Comment Re:Really??? (Score 1) 266
Right, so if I quit my job now there's no other jobs available for me? Don't be so stupid.
I’m not the one being stupid. I’m talking at a macro level. You’re nitpicking at an individual level.
There are ca. millions more people looking for work than there are advertised jobs. That doesn’t count all the people who could work but for whatever reason aren’t considered to be looking. That means there’s not enough jobs. It doesn’t mean arbitrary person Joe Blogs cannot find a job. Obviously individual people move in and out of jobs all the time.
If we pretend to be physicists for a second, and assume each job is a perfect sphere, and we could somehow match up every single vacancy with a willing applicant tomorrow, you would still have millions of people either without a job, or working less hours than they want to.
That’s because there’s not enough jobs.
Yep, that's exactly the problem, over a million of them are NEETS for starters, youths not in employment, education, or training. They can get away with it because they live at home and £90 a week is still plenty enough to pay for the latest XBox games.
Where is the evidence these people do not want to work ?
What's the relevance of your anecdote exactly?
That your argument because you can in certain situations drive from point A to point B in less than three hours means long commutes don’t exist is stupid.
Of course if you live on one side of London and commute to the other and dawdle about walking slowly or happen to work or live far from a tube station then you're going to be able to get your commute up to 45 minutes but that still means they can get anywhere in the capital from their doorstep within 45 minutes which for a city with a population of over 7 million (think about the size of that) is not unreasonable.
The _average_ London commute is something like 37 minutes each way.
You are arguing a 45 minute commute is unusual. In actual fact it’s common if you live in London.
I am not making any comment about whether or not that is “unreasonable”. I am making the point that it could be a reason that taking a particular job is impossible.
Except that's unnecessary because guess what? we also have publicly funded schemes to deal with those problems for parents.
You have a scheme that picks children up from their homes, takes them to childcare and returns them at the end of the day ? From anywhere ?
They also get the bulk of childcare paid for, and child tax credits which leaves them with a net profit for having a child.
A quick Google says the base tax credit is 500 quid. I know the cost of living there is a lot lower than Australia, but I still doubt that would be enough turn a profit on the annual costs of child rearing.
You're just showing you have no idea about the breakdown of UK finances, the amount of benefits available and so forth. Bank bailouts don't even get included in general spending figures as they're classed as one off costs. Some of those banks have been sold back to private investors and much of the money recouped now anyway.
Who said anything about a breakdown of finances and spending ? You said:
“This is a large part the reason we ended up with one of the highest levels of public debt in the world when the financial crisis hit.”
Incorrect. See above. You've no idea what you're talking about:
Actually that breakdown is the same one I found before commenting.
I was under the impression we were talking primarily about welfare frauds - people who could work but choose not to, and how much the welfare they receive costs.
I think you just need to admit you're bitching about problems in your country and trying to project them everywhere.
Actually everything I’ve read during this discussion has led me to believe you have exactly the same problems. The sort of middle-class welfare you mention (payments to millionaires) is a problem here in Australia as well.
This shouldn’t really be surprising, since the people running the whole western world for the last 20-30 years are all adherents to the same broken neoliberal economic philosophy.