If an unemployed Pole gets a job as a barista in Starbucks, even for 15 hours a week, his situation improves dramatically. A young man in Britain would be just £10 a week better off than if he stayed at home on benefits. Why break your back for an extra tenner?

The situation is even more pernicious for young women who leave school with low qualifications, because the alternative to low-paid work is pregnancy. A woman with one child and on benefits has, on average, more disposable income than a hairdresser or teaching assistant. With two children, it's more than a receptionist or library assistant. With three, it's a lab technician, typist or bookkeeper. So there should be no mystery about why Britain came to have so many children in workless households (one in five, the highest in Europe). The young mothers, and the young men on benefits, are walking down a road to dependency paved for them by the state.

This is a peculiar definition of compassion. What Beveridge denounced as the "giant evil" of idleness is now being incubated on a mass scale by the very welfare state designed to eradicate it.

This is from an excellent piece by Fraser Nelson in today's Telegraph. It repeats something that people like me have been saying for a long time but it is good to see it said anew and so well. The trouble is, as he says, that neither of the main parties seems likely to be willing to take the problem on. In fact, the one party which openly has a policy which would genuinely help is, to my surprise, the Liberal Democrat party which proposes that the personal tax allowance should be raised to £10,000.

Incidentally, it would be good to know what were the sources for his detailed assertions about how work does not pay.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies produced a report earlier this week about benefits and taxes under Labour. One of the authors commented,

Compared with 1997 those who had a weak incentive to work – especially lone parents – have seen an improvement in their incentive.

"But in order to pay for that Labour have had to raise taxes which has weakened the incentive to work of other groups.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting • Welfare benefits

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