A jobless couple rake in £95,000 in state benefits a year – and even have breakfast delivered to the door each morning, courtesy of the taxpayer.
The money – five times the starting salary of a teacher – goes to unemployed Pete and Sam Smith and their ten children, who live in a rentfree four-bedroom house.
[…]The Smiths were moved last month by the local authority from a house in Bath, which the landlord accused them of wrecking, to the large house in the Bristol suburb of Kingswood.
But Mrs Smith, 36, complained that the house was too small, the breakfast portions too stingy and said she could afford to buy her brood only one Nintendo Wii games console between them.
She claims she is also forced to pay £100 a week to keep her five cats in a cattery.
‘It’s very cramped here,’ she told the News of the World. ‘We’ve been told we might not be given a new house for another nine months, which is ridiculous.
‘The breakfast supplied by the council isn’t like proper hot food. It’s usually eggs, beans, tinned tomatoes and cereal, which isn’t really enough for us all and we have to heat it up ourselves.’
[…]Mrs Smith receives up to £140-a-week child benefits for her children aged from four months to 14 years.
The family also get disability living allowance, carer’s allowance, tax credits and income support.
The total with child benefits is £44,954. They then receive a £950-aweek bed-and-breakfast deal where the council pays for breakfasts delivered to their home, which comes to £49,400 – a total of £94,354 a year.
You may want to read this Arthur Brooks column that argues that it isn’t money that makes people happy – it’s the freedom to work, save and spend how you please. Arthur Brooks is the same guy who previously wrote a book showing that those who oppose redistribution of wealth give far more in charity than than those who support it. You can read about that in this article.
One of the things that makes it tough to figure out how much has to be charged for insurance is that people behave differently when they are insured from the way they behave when they are not insured.
In other words, if one person out of 10,000 has his car set on fire, and it costs an average of $10,000 to restore the car to its previous condition, then it might seem as if charging one dollar to all 10,000 people would be enough to cover the cost of paying $10,000 to the one person whose car that will need to be repaired. But the joker in this deal is that people whose cars are insured may not be as cautious as other people are about what kinds of neighborhoods they park their car in.
[…]Although “moral hazard” is an insurance term, it applies to other government policies besides insurance. International studies show that people in countries with more generous and long-lasting unemployment compensation spend less time looking for jobs. In the United States, where unemployment compensation is less generous than in Western Europe, unemployed Americans spend more hours looking for work than do unemployed Europeans in countries with more generous unemployment compensation.
People change their behavior in other ways when the government pays with the taxpayers’ money. After welfare became more readily available in the 1960s, unwed motherhood skyrocketed. The country is still paying the price for that– of which the money is the least of it. Children raised by single mothers on welfare have far higher rates of crime, welfare and other social pathology.
San Francisco has been one of the most generous cities in the country when it comes to subsidizing the homeless. Should we be surprised that homelessness is a big problem in San Francisco?
[…]We also hear a lot of talk about “the uninsured,” for whose benefit we are to drastically change the whole medical-care system. But income data show that many of those uninsured people have incomes from which they could easily afford insurance. But they can live it up instead, because the government has mandated that hospital emergency rooms treat everyone.
Much has been made of the fact that families making less than $250,000 a year will not see their taxes raised. Of course they won’t see it, because what they see could affect how they vote.
But when huge tax increases are put on electric utility companies, the public will see their electricity bills go up. When huge taxes are put on other businesses as well, they will see the prices of the things those businesses sell go up.
If you are not in that “rich” category, you will not see your own taxes go up. But you will be paying someone else’s higher taxes, unless of course you can do without electricity and other products of heavily taxed businesses. If you don’t see this, so much the better for the Obama administration politically.
This country has been changed in a more profound way by corrupting its fundamental values. The Obama administration has begun bribing people with the promise of getting their medical care and other benefits paid for by other people, so long as those other people can be called “the rich.” Incidentally, most of those who are called “the rich” are nowhere close to being rich.
[…]There was a time when most Americans would have resented the suggestion that they wanted someone else to pay their bills. But now, envy and resentment have been cultivated to the point where even people who contribute nothing to society feel that they have a right to a “fair share” of what others have produced.
The most dangerous corruption is a corruption of a nation’s soul. That is what this administration is doing.
Republicans prefer private voluntary charity as the best way to provide a safety net. Just because people on the left give less to charity than people on the right, it doesn’t mean that no one one gives to charity. Europe has the highest taxes, and they give the least in charity. Why not LOWER taxes for people who want to give MORE in charity? When government hands out money, it encourages people to be more dependent. But when a person in trouble has to go to a neighbor or a charity in their own community, it sends the right message – “this should be temporary – don’t let this become a habit”. It’s not GOOD for someone to depend on the government. People need to work in order to be happy.
Having the government take over the role of provider in the home is an insult to men. It’s not government’s job to replace men. They ought to stay right out of it. Leave money in the pockets of the working man so he can save for a rainy day himself. If you subsidize a behavior, you get more of it. If you tax a behavior, you get less of it. It makes no sense to subsidize irresponsible lifestyle choices and tax productive and moral lifestyle choices. You don’t want to make the rescue from bad decisions an anonymous and automatic affair. You want people to worry, so that they won’t want to make risky and irresponsible choices. Everybody goes through though times, but we shouldn’t make it normal. People ought to know that it’s not normal.
You may want to read about how government dependence makes people less happy than having a job. Don’t make people depend on government by taxing businesses and investment. We need more companies hiring – not less. And that means letting the profit motive provide an incentive for entrepreneurs to engage in more risk-taking and enterprise.
T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, isn’t surprised. In an interview Thursday with Neil Cavuto on Fox News, Rodgers saw the move as part of a brewing corporate revolt against an overbearing government sucking the economic oxygen out of the room, tilting at windmills, imposing burdens such as the health care overhaul and environmental regulations but not providing the incentives or certainty that companies need to plan and survive.
“When we continue to put money into bad things, take money out of the productive sector, take money away from me to invest, take money away from families to spend on what they think is right, and dump it into these foolish government projects and blather about green jobs,” Rodgers said, “you know eventually the overall economy is going to get less competitive and some sort of recession or some sort of problem is going to set in.”
As a result, Rodgers continued, “I am not spending any money, I am not opening any plants and I am not hiring anybody, and corporate America is doing the same thing.”
And it’s not just CEOs who are affected by energy taxes:
According to the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, under cap-and-tax legislation, gas prices at the pump would increase 58%. Residential electricity costs would “necessarily skyrocket” by 90%. Total GDP loss by 2035 would be $9.4 trillion. Net job losses (after “green” job creation) would be nearly 1.9 million in 2012 and could approach 2.5 million by 2035. Manufacturing would lose 1.4 million jobs in 2035.
If only Democrats could be affected by the laws that Democrats pass, while Republicans can be affected by the laws that Republicans pass. Let the Democrats live in bankrupt states like California and the Republicans can live in booming states like Texas. There are two different cultures – one that doesn’t understand economics, and one that does.
WINTERY KNIGHT 