Wittering on about social care.
People don’t want to spend money tied up in their bricks and mortar on funding their care. They want to leave that cash to their kids, so they can buy some overpriced property themselves.
Far better, of course, that the state steals it.
The idea that there’s something cruel and awful about having to use your own money to pay people to look after you could, I suppose, be regarded as a strong validation of the universalist principles of the welfare state.
But we do use our own money. The state steals over half our income during a lifetime of work – so, yeah, it is objectionable that we should then have to pay all over again. A couple of options here; we could reduce the size of the state and release the money freed up to fund social care. We could just remove the state from the equation anyway and let us take out our own insurance. As well as reducing the size of the state.
The point here being that while the state is so fiscally incompetent, pissing money away like it’s going out of fashion, arguments about selling our houses to pay for our care will be met with contempt from me. This is a two-way street. I’m more than happy to use my own money providing the state gives it back to me. Seems fair enough…
Austerity, of course…
Ah, that bullshit. There is no austerity. The last two governments have merely reduced the rate of borrowing. They spend more than the last Labour government. There are no cuts. There is no austerity. My parents lived through austerity during the immediate post-war years. What we have now does not compare. Not even close.
Agree with your last comment. We came back to Britain in 1950s and shared a Nissen hut with a number of families, fire in an empty spirit drum.
Dear god another one….and did you have to get up every morning half an hour before you went to bed and lick the motorway clean with your tongue?
Your last three lines are like something from a monty python sketch…”When I were a lad…”
Of course things were worse then and things were worse back in Victorian times and beyond that, things were much worse when we were cavemen. Is that how you judge whether someone is poor or not or whether the austerity that the tories are inflicting is real austerity or not.
You can only compare like with like. Any thing else is deliberately skewing the debate.
There is a discussion about austerity going on at Samizdata at the moment.
https://www.samizdata.net/2017/05/samizdata-quote-of-the-day-866/#comments
Regarding living standards and what is regarded as hardship, Tony Halford is correct to point out that this has changed over time. If you consider the lives of the richest 1% of a hundred years ago, most people in the UK today have a higher standard of living than they did. Of course this is open to some debate because it depends how you measure it, but it is basically true.
That was the point I was making. We don’t have absolute poverty these days. We have a standard of living only dreamed of by previous generations. So to use the term austerity is hysterical nonsense. We do not have austerity, not even close. As is usual, the usual suspects are corrupting the language. A bit of mild belt-tightening through reducing the rate at which we borrow is not by any stretch of the imagination; austerity.