People-claiming-benefits should have to sell valuable assets (such as real estate) and investments as well as spend savings.
Part of the problem, though, is that the system scales very badly. People who have a modest level of assets are punished by it, but people who have a high level of assets are rewarded. Thus, if you buy one house, the government will only pay a portion of the interest on your mortgage, but if you can afford to put down deposits on ten and then rent nine of them out to people on benefits, the government will happily give you enough money to pay the mortgages on all of them. *Much* more than ten times the amount they'd give you towards the mortgage payments on one of those houses. Is giving money to private landlords really so much better from the system's point of view than giving it to people who own their own houses? Surely it's fairer to distribute the money as evenly as possible? (Assuming that they live in reasonable sized houses; someone who lives by themselves in a ten-bedroom mansion probably needs psychological help rather than the financial kind. Of course, working out exactly where to draw the line is always tricky, but that's another matter.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-01-08 05:04 pm (UTC)Part of the problem, though, is that the system scales very badly. People who have a modest level of assets are punished by it, but people who have a high level of assets are rewarded. Thus, if you buy one house, the government will only pay a portion of the interest on your mortgage, but if you can afford to put down deposits on ten and then rent nine of them out to people on benefits, the government will happily give you enough money to pay the mortgages on all of them. *Much* more than ten times the amount they'd give you towards the mortgage payments on one of those houses. Is giving money to private landlords really so much better from the system's point of view than giving it to people who own their own houses? Surely it's fairer to distribute the money as evenly as possible? (Assuming that they live in reasonable sized houses; someone who lives by themselves in a ten-bedroom mansion probably needs psychological help rather than the financial kind. Of course, working out exactly where to draw the line is always tricky, but that's another matter.)