Iâm asking you to prove your point. Youâre getting thick because you canât. All you have is assumptions.
Drill down into your 4% a bit for me. You want to tell me that all of those people had the basic skills and wherewithal to do whatever jobs were available? Were they all living in the regions the jobs were available? Iâd say weâve now knocked written off a majority of them. Now take the employment on offer, is all of it suitable for all your 4%? Letâs look at a few more factors, did any of this 4% come from the same socio-economic background as, say, you or me? Whatâs their level of educational attainment? How many have drink or drug problems? What percentage are we down to now?
Trot out your simplistic bullshit all you like about lifestyle dolers, itâs typical uninformed scratch the surface sound bite nonsense.
There are people out there who donât want to work. Theyâre far far fewer and far far less of a problem than you would like to believe. It costs the state a hell of lot less than the real problems the country faces. Fuck all in fact. Which is why I would argue itâs really not a problem. Broadly, the system works.
But hey, fuckwits would prefer to get angry at some simplistic shite about poor people than try wrap their heads around the things that are actually serious issues.
When presented with facts which you canât rebuke, you go back to an attack on a politician?
Varadkar increased welfare by 5 euro last year as social protection Minister for his own political gain and his own government have just done the same, so Iâm not going out to bat for Leo Varadkar on this. Debate the points.
My point is your âpotential welfare fraudâ is a joke. A straw man. A load of bullshit. A simplistic little trope that gets people all riled up because of the suggestion that others are stealing a loving off them.
If you want to go down that road then look at tax cheats. Much bigger gains to be made for the country there.
You canât argue the statistics or explain them away. Nobody is jumping up and down to say they shouldnât be on welfare, we can only take comparative looks and look at our own system to determine why things are the way they are.
Why does Ireland have a far higher rate of persons claiming disability than other OECD countries based on our youthful demographics? Why did Ireland go from having 500 persons a year go on disability a year between 2002-2006 to 7500 from the year after?
Why were we top of the table for single parent household payments just a decade after introducing divorce and are still there despite having high marriage rates and divorce?
Why does the Irish state take a higher rate of what is considered âfull employmentâ versus other countries?
Why do we have such a high rate of VLWI households, particularly why is it that? Why is our labour market participation rate of working persons 5% below the EU average. Youthful demographics, with many in further education might be one reason, but that doesnât exactly square to our disability rate does it?
Of particular concern is thelevel of persistent joblessness; 18.8 percent of VLWI household members over 25 years of age that are currently not working, have never worked.
Disability payments went up by 75% in just 10 years after 2005. We spend over 3.5 billion a year on this. That is a lot of money annually.
The conclusion to the Redmond paper I linked earlier says this;
Targeting VLWI households is a key component of the European Union 2020 strategy as VLWI drives up the risk of social exclusion and material deprivation. In this paper I have shown in detail how VLWI households and their members differ from non-VLWI household members, both in characteristics such as education, disability benefit receipt and single parent households, as well as the incidence of poverty and social exclusion. While some of the observations in Ireland are common throughout Europe, there are some notable differences. For example, the incidence of VLWI households that are single parent households is particularly high in Ireland by EU standards. Regarding self-defined economic status, Ireland also has a strikingly high number of VLWI household members that categorize themselves as being engaged in domestic and care duties.
I can give you my opinion, and this is shared by many including the Troika which had persons from nordic countries which the left love to go on about involved. It is because we have an open ended welfare system that is too easy to game. There is no cliff edge for welfare. It is just there. Other countries use a tiering off, we donât. As I said earlier, I wouldnât have a problem with paying the recently unemployed more money- it is the long term which is the issue.
One thing I would applaud Joan Burton on, and this is despite our still ridiculously high number of youths out of the labour force âdisabledâ, is the drop in our youth unemployment. Good education options combined with a lowering of welfare helps here.
The Maxol petrol station on the Dublin road on the way out to UL has a few Indian fellas working behind the counter. And doing a fine job too, one of them is a gas man he has a great attitude. They had to be brought in to do the job that fellas on the dole in Limerick like @ChocolateMice was too lazy to take on, thrown down in the scratcher until after midday each day.
Iâve shown that at a time when it was commonly accepted that jobs were widely available, and in particular jobs that required no specific skill set or education level and that was dispersed across the country, the unemployment rate stayed at 4%. Thatâs fact. You are speculating as to why - whereâs your evidence?
You say itâs âfar fewer and far lessâ. Wheres your evidence?
You argue âitâs not really a problemâ. Whereâs your evidence?
You have none other than a cast iron belief in your own point of view.
Itâs also possible to believe we should be looking to reduce these welfare traps and get more people back to work without it just being a âhate the poorâ political viewpoint. Youâre the one who is keen to boil everything down to a âsimplisticâ argument. Youâre utterly incapable or unwilling to at least consider other perspectives which makes trying to rationally engage with you completely pointless.
Farmers on the radio this morning complaining about stamp duty and arguing that it shouldnât apply to them.
Why? Farming is a commercial activity like any other - why do farmers continually believe that they should be exempt from tax laws that apply to everyone else?
All youâve done is thrown up the 4% figure and made an assumption about it - that those people have chosen not to work. Itâs a dumb assumption and when I asked you to support it and youâve shown nothing. It doesnât stand up to scrutiny. You made the assertion so you back it up. Thats how this works. Youâre going down the âprove my unsupported statement is wrong or else Iâm rightâ line.
Only one person is being simplistic here. Youâre throwing up your 4% figure and making all sorts of assumptions about it. Iâve asked you to drill down into it a tiny bit and Iâve offered numerous other reasons as to what that stubborn 4-5% constitutes full employment. Youâve not even considered these.
Itâs bizarre to be honest. There was some guy this morning arguing that because it was a âfamily farmâ he shouldnât have to pay stamp duty or tax. Every other family asset passed over normally has inheritance tax implications but not for the farming community it would appear.
This lad was going to have turned 35 a few weeks before the farm could be transferred. If theyâd had their affairs in order he could have availed of the no stamp duty.