On Leftfoot Forward, Jack Lofthouse of the Institute of Public Policy Research cogitates on a recent article by Jonathan Cribb, Andrew Hood, Robert Joyce and David Phillips (source PDF here on the Institute for Fiscal Studies site) and how it reflects on the incentives the benefits system offers childless working-age adults to become hard-working strivers in employment.
Britain’s working families are now more likely than ever to be living in poverty. Analysis today by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) reveals a stark truth: household incomes for those currently in employment are often insufficient to provide a basic living.
In fact, almost half of all poor working-age adults without children (those that live on less than 60 per cent of the median family’s income) are in work or have a partner who works, compared with just 30 per cent in 1978–1980.
This is a valid and dismal observation, and as several respondents observe the current set-up is iniquitous as it often is only sheer happenstance that the low-paid will find themselves better-off than when in receipt of full unemployment benefits. Such people seem to be stuck in a trap of being treated like the new helots in which the State either keeps them on the bare minimum to subsist but with little real opportunity to improve, it subsidizes low-pay employers through the gargantuan tax credit system and continued benefits for their employees (or sources already-skilled samplers from the Jobcentre as it did for free-market wide boy and failed Conservative mayoral candidate, Tony Caldiera).
Yet, one point which I feel Lofthouse misses is the very title of the article by Cribb et al. which I touched upon in a recent piece about blanket provision of add-on benefits to pensioners: namely that over the period in question, the elderly and out-of-work have moved from being a dominant group of the relative poor to between one in five and one in eight based respectively on before or after housing costs have been deducted.
On the other hand, David Cameron’s hard-working, striving (childless) adults previously were between six and eight times less likely to be in poverty than pensioners now can be expected to be at a similar level (not including housing costs) and two thirds (including housing costs). For pensioners, this single-generation increase in their income-levels must be highly welcome, but it will be of cold comfort to hard-working striving adults both with and without designated poor.
PS As before, this is not about Israel or Muslims, so you know what not to do, maggots.
