It’s irritating that the children mentioned in this article are not wrong.
Failed by school, failed by their parents (normally) and failed by a society which pays people greater dividends for ultimate failure than hard work achieves, young girls (and boys) are taking advantage of the ‘free’ home, free dentistry, ‘free’ school meals and ‘free’ hand-outs that are then available to them.
And you don’t have to be bottom of the IQ ladder to benefit from benefits. A reasonable wage is still bettered by the Council house which is way beyond the reach of anyone even on the mean wage without years of saving.
And when this ne’er-do-work reaches retirement age, there’s no question of their home being taken for payment of nursing home bills etc — having their own-means, workers are penalised again by watching those who have not “paid their way” lose out not at all.
There are people in this world who work hard and then, through perverse misfortune, lose their home, lose their job and genuinely need the help of the state (the rest of us, really). At the same time there are people who leave school having not tried and not been punished for not trying and never get a job. These two groups of people are not similar in any way.
And yet the state treats them the same.
I want a social security safety net. I think it would be cruel and unusual punishment to allow people to be turfed out onto the street penny-less. But at the same time I begrudge paying tax to fund someone else’s work-free life.
I love Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, but those people who really are like Jonny shouldn’t be being molly-coddled — they should be given a simple message by taxpayers: work (if you can) or lose your benefits.
July 17th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
The problem is the money for nothing attitude, why can’t the social security safety net involve having to work to get it, such as joining the TA.
July 18th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
hi…..you think YOU’VE got it bad! Ha! Take my beloved former hometown of Detroit……When we “Fascists” were in power (read that right of center), unemployment was around 5% , illiteracy around 10%, and the drop out rate of high schoolers was about 2%. Now, that the left (read socialist) has ruled there for about 3 decades, that the Detroit School System gets most of the aid from the State (Michigan) and Federal Govt in comparrison with the rest of Michigan….Detroit has managed to……achieve an adult illiteracy rate of 47% (just below that of Zimbabwe’s), an official unemployment rate of just over 20% (unofficial, ie including those that have droped out of the system, of around 35%), and a high-school drop out rate of just over 50%.
If you want to solve your problems….just look at what procedures and laws we have used in Detroit, do the opposite, and you should once again excel.
paul