I think your ideological slip is showing, saintfletcher.

>>The welfare state in the UK was dismantled and watered down in the Thatcher years<<

The facts are against you, I'm afraid.

As reported last month, figures from the UK Department for Work and Pensions show that "One in three households across Britain is now dependent on the state for at least half its income... more than seven million households are getting most of their income from government handouts"

So much for the welfare state having been "dismantled".

Frank Field, a UK (Labour!) parliamentarian is prominent in the battle for welfare reform, showing how it can morph rapidly from "help to the battler" into a cushy pit of hand-out dependency. In a 2002 essay he cited an example:

"A single mother... earning £4.10 [A$10.50] an hour over a 30 hour week will see her net weekly income of £106.22 [A$272] more than quadruple to £447.34 [A$1,150] once the child care tax credit and the basic working families tax credit are added in. A yearly net income of £5,523.44 [A$14,162] once the tax credits are added in is equivalent to an annual salary of £23,261.68 [A$59,645]. Even more staggering is the level of earnings a single mother would have to achieve to give her an income equal to, let alone a penny more, than her current entitlement. Gross earnings in excess of £31,500 [A$80,770] a year are now required to put the person on an income equal to an individual earning £4.10 [A$10.50] an hour and claiming all the tax credit help available." (Welfare Titans: Frank Field, Civitas Institute 2002)

Is that a good deal or what? Thirty hours at ten and a half bucks an hour is the equivalent of an honestly-earned and taxed salary of eighty grand a year.

The welfare state in the UK dismantled? I don't think so.

I know lots of folk who would love to be "demeaned" to the tune of eighty grand a year.

The problem is compounded, needless to say, by the cost of the armies of public servants required to administer such a scheme.

Pericles,
Have you ever had the experience of been woken up every night, at 3am from the sound of baby screeching (for about 4 years)? Have you ever spent any amount of time wiping warm gooey stinky vomit off your clothing? Have you ever had the pleasure of caring for a snotty diarea dripping child? Although none of this is quite as demeaning as working on a factory floor, in my book, I assure you there is no amount of money that could compensate for the experience. It requires love to motivate.

Pericles I think its fair what saintfletcher put foward. Civil welfare in Britain did take a beating. Such things need to be assessed taking in support services as well and Thatcher did devolve British government responsibility to painful thresholds. Still it was for a good cause to pay off India for debt accumulated over the Second World War although perhaps Thatchers Government could have been more clever about it certainly many lives were destroyed through her policies. It could be theorised that India's current boom in part owes a debt to Thatchers desire to rid Britain of its debts. If so Thatcher could not be judged the total failure as at least she contributed to the prosperity of Indians

Admittedly, the Sermon on the Mount is a good example of the love and compassion that Jesus, later, the Christ, is purported to bring to humanity.

Yet the two greatest Christian philosophers, St Thomas Aqunas and Immanuel Kant, did give doctrinal proof to the benefits of using Golden Greek reasoning to prove that we do need the love as expressed by the early Jesus, but to use Socratic commonsense to Snsense to make it worldly.

Vivy “People who are too kind to others will end up poor, wether they are clever or not.”

Now maybe you could back up that statement of gross judgemntalist generalization with some statistic to show any correlation between “kindness” and “poverty” or negative correlation between wealth and kindness.

Until you do, I would suggest your claim is a complete nonsense and would suspect that even if you did find anything close to a correlations it would be completely spurious

Saintfletcher “The working poor are miserbable, their families are breaking up, and people are wondering why.”

Their families always have broken up, their poverty would not be absolved by giving them monetary support. The poverty they suffer is an attitudinal thing and hence all notions of welfare are merely crutches to help them get along.
It is fixing the attitude which needs doing and that is not a monetary or fiscal issue.
It would take dictatorial intervention to get close to fixing it and the problem with that is – a dictatorial interventionist authority would not stop at dictating simply to the poor who might need it but to those of us who don’t.

The idea that it is individual attitude that is the reason people are poor is the prevailing ideology, that is behavioural poverty. This idea suggests, for one thing. that it is indulging in risk behaviours that make people poor.

However, it may be argued that poverty is a crucial factor that affects the attitudes and opportunities of those experiencing it, therefore limiting not only their own future prospects but also those of their families. That is, there is validity in the idea that poor people cannot change their attitudes and behaviours while they remain poor.

People and governments often blame the indulgence in risk behaviour as one reason while people are poor, and this is definitely a significant factor in increasing stress and it also contributes to ill health. However, poverty cannot be wholly explained by the indulgence in risky behaviour because alcohol, drug and tobacco dependencies have been identified as products of poverty.

Personally, I think that action does start at sufficient income and access to adequate services that enable people to build up their confidence and self worth. How many people are embarassed to go for job interviews because of shabby clothing and poor teeth or they cannot afford a haircut? It would be an interesting study.

I think that we need basic welfare for some who will never compete in our market society, and more for people who are trying to better themselves. It is very hard. Have a look at how much welfare is cut when people try to take on part time work. I had an increase of $10 pf income, my little bit of RA was cut by $6pf. On an income of less than $20,000pa. Why would I bother?