The Twisted Welfare System
Who are The Real Benefit Cheats of a Twisted Welfare System?
In a topsy-turvey world workers suffer on low pay subsidise Big Businesss
This is the Hidden Welfare State
From John Dutton
Businesses collectively are, by far, the biggest benefit scroungers in Britain! In fact, the biggest retail chains and many other large and small British businesses could well afford to pay their low paid employees higher wages!
Instead, their executives prefer to inflate the profits of their owners and line their own and top colleagues’ pockets with huge bonuses! Meanwhile the ordinary British taxpayer picks up the bill and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have their benefits cut!
The following benefit scroungers’ latest annual subsidies from taxpayers are:
£67m, Next
£364m, Tesco
£221m, Asda
£182m, Sainsbury’s.
That’s a total taxpayer subsidy, for just FOUR companies, alone, of £734 million!
Some of these figures are even higher than the total amount of corporation tax the companies paid. It may provoke some to reconsider who the real “scroungers” are when it comes to the welfare system?
To add to the lunacy, taxpayers are hit a second time, for housing benefit, as the low-paid struggle to afford sky-high rents. Buy-to-let landlords, like many large employers, are among the biggest beneficiaries of this twisted welfare system.
Tax credits also explain, in part, Britain’s “productivity puzzle”. Why invest in plant and machinery when there is an endless supply of workers available on miserable wages, subsidised by tax credits? It is claimed that £5bn of the tax credit bill alone goes to migrants who fill minimum-wage jobs in Britain.
But the solution is not, as we are likely to see on Wednesday, just to slash the entitlements. Instead we need a phased reduction of tax credits hand-in-hand with a phased major increase in the minimum wage. Citizens UK estimates that aligning the minimum wage with the living wage – £9.15 an hour in London and £7.85 for the rest of the UK – will reduce the need for in-work benefits by £6.7bn a year, which would make a massive dent in the £12bn reduction in welfare spending which the Conservatives say is necessary.
We need a phased reduction of tax credits hand-in-hand with a phased major increase in the minimum wage.
A high minimum wage will destroy jobs, say right-wing, neo-con and libertarian economists, although they peddled that line before the start of the minimum wage, and were wrong then. Arguably, if some jobs disappear because of a higher minimum wage and lower tax credits, they weren’t real jobs anyway. Many employers pay for labour at the lowest price they can, not the price they would pay if wages were higher. And Britain will survive if Tesco or Next open fewer stores staffed by the ultra low-paid.
Think Left 
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If a business can’t afford to pay a living wage then they should rightly go bust. As a society we allow business owners the privilege of employing people in return we expect them to pay a living wage as a bare minimum.
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Reblogged this on 61chrissterry.
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