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. Well 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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