Welfare paid to nearly half of population -Kevin Keane → independent.ie/national-news … 18573.html
I wonder what the figure would be if you took out the universal payments: Children’s allowance and the pension.
The State Pension isn’t a universal payment Rick - you either qualify on social insurance or it is means-tested.
This makes the pledge not to touch SW rates all the more puzzling. Obviously the overall spend is up because of increased unemployment, along with all the ancillary payments that go with that, and promising not to touch the rates ties your hands needlessly.
Reducing the spend can only be realised now by ending schemes, or limiting their duration. Limiting duration may be the way to go, it would more easily slip under the radar than discontinuation. But I’m not sure how you could realise the level of savings needed through this route.
Household benefits packages and other ancillaries?
It’s in the quotation, isn’t it?
So 22pc + 12.7pc = 34.7pc (of €20.8bn) = €7.22bn, leaving €13.58bn → still more than was paid out in 2006.
Does that figure include Rent Allowance? Doesn’t look like it does.
I agree. But it’s still difficult to see how they’re going to get significant amounts from the cuts.
The entire household benefits spend was €670million. In contrast €3.4billion is spent on the contributory State pension.
Rent Allowance is listed as being a very small figure (€800 odd thousand if I’m reading this right) - welfare.ie/EN/Policy/Researc … 0stats.pdf (BIG pdf document) - is that listed under a separate return - Department of Health?
look for rent supplement further down the doc 97,260 received 516,861,000 between them
To my mind, of the real problems with many social welfare payments such as UA, UB and their various long-term substitutes such as disability payments is that they consist of two components: the money and the fact that you do not to do anything for the money
This means that when evaluating a paid alternatives two interlinked factors are taken into account, either implicitly or explicitly, by the SW recipient: what is the difference between what I get now and the wages of a job and is it worth going from zero hours work to 40 or more?
It has already been said that insisting that social welfare recipient work would distort the jobs market by introducing cheap labour that would undercut employers.
However, in our current economic woes 20 billion of social welfare costs is so distorted. The total annual tax take for the country is 30 billion. The concept of paying two third of tax revenues in social welfare is nonsensical.
Also, there is much talk about an unpaid internship scheme that is effectively such a distortion.
On the other hand, rent allowance is such a distortion, keeping rents high.
This mad situation is a legacy of Bertie’s largesse: throwing around money that never really existed, especially in the post McCreevey “I’s a socialist”, cosying up to Sean Healy period.
I always regarded Kenny as a bit of a simpleton, the last man standing after Mickey Noonan managed to inadvertently fillet Fine Gael and his hostage-to-fortune statement about not reducing social welfare payments was really really stupid.
I do not believe Kenny really thinks. He just shoots his mouth off, disconnected from his brain.
Where is the real intelligent debate about cuts, based on facts and removed from dogma?
There is a reason why they are called cuts: because they are unpleasant.
Well, the total tax take is about 54 bn, with about 20 bn in social security income (12 bn of employers PRSI and about 8 bn between PRSI and USC, I think).
One problem is the multitude of other payments that constitute ‘welfare’ that don’t show up in social protection spend. Does anyone really know how much is spent on welfare?
To the jubilation of many FGers, last month Endas ‘popularity’ increased to 65%.
Far from proving what a wonderful job he was doing, it proved what little had been done to really solve our problems.
is that 97,260 figure for households or individuals? I presume household?
just thinking along another track - half the rental market is rent supplement
meaning the total rental market is nearly 200,000
with about 10% of the above in arrears
throw in 300,000 empty properties - more than the entire rental market in Ireland and 1 third of the entire housing stock??
Is this correct???
I had thought originally that making all the cuts Morgan Kelly style in one go would be political suicide but I think the Roscommon Hospital scenario shows that doing it over a few years will be worse - every little thing will be scrutinised and the Government parties will he hung drawn and quartered for not being upfront and honest about what needs to be done.
Couldn’t agree more.
What annoys people the most is the feeling that they are being ‘singled out’ for cuts.
If all cuts came in at once, people would see that they are shared by all and are more likely to accept them.
They won’t cut all at once because Gilmore and Kenny are so vain they care more about the iminent Presidential Election than a future default
My guess is individuals, there is a table outlining the breakdown of recipients along gender and age lines so that leads me to believe it is individuals not households.
One thing I found interesting is that Mortgage Interest Supplement was being paid to 17,648 people in 2010, most of those on JA or JB, in Dublin, Cork, Kildare, Meath and Wexford. welfare.ie/EN/Policy/Researc … 0stats.pdf
as of 2009 the prtb claim to have registered 234,000 tenancies
i had a count of their county stats there now, and it comes to 221328 but i think dublin 6 is missing from the site
As always, things in Ireland get done backwards.
Irish prices are far too high. Mostly this is due to markets being rigged and prices being artificially inflated in one way or another by the State. Rent allowance is an obvious one, but it’s far more widespread than that…energy, telecoms, professional fees, regressive taxes and charges, rents, down to the price of a pint there’s a scam going on somewhere, and a scam that is enabled by the State.
I call this what it is: corruption. And from my experience of price levels elsewhere around Europe and especially in the north, at a rough guess general Irish prices are over-inflated by around 30%.
If the cost of living and doing business could be reduced by 30%; public sector wages, pensions, wages and welfare consequently cut to match; if the State stopped the flow of pork on pointless quangos, inflated supply contracts, “consultancy”, hospitality and sponsorship and PR and advertising budgets and all that nonsense…
In other words, to put it at its simplest, if we just stopped being so damn corrupt, and if we stopped believing in High Prices Good, we could balance the budget overnight with very little actual pain in terms of cuts to frontline services. SMEs would be able to stay in business and maybe even expand. People would gradually get back to work.
Yes, this would also involve hugely indebted people reliant on public money to service their megadebts defaulting. But this is going to happen anyway. Stop dithering about, force the consolidation of these insolvent turkey banks into one toxic entity, slash prices, slash pork, balance the budget, get all the (inevitable) personal debt defaults in on one wave. Flush the system.
At least we’ll know the scale of the bad debt problem, having the number sitting there will make it far easier to shrug our shoulders and force haircuts externally, and we’ll have a rebalanced economy capable of creating businesses and jobs without groaning under the weight of the FF corruption networks. Carrying the weight of corruption, high prices, bubble froth, insolvent banks and a 20bn deficit is just plain dumb.