UK Politics
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!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
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Man, there is a lot that you can correlate with economic stagflation. High residual nitrogen in soil. Gay marriage. Sales of left-handed ukeleles.
Why specifically choose welfare?
More to the point; do you know what happens to sick people who become poorer? They get sicker and become more expensive to look after. Check out the public cost of helping a disabled person keep some independence versus the cost of looking after them in hospital or a care home.
These people won't magically disappear if you pull the rug on them.
The issue is health, not welfare.
They shouldn't get sick in the first place. The focus should be on prevention, that's what is cheaper and more helpful.
So what do you do with all the people who didn't have your blazingly brilliant insight and instead already got sick?
Many forms of illness are not preventable, and of those, many don't benefit from early treatment. Even among the more or less treatable chronic illnesses, many (such as type 1 diabetes) are not preventable.
Pretending a problem doesn't exist doesn't make it go away.
Fuck me, you're a moron.
'Hey, you with the chronic illness! Why didn't you try not to get sick?'
I don't like hoping that someone suffers a spinal injury in a car accident only to be told it's their fault, and if they'd chosen not to become disabled they'd be able to walk and live free from constant unbearable pain, yet here I am.
I think you may be getting unfairly downvoted for this particular comment. Because yes, the focus should be on prevention - lack of exercise and poor diet on the physical side and the breakdown of in-person community and brainrot screen time on the mental side.
Too many people are losing control of their lives for avoidable reasons and that is what should be addressed.
The point obviously remains that removing people's support after they have become ill is a bad idea and there are also people who are sick/disabled for unavoidable reasons e.g accidents, violence, genetic disorders etc.
I hope this conversation has helped change your mind about sick people a bit. We're all guilty of not thinking things through sometimes and there are a lot of malevolent voices shouting for our attention.
Great idea. But it's far from the case that all forms of illness are preventable. And prevention strategies don't always work perfectly: sometimes they improve people's odds of avoiding a disease, but don't work in every case.
Of course; if you read the third paragraph of my you'll see that we agree.
It’s broadly accepted that austerity is the primary cause of stagnation.
Krugman, Stiglitz, Chang, Piketty etc etc have all explained how cutting welfare weakens demand, which in turn prolongs a period of stagnation.
The time to cut welfare, if you have a hard on for hurting the poor, is when the economy is booming.
Cutting benefits is not austerity.
You have the whole internet, like, right here. It's really easy to actually look up the definition.
Yes, there's a whole internet. You can start by reading a Wikipedia article to learn the meaning of the word https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity
Thanks, seems like you skimmed over the very first sentence.
So you’re okay with abandoning millions of disabled people to starve?
You're an evil bastard then.
@Emperor@feddit.uk is this instance ban worthy? (The comment by Aux)
The Mods have gone with a 14 day ban and I'll support that but will keep an eye on the situation.
Ban worthy for what? For supporting the current democratically elected left wing government of the UK? You just be a delusional authoritarian Reform supporter.
You just said you’re okay taking away life saving support for a whole minority group of people and letting them starve to death. Your comment was massively ableist and is almost certainly promoting violence against a group of people. (Starving a group of people is violence)
Wow, a real eugenicist in the wild!
Nazi removed go follow your leader
The welfare spending provides an oversized return in productivity. What is common to all the low spenders - low life expectancy.
I don't think this is correct. Prevention provides outsized benefits, but unless benefits lead to a return to work, they do not result in increased productivity. I'm happy to be proven wrong if you have a source. I think this is a moral discussion rather than an economic one.
I understand your point. It's just easy to make it economic as an example, productivity can go to hell. Life satisfaction and life expectancy by themselves should be a big enough motivation to support public welfare. It's just that the arguments against are usually rooted in economic motivations, e.g. inefficiency of the tax money management.
Low spender here. In my case, I don't need much that I don't already have and have opted out of consumerism to a large extent. So no, it's not common to all low spenders, unless your definition of "low" is something extreme like under £1 a day.
There could be a misunderstanding here, I meant public welfare spending, not personal spending.
Countries who spend more on public welfare would get more people being productive rather than staying home sick. Higher life expectancy and higher life satisfaction is also expected.
Increased life expectancy should come with proportionally increased retirement age. Which is also a very unpopular policy. Otherwise you end with an aging population and the whole mess we're in today.
Citation needed
'people don't like it when the government decides to cull the vulnerable ' this isn't some reduction of pocket money to lazy teenagers, this is literally the cutting of people's basic needs. How would you feel if i took away your ability to feed and house yourself?