At present, you may have heard, the government is trying to push through a piece of legislation that will limit the amount of benefit any household can receive to no more than £26,000 per year. Quite frankly I can’t think of anyone (other than people receiving more than this) who would argue against the bill.

I pay my taxes in the UK, and I think it’s disgraceful that anyone can receive more than £26,000 a year. Obviously there is a reasonable chance that everyone will be out of work at some point of their working lives, and don’t get me wrong, I think the welfare state is a brilliant idea; jobseekers allowance is there to tide you over through the tough times until you can find a new job; Housing and Council Tax benefits are there to help you pay your rent until you can find a new job to pay for it yourself; Even child benefit to help you look after your child (to HELP you look after a child, not pay for everything for it). There’s even the NHS that is free, and prescriptions are heavily subsidised. These are very good ideas to help those in need, but the system is not designed for people to live off it.

Freqmaster recently pointed me in the direction of an interesting article on the BBC website, please have a read and let us know your thoughts: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16812185. This family receive £582.40 a week from the state; that’s apparently £30,384.80 a year! According to the ONS, the average weekly income for a British person in 2011 was £501*, which is £81.40 less than this family is getting for free. That’s per week, don’t forget, which means this family are receiving £4,232.80 more than the average Briton every year. I don’t know how rich you may be, but to me that’s a lot of money.

Now let us just think about this for a second, purely from the point of outgoing expenditure, they admit weekly to spending money on; 200 cigarettes; as well as loose tobacco products; 24 cans of lager, 7 mobile phones, Sky TV, nights at the pub where he buys a few pints. He also adds, for the sympathy vote,

“On the cigarettes, my wife tried to give up, but she missed one appointment on the course and they threw her off it.”

Firstly, don’t be so lazy that you miss an appointment. Secondly, I quit smoking when I was a student and it became too expensive, one day I bought a pack of cigarettes, the next day I didn’t. It was as simple as that, you don’t need “courses” to quit smoking.

Now, how much can we save them a week?

Depending on what they smoke, a 200 pack of cigarettes is around the £60 mark, a 50g pack of loose tobacco, around £13, and 24 cans of Tesco value lager is about £5 (but I almost guarantee he buys a better, more expensive lager, as this one tastes like piss)**. Also, the three of four pints he buys a week add up to about £13.20, at £3.30 a pint for the Bangor (North Wales) area***. Both my wife and I have full time jobs and we can’t afford Sky, so that’s definitely not a necessity. My parents both had full time jobs too, and even then when I was a teenager they NEVER paid my phone bill, I even had to fork out for my own mobile phones, so less of the;

“You try telling teenagers they’re going to have to do without their mobiles and there’ll be hell to pay.”

sob story please. They live in your house, they can live by your rules. They are teenagers and should start learning to pay their own way, I had summer jobs from the age of 14, and I got a permanent part time job as soon as the law allowed me after my 16^th birthday, it’s not hard.

So all in all, add those expenditures up and they could be spending £138.20 less a week. The spending cap would mean they would be £82.40 less off per week, which after my savings would give them £55.88 a week spare to spend back where they wished.

Lastly, why, when they are on benefits and things are already tight did they have another child? You can’t put yourself into financial hardship and then complain that you’re there. That’s preposterous. Don’t have children if you can’t afford to look after them, it’s not fair on the children and no one wants to listen to you bitch about being hard up when you put yourself in that position.

If things are hard, find work. Well, I suppose that opinion would be valid if the work he could bring in would pay more than £30,000 a year. Probably not, and here we have our second problem, we’re making it more financially viable for people to be on the dole, than it is for them to find work, this is a ridiculous state of affairs and personally I think the limit should be set at somewhere around the £10,000 mark, not high up at £26,000.

It’s disgusting how much money gets spent on dole dossers, and this example is quite conservative compared to some families. You don’t have to look far for these people, here’s just a few I found in about 10 minutes on Google:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1265508/Peter-Davey-gets-42-000-benefits-year-drives-Mercedes.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-541598/Meet-families-ones-worked-THREE-generations–dont-care.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9001599/200-families-with-10-children-claiming-60000-benefits.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2025296/30k-year-benefits-mother-Moira-Pearce-asks-charity-money.html

Sorry they’re mostly from the Mail, but you get the point! So in summation, “Unemployed father-of-seven Raymond (not his real name) and his family”, and anyone else taking such large amounts from the government, and from my tax contributions, can go fuck themselves for being dirty thieves.

Sources:

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

** All grocery prices taken from tesco.com grocery website.

*** Source, pintprice.com website: http://www.pintprice.com/city.php?/Bangor/United%20Kingdom/gbp.htm