Government should control how you spend your benefits?

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

Your thoughts comrades? Personally, while the welfare state exists I don't like the idea of the government determining / trying to control how someone's benefits are spent. We don't get any dirtect say in how they spend the tax or on what an over-paid CEO spends their bonus on.

Demos poll


59% agreed the government should control what people spend universal credit on
77% said yes to monitoring people with a substance or gambling addiction and 69% for those with a criminal or anti-social history
68% agreed the government should stop all recipients from spending their benefits on gambling
54% agreed with the government stopping people spending their benefits on unhealthy items such as cigarettes or alcohol
46% opposed benefits being spent on branded goods such as Nike trainers
38% backed a ban on buying junk food and 35% on holidays
Poll was carried out by Populus Data Solutions, based on a survey of 2,052 adults
Should benefit claimants be prevented from spending the money given to them by the state on alcohol, gambling, cigarettes and other "vices"?
A poll commissioned by think tank Demos suggests most people would support such a move.
But the findings have been met with horror by anti-poverty campaigners, who have questioned whether the British public really feel that way, or whether they have been denied the full facts on poverty by the government and certain newspapers.
Alison Garnham, director of the Child Poverty Action Group, said the poll, in which 59% agreed the government should control what people spend their benefits on, should be taken with a large pinch of salt.
"In the United States in the 1960s, welfare rights campaigners argued for food stamps for certain groups on the basis that some of them were alcohol abusers, but it's not an argument that ever took traction in the UK because people would find that offensive.
"I think we have a very different culture. I just don't think it would be acceptable in the same way," she told a Demos fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference.

(More at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19792066 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19792066))

[rednordman]

These statistics baffle me. Have anyone who did the survey ever actually been on benefits/jsa? honestly how the hell can they actually afford quality trainers, let alone holidays? the countries got its head shoved far far up its own ass i'm afraid to say.

[blake 3:17]

We should oppose any attempts to control how we spend our money. In capitalist societies, poor people need money and should have the right to spend how they see fit.

There`ve been attempts here in Canada to control what people on social assistance and this has been fiercely resisted.

There`s a populist appeal to denying addicts access to benefits. It is very very bad social policy.

[Raúl Duke]

In the US, there's this idea of piss tests for people on welfare, whether at all forms of social assistance or just the cash-based kind; and among some people it has strong support.

In Florida, they did this piss test, less than 3% of welfare recipients failed and the test cost the state more than the savings from that meager 3%; further boosting negative reception to our incompetent governor rick scott.

Part of this has to do with the Reaganite propaganda machine back when it passed the idea of inner-city usually African-American welfare queens which than spiraled to included all sorts of stereotypes of welfare recipients like "drug addicts getting free money to spend drugs on" which are mostly false yet these stereotypes are strongly held by many particularly those who have no experience of being on those kinds of benefits or know anyone who has used them.

There's also a bit of the whole sentiment of controlling what EBT should be used for, but not strong. Mostly just scoffing at EBT users as people who buy junk food but those elitist Americans don't really give a fuck what the poor eat and many do not care enough to desire control of what they should or should not eat with their EBT.

[blake 3:17]

I started thinking a bit about why some of the moral regulation of benefits hasn't happened. As Raul Duke says, simple drug testing is super expensive and wasteful. To try to regulate moral/immoral commodities at the point of consumption would b crazy unwieldy. The enforcement would be very bad for business.

For socialists, the main reason to oppose any cuts or restrictions to social assistance is that they create a larger and more desperate reserve army of labour.

We should also oppose excessive state intrusion in private life, systems that shame the poor for being poor, and the creation of useless repressive bureacracies.