39 hours.Wonder where those jobs are.

Full of hard working people providing for their families?

Most working people would love a job that pays that much. As per footflaps above the cap is set at above the average wage. I think the limit I heard on the news today was £500/wk for a couple and £350/week for a single person, hardly poverty is it?
As a degree-educated office worker I earn less than that…
,
And I wholeheartedly agree with Biscuit and flaperon, the only way I will ever be able to think of being able to afford a house is if a massive reduction in housing benefit forces BTL landlords to reduce the rent or sell up and starts to bring the price of FTB-type houses down. Housing benefit merely keeps the rental market high, beneifting landlords and no-one else. And these ludicrous schemes the government comes up with to ‘help’ FTBs with deposits an guarantees etc are totally counter-productive, they are keeping house prices high, which is exactly what FTBs don’t want.

And I wholeheartedly agree with Biscuit and flaperon, the only way I will ever be able to think of being able to afford a house is if a massive reduction in housing benefit forces BTL landlords to reduce the rent or sell up and starts to bring the price of FTB-type houses down. Housing benefit merely keeps the rental market high, beneifting landlords and no-one else. And these ludicrous schemes the government comes up with to ‘help’ FTBs with deposits an guarantees etc are totally counter-productive, they are keeping house prices high, which is exactly what FTBs don’t want.

Many BTL’s would probably sell but not at a loss, there is no way any government will actively try and reduce house prices despite any long term benefit as so many people in the middle/floating voter sector have too much invested in it.

More integrated social housing would be a start rather than whole estates so say if you want to be part of government schemes to help building 20% must be social housing available at cost to the local authority/housing associations.

As the single person income cap is set at £350/week which would take someone on the minimum wage 50-70 hrs to earn depending on how you are taxed. It’s still fairly generous compared to working these days.

Flame me but, times are hard and those working have to support those that don’t. Many working people have had salary sacrifices and many are working with less colleagues and there fore an increased workload.

In my very simplistic terms;

There’s less money being made by the workers and so less being paid in taxes

Simple economics says that the government has to make cuts somewhere and it’s seems appropriate that, if the workers of the country are feeling the pinch, so must the non workers.

People have always moved to seek work, now they may have to move to maintain their benefits lifestyle from a dear are to a cheaper one. Only like me moving to Kent from Liverpool for work when I was 23 and then to Lancashire when I was 29.

Not my choices, i did it because I had to if I wanted to work.

Not arsed about BTL landlords losing out, they took their chances and business is a risk.

Simple economics says that the government has to make cuts somewhere and it’s seems appropriate that, if the workers of the country are feeling the pinch, so must the non workers.

This is about persecuting the poor rather than saving money. If they really cared about balancing the books they’d focus on corporate and individual tax avoidance from their milionaire chums….

according to the wealth of HMRC figures on the topic, the top 1% of all income taxpayers contributed a whopping 27% of all income tax that year.

By contrast, the bottom 50% of income taxpayers paid just over 11% of income tax.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17397199

There is undoubtably more to it.

Can’t see why this is a problem. People whining that there’s no work in their area? Bloody well move somewhere there is work then rather than sit on your arses complaining. That’s what I’ve had to do on numerous occasions to get the right job and it hasn’t killed me.

Or how about make your own work? Something like valeting cars or gardening is not rocket science. We struggled for years to find a reliable gardener who turned up when he said he would. The less easy it is to sit on benefits for these people the better. That way more benefits can be given to people who really need them like the disabled for example.

Although there may not be many of them, they have incomes which are so fantastically large, running into millions of pounds a year, that their individual income tax bills are huge too.

I think many people don’t realise just how wealthy the super rich are. The 1,000 wealthiest people in Britain, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, are now worth a combined £395.8 billion, equivalent to more than a third of the national debt.

It is quite unbelievable that during these difficult economic times just 1000 individuals, out of a population of over £60 million, should own the equivalent of more than a third of the national debt – it’s the sort of inequality which you might have expected in the middle ages. It is however true.

The richest people in Britain have seen their fortunes soar by a fifth in the past year even as much of the UK is struggling to recover from the recession.

It is quite unbelievable that during these difficult economic times just 1000 individuals, out of a population of over £60 million, should own the equivalent of more than a third of the national debt – it’s the sort of inequality which you might have expected in the middle ages. It is however true.

What you planning Ernie? Smash n grab raid, instant and random 50% tax on saving/worth? For a lot of those up there on the list the wealth will be on paper with things like Property, Art etc if you want to cash it in you need someone to buy it. Can’t seem many in the market for a Rembrant these days especially if they will have to sell it to pay their tax bill.

For a lot of those up there on the list the wealth will be on paper with things like Property, Art etc if you want to cash it in you need someone to buy it. Can’t seem many in the market for a Rembrant these days especially if they will have to sell it to pay their tax bill.

Yes of course. A stern letter to the Daily Telegraph pointing this out seems in order.

How dare they mislead their readers in such a way, eh ?

Separate issue, there are changes a foot to make super rich tax dodgers like say T Blair pay there share. That doesn’t detract from this bill being the right thing to do.

It’s apparently the most popular proposal ever, wouldn’t expect it to go down well in some quarters of studentuniontrack world.