Posted on 01/13/2013 6:54:56 PM PST by Olog-hai
Britain cannot possibly afford its welfare state for much longer. Most people do not realize that state handouts (£207 billion [$334 billion] a year) mop up every penny we pay in income tax (£155 billion [$250 billion] a year). Everything else, the NHS, schools, transport, police, defense, interest on the debt (nearly £50 billion [$80.7 billion] a year, by the way) must be paid for by other taxes, including the vast sums raked in by so-called “National Insurance”, or by more borrowing.
As we are more or less bankrupt as a country, such generosity is not noble, but plain idiotic. Yet we will not stop doing it. Change is politically impossible. …
The very idea that people should provide for themselves has become a horrible heresy, a barbaric view that no civilized person can hold. We’ll see. My own guess is that a hurricane of inflation will, over the next ten years, rip the welfare state up by the roots and leave us impoverished, diminished and baffled, wondering what happened to us. …
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
If you haven't already done so, GTF out of the cities and interior 'burbs and away from public transportation lines. Distance will be a friend when the wheels fall off the gravy train.
I’ve thought for a long time about a tax on illegals. A nice Catch-22, but it will never even get considered. A $5,000/head yearly tax to help defray the cost to citizens and legal residents. I bet the IRS would be lots more effective than the INS in getting illegals to self-deport.
Someone send a memo to Washington.
Actually, the Elizabethan poor laws were on a different model from the U.S. welfare system completely.
At the turn of the century there were three competing social-welfarist models. I forget what the Catholic model was, but the Protestant/Elizabethan model was the poorhouse or workhouse where housing and work were under the same roof, all administered under contract by a private party (which Dickens attacked for its parsimoniousness and brutality to the internees).
The Jewish model, that the U.S. settled on (because of the Jewish influence in urban-ethnic machine politics on the East Coast), was direct cash subsidies to a widow. That worked fine in the Jewish community because the widow was enmeshed in a strong social and moral structure. The general population was not, with the result that numerous abuses that we all know grew up around the U.S. social-welfare model.
Oh dear, they’ll be storming the palace shortly.
That, and Pelosi’s brilliant thesis that paying people not to work positively stimulates the economy.
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