Even millionaires should be entitled to child benefit

[Hopeless Romantic]

Even millionaires should be entitled to child benefit, Ed Miliband has said, as he claimed people earning £45,000 still needed help from the state.

Asked whether he would condone handing out Government cash to the super-rich, the new Labour leader said he was against any move towards underminining the universal principal.

"I'm in favour of that yes, and I'm in favour of it because it's a cornerstone of our system to have universal benefits, and frankly there aren't that many millionaires in this country," he told BBC1's The Politics Show.

"Families on £45,000 need child benefit in my view and it's a way that society recognises the costs of having kids."

snip

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/ed-miliband/8053881/Even-millionaires-should-be-entitled-to-child-benefit-Ed-Miliband-says.html


What a load of shite

[LeftishBrit]

1. The point is, though...

that if a benefit is universal, then it's universal. Miliband is not defending the rights of millionaires to benefits out of sympathy with them, but because once you start chopping benefits from some, it can be used to call into question other people's rights to benefits, and even be a first step to taking them away altogether.

I'm not sure where I stand on this. On the one hand, if you must have cuts in benefits, means-testing seems the fairest way to have them, so long as the limit isn't set outrageously low. And I've seen the hypocrisy of middle-class Tories and their spokespeople in rubbish newspapers like the Hate-Mail, who are all in favour of cuts for the poor, but scream when it affects themselves. On the other hand, the 'slippery slope' argument is a real one; in part because poorer people have less power, and so if only poorer people are receiving a benefit, then they don't have as much clout if they protest about it than if richer people were also affected and protesting. Sad but true.

Certainly, I think that if benefits are to be means-tested, this should take into account the total income coming to the home, not just that of one earner.

[non sociopath skin]

2. Spot on, LB

Once the Welfare State is seen as administering the poor law, it's fucked.

The Skin

[miscsoc]

3. Yeah, what's the old adage?

"Programmes for the poor are poor programmes". The universalism of the British welfare state inculculates some degree of social solidarity into the populace; that's why we have universalism. A sense that "we're all in this together", as the Tories like to disingenuously say at every opportunity. If you reduce the welfare state to a means tested safety net you ensure that much or most of the populace hardly ever have any dealings with it, and don't have any emotional attachment to it, or sense of investment.