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Savings; Modest Proposal
Great. Savings rates are now at 2%; the perfect moment for the Government to launch a token encouraging-saving program whereby, if you are sufficiently poor and put away six pounds a week, after two years a magic wand will be waved and it will be as if you had put away nine pounds a week.
At the very least it would seem to make sense to raise benefits and pensions by those six pounds a week, with a claim that it's to encourage saving. If you add only a couple of hoops to jump through to keep the £6 from going automatically to a savings account of the right sort, it might well actually end up saved, and if not then a marginal six pounds on benefits is infinitely more likely to get spent in an economy-stimulating way than any process which, for example, gives money to me.
(Anyone who has sixty spare pounds a week, set up a monthly saver with Barclays ASAP before they decide that paying more than three and a half times the current base rate, fixed for a year, is silly. You need to turn up in person with your passport and a utility bill, the process takes about twenty minutes, and you have to set up a standing order into the account manually rather than have Barclays arrange it through direct-debitry)
At the very least it would seem to make sense to raise benefits and pensions by those six pounds a week, with a claim that it's to encourage saving. If you add only a couple of hoops to jump through to keep the £6 from going automatically to a savings account of the right sort, it might well actually end up saved, and if not then a marginal six pounds on benefits is infinitely more likely to get spent in an economy-stimulating way than any process which, for example, gives money to me.
(Anyone who has sixty spare pounds a week, set up a monthly saver with Barclays ASAP before they decide that paying more than three and a half times the current base rate, fixed for a year, is silly. You need to turn up in person with your passport and a utility bill, the process takes about twenty minutes, and you have to set up a standing order into the account manually rather than have Barclays arrange it through direct-debitry)
no subject
My guess, and this is a bad guess made out of poor-quality string, thrice-used sealing-wax and a strong belief in the honour of politicians, is that encouraging small savings for people who have no money is an attempt to strengthen a certain kind of safety net, and weaken demand for loan sharks at the absolutely most desolate baby-needs-new-shoes level. It's not going to have macro-economic effects but it's possible that it might be good for people.