A commenter on Samizdata wrote the following lines, which got me thinking:
Has anyone here heard anyone (other than another libertarian) suggest that child benefit should be abolished so that this never happens again?
No I had not, but now that you mention it….
I don’t think it’s difficult to follow the argument that child benefit is a waste of everybody’s money except that of net welfare recipient families.
I do not have a problem with welfare for poor families – it is state welfare that is the problem. The all-important word “state” is the problem.
It certainly cannot operate without a database of every child and their parents.
Indeed. As the late Ronald Reagan used to say, a state that is powerful enough to give the public everything it wants is powerful enough to take it from them too. And I think that one, perhaps unintended insight of this debacle is how it demonstrates that 25m British citizens receive some form of state benefit, or ‘tax credit’ (ie, benefit). That is a shocking statistic in its own right. 25m people, the vast majority of whom are not poor by any objective basis, now are caught into the welfare system. I am not saying, of course, that if the welfare system is rolled back, that disasters like this will not happen, but the need to hold so much data on us in the first place would certainly be greatly reduced, if not eliminated.
It goes without saying that this fiasco is a gift to opponents of ID cards. The sun was shining on my way to work this morning.
I saw this comment over at Guido Fawkes’ blog:
‘Watching Gordon Brown and gang run the country,
Is a lot like watching Frank Spencer put up a wardrobe’
Strong candidate for quote of the day IMHO – and a good reason to dismantle much of the state that they so disastrously oversee.
I’ve seen this view – that this fiasco will kill the ID card plan stone dead – a number of times over the last twenty-four hours, but what would the actual politics of this be? The law has already been passed. The government can’t just drop laws if it suddenly decides against them. Or can it?
I get child benefit for my three. At least I think I do. I haven’t really checked in about 10 years.
The theory is that it’s actually more economical to give it to everyone than to have all the hassle of means-testing and chasing up on cheats.
I’ve seen the same argument advanced for unemployment benefit; if you gave it to everyone whether they work or not, you don’t then have the appalling notion of forcing people not to work.
Obviously those arguments only serve to further highlight the shocking massive intrusive waste that is The State.
I agree. My wife and I have 3 kids and my wife claims child benefit. We don’t need it and to be honest if it were down to me wouldn’t claim it other than the fact that the thieves who call themselves government steal money from my perpetually.
“I agree. My wife and I have 3 kids and my wife claims child benefit. We don’t need it and to be honest if it were down to me wouldn’t claim it other than the fact that the thieves who call themselves government steal money from my perpetually.”
Actually, I think it is illegal NOT to accept it if I remember one old comment correctly.
The concept behind child benefit was that it went straight to the mother (who may not work), meaning it bypassed a potentially wasteful, or drunk, father. The left are still very proud of that system and for once, there is some logic behind it. Of all the benefits going, it isn’t that badly thought out.
But perhaps such a view is too gendered these days with traditional ideas of motherhood succumbing to welfare dependency amongst the only class of people that could benefit from this system.
Nic
I suspect you are right about the justification for this being to bypass irresponsible fathers, but I’d like to know just how many such fathers really exist, and what stops them taking the benefit off the mother(s) of their children.
I calculate that I pay about £18.50 per week in tax toward child benefit, the taxman deducts £0.20 for taking it off me and transfers £18.30 to the appropriite benefit office, who deduct £0.20 handling costs and pay £18.10 to Mrs MarkE for our remaining child (we get nothing for the big one as she is at university, where we have to support her because she is punished for us being so wealthy). If I promise to hand over £18.30 per week to Mrs MarkE can we miss out the middle man and split the saving?
A gift to opponents of the ID card scheme.
Fool. It’s precisely to avoid things like this that we need an ID card database. When we have one, sanfus like this will be consigned to the dustbin of history.
No kids yet so no idea how this works, but I rather thought when the time comes I’ll just not bother claiming for anything and generally ignore the government as much as possible.
nic’s comment about it being illegal not to claim it is alarming. How does it work? How do They know I’ve got children?
Friends with new babies have mentioned some book the government gives you when you have a baby, and I even have a vague notion that there might be some kind of health visitor (who I plan to either not let in or be very rude to.)
Is there paperwork to be filled in? What happens if you don’t play along?
It’s odd, really. As an unmarried taxpaying employee of a private company the only interaction I’ve ever had with the state is their schools (I was mostly too young to understand) and having a good proportion of my money stolen.
I dread to think what manner of trouble I’ll end up in if I have children and they start taking a more active interest in me…
Child benefit started life as a tax rebate but became a “benefit” when it was decided it should be universal and paid directly to mums who wouldn’t gamble it away or piss it up against the wall. For people who pay taxes, it still is a rebate, not a benefit, i.e. you are just getting back a small portion of what you have paid in (but as MarkE points out, it would be more efficient to leave it in your pocket in the first place). The government wants to develop this notion of benefit and therefore state dependency, as it does with the state pension, which is also not a benefit if you have paid NI.
This is why I disagree with the sentiments of Mark Hendy. As you intimate, Mark, you are merely getting back some of what you have paid in, i.e. it serves to lessen your overall tax burden (albeit inefficiently) so take it and spend it down the pub, or in which ever way you choose, safe in the knowledge that it always was and is your money.
It’s touching to see how charitable most of the posters are about so-called benefits. When such handouts were first introduced in Canada they were optional. That didn’t last long.
The reason? A universal system is a gift to bureaucrats. They can hire more people to run the whole operation. The fact that the system costs the taxpayer more than any so-called benefit received is simply swept under the carpet. These alleged benefit schemes are basically an employment tactic to hand out jobs to unemployable social science grads. They are yet another burden placed on the productive members of society and benefit no one but the unproductive drones.
In a basic math challenged world the pols can get away with these scams alas!
After this fiasco I’d like to give notice to the Government that I am reclaiming my life. They have bullied and interfered with my personal life, confiscated huge amounts of my income and at no time have I been asked to sign any consent for or contract. It’s time this was stopped. Just how badly does a government have to screw up before people do anything to cut it down to size. The master servant relationship has gone dreadfully wrong. No one wants ID cards so how come these buffoons can still push such a crackpot scheme onto the statute books. The notion that we live in a democracy is farcical.
Child benefit does not help the poorest anyway. Every penny of child benefit is deducted from income support. It is a middle class benenefit through and through.
Child Benefit IS connected to the Health Visitor, who will make an appointment to visit after you register your child with an NHS practice. I get the impression the child benefit goes up and down as an inverse of the family’s income and whether or not the father lives with the family, so the children are still able to eat when they have poor or irresponsible parents.
Our Health Visitor was a bit of a pushy old broad, but she was a wealth of information about children and early development. They usually like to see the mother and child(ren) anyway, so us crusty anti-government guys usually stay at work… but the one thing I would NOT do is alienate the Health Visitor. While some are more helpful than others, every last ONE of them has the ability to bring more government “help” down on your family’s head than you could ever imagine! And more than a few of them are just malevolent enough to do it. If they see happy children living with both parents, they tick their little boxes, weigh the baby and go on to the next appointment. My older daughter conveyed my opinion of government meddling for me — she peed all over the scale EVERY TIME.
What’s wrong with giving people an increased tax allowance for children instead of the pathetic system of tax credits? Wouldn’t need any bureaucracy other than presentation of child’s birth certificate. No overpayments… No fraud… No wasted public money. Oops… forgot about all those Labour-voting cronies in Gateshead who’d be out of a job. Silly me!
Flying Pig, you were misinformed. Child Benefit is a flat-rate sum paid to everyone who has children up to 16. It is completely not means-tested and is available to millionaires and paupers alike.
Poorer folk may get other benefits in addition, but this one is universal and doesn’t change.
On this data loss fiasco, has anyone asked why they were sending stuff around on CD’s in the first place?
Has the government not discovered networks, or something?
Andrew, we just got new “statements” from HMRC about the recent change in my wife’s work hours and income. We must tell them every time those change, or we are considered tax cheats. Since her income increased, they reduced the “Child Tax Credit” and we get less into her account every 4 weeks. Not a pound- for-pound loss, but inverse to income. This has happened often in the last 4 years as income goes up and down. Every time, we get the statements in the post after she calls the bods in Preston.
Also, a colleague of mine (a Chartered Accountant) responded to my thoughts about not bothering with claiming the child benefit, mentioning that it would only flag me (us) for further investigation by HMRC as possibly hiding income. I don’t need the extra “attention” for something I would never even consider.
As for the security of the data, I suppose the government knows the network is less secure than an interoffice envelope punched full of holes… just speculation on my part!
People who have been putting up with a decade of my berating New Labour’s ‘managerialist’ approach to the public-sector are only now coming to realise what I’ve been getting at.
The smug smell of “I told you so” hangs heavy in the air as the blinkers are at last lifted from their eyes.
Peter Briffa,
The government can’t just drop laws if it suddenly decides against them. Or can it?
Yes. Just as it can make them suddenly, provided it commands a majority.
Only a small handful of sections of the Identity Cards Act 2006 are in force, and the Act is designed as enabling legislation, leaving every practical detail of the scheme to regulation. The only thing that has been done on the ID scheme in consequence of the Act is the Section 37 report (and that was unlawfully late the first two times, and extremely vague, showing up the backbenchers who backed this ‘compromise’ as suckers). Everything else, including setting up the Identity and Passport Service, the massive spending on consultants to make plans and the even more massive spending on interrogation centres has been under prerogative.
FlyingPig: “Also, a colleague of mine (a Chartered Accountant) responded to my thoughts about not bothering with claiming the child benefit, mentioning that it would only flag me (us) for further investigation by HMRC as possibly hiding income. I don’t need the extra “attention” for something I would never even consider.”
My wife claims CB, and I was going to claim CB, but the screeds of impertinent questions, I thought “stuff them”. The Misses was a little put out but I just gave her the form to fill out and said “go ahead if you want”..
” and I was going to claim CB, ”
Childrens tax credits.
Regarding Child Benefit I would have thought that the last thing people would want would be to assist any government in schemes designed to steal yet more cash from those who prop the state up with the sweat of their brow. If you need the state to help you pay for your child then surely the simple answer must be, “sorry folks, but you can not afford to have children on your current income level at this time”?
I’m certainly not against anyone’s right to have a child but I sure as hell am against my having to pay for someone else’s ‘right’ out of my income.
PS. I have yet to hear of any state benefit where it is ‘illegal not to accept it’
nic said:
I guess he missed this gem.
So government first taxes the population into the ground, then it offers people a little of the money back (so their children do not starve) – whilst warning them that there are evil rightwing folk about, plotting to take their benefits away.
It is is astonishing that this trick works – but it seems to.