Welfare versus parasitism
Bookworm on Jul 16 2010 at 12:34 pm | Filed under: Britain, England, Welfare
When I lived in England many, many moons ago, I met an English student who had spent the previous summer working, very, very hard, at the local zoo. The highlight of his work day was driving around the little kiddy train, and even that wasn’t much fun. He spent the rest of the time mucking out the animals’ enclosures. He found the elephant enclosure especially distasteful.
His sister, who was about his age, didn’t bother to get a job. She spent her time watching the soaps on telly, going out drinking with her friends, and collecting the dole.
At summer’s end, the sister had gotten more money on the dole than my friend did, despite his hard, honest work. The result was that, while he expected to work a real job once he had his engineering degree, he was very clear that he would never work again until that degree catapulted him into a different income bracket. At the lower bracket, living in a welfare state, it was much smarter not to work at all.
Thirty years on, and that message in England has not changed one iota:
A haulage boss was left stunned after an unemployed driver rejected the offer of a job paying more than £500 a week so he could remain on benefits.
Graham Poole, the managing director of a 23-wagon fleet in Rochdale, offered the job to the man who had been out of work for 18 months only to be told told it was not enough to have him come off government handouts.
The man turned the job down claiming he could get more money on benefits by ‘sitting around at home’.
(You can read the rest here.)
Funnily enough, if a government pays people not to work, they won’t work. The workers have figured that out, of course. The ideologues behind Leftist government prefer not to think about it, as they pursue their social re-engineering goals.
The reckoning always has to come, though. At some point, nobody is left to work, and then the whole Ponzi scheme collapses.
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Greetings:
Back in the mid-70s, I worked in the social service industry for the State of New York’s version of President Ford’s “Work Incentive Program”. The basic idea of the program was to get welfare recipients off the rolls via training and/or, perish the thought, employment. I was involved in doing the initial interviews and assessments. One day, a woman recipient came in with her 16-year-old daughter who had dropped out of high school. I asked the daughter what goals she had for her life, what employment or other interests she had. She seem pretty clueless, like these questions had not occurred to her or ever been discussed within her family group. I didn’t really want to press her to a conclusion, as her confusion was all the conclusion I thought I needed. I asked her mother if her daughter had expressed any interests, when the young woman’s light bulb went on and she said, in words that should be posted in every welfare office throughout our land, “Oh, yeah, I know, I want to open my own case and get off my mother’s.”
I am currently convinced that while the Clinton Administration may have succeeded in lowering the numbers on actual welfare, may other programs have sprung up, like the proverbially Hydra’s teeth to pick up the slack. I live in the San Francisco Bay area and there’s a commercial on a local radio station touting the benefits of attending community colleges. In discussing the available financial aid, the announcer mentions that assistance in paying your “rent” may be available. More unsecured loans to unsecured people, what could go wrong with that? There are people currently on welfare getting college educations, including child care, largely at the taxpayers expense. It’s only a matter of time until the campaign for college education as an entitlement begins in earnest.