I'm not sure how much it would cost to enact but thats a lot of taxes to be coupled in if we say pay everyone 12k a year (65 million people, 780 billion, if we take away kids thats then its 636 billion quid a year to dish it out)
It would lose most people money rather than increase it. I get way more than £12k in benefits a year whilst "in work" and by that I mean if I halve what we get assuming that myself and the wife (who doesn't work) would be be paid a set amount.
There will be others that get way more than me. Just think about the number of people in (and out of) work in London in receipt of the maximum housing benefits!!!
You would have to near double that £12k and then double that again to match my "benefits" when you add up all the working tax credits, child tax credits, DLA x 2, carer's allowance x 1, child benefit, housing benefit, council tax benefit etc. And I don't claim for discount on water bills either.
£12k a year is way less than my child tax credit alone which is "super boosted" because I have 2 autistic children. They aren't autistic in terms of any major noticeable difference from other kids. They are more like "naughty boys" that are blameless (if you know what I mean) but intelligent, good at school but get angry quite a lot. Can be awkward like teenagers before their time has come to be teenagers but other than that they are just normal kids that are a handful.
The 3rd child is probably autistic too but then she is a girl so nothing has been noticed yet at school and thus she has not been referred yet. When they start noticing that girls can be autistic too there will be an explosion on this front numberswise because the whole "boys are x more likely to be autistic" myth will be finished with. They just don't "present" the "symptoms" of autism as easily due to differences in the things they do, play etc.
This country would be bankrupted if it substituted the current system to that Norwegian model. People won't work less, they will just see it as a bonus because this country is obsessed with wealth and material stuff. People would still work the same hours with a "£12k" bonus on top.
Quite different from when tax credits initially came in and workers stopped doing O/T because it would just be taken off their tax credits. This isn't taking anything off. It is a freebie so people would still work more hours for more money and buy more stuff to show off to the Jones' then years down the line after initially those it saved from poverty we would be in an even worse position.
As for the Butlins argument you can take Wetherspoons as well. See above. This country is obsessed with money, profits, business. Business that does well out of the EU supports the EU. There is a trade off however with a lot of "service" business. If your clientele is mainly the demographic likely to be leavers it makes good business sense to support leave. So Butlins and Wetherspoons gets some very good and well positioned publicity which its main clientele agrees with..........unless you think Wetherspoons is full of city traders and Butlins is the domain of the well to do investors!!! Last time I went to Skeggy Butlins it was full of the Hoi Polloi that will have been a vast majority leave and Wetherspoons was full of middle aged blokes in their 80s leather blousons and tinted glasses on. Very good publicity for these types of places and that is what the world has become.
They don't care about the pluses or minuses of Brexit at all. You and I have more care about that. They care about what makes their profits bigger (whether supporting leave or remain.) Whereas you lot and I may differ in our support of leave or remain but we made that decision based on a belief and not a £ calculation. And that was a big failing in the whole concept of the remain argument. They made an assumption that all they have to do is tell people they would lose money and then assumed we are all mercenaries with no other interest than money.
The problem with this country (and other leading nations) is the obsession with money and material; things. Maybe Norwegians are not as far down that path to doom as we are? Maybe more Norwegians still value time with family over money in their pockets? We hear a lot of people on telly that talk up the whole "paternal" time off, flexibility in work etc and how wonderful it is but then they tend to be people that have a bit of money stashed away etc. In the real world optional paternal time off is a pipe dream. Employers being flexible is a pipe dream.
Over here time is sacrificed and we are obsessed with rushing about everywhere because our money obsessions means we are working as many hours as we can and then blaming that obsession on us not seeing our families or "being busy" when we've already wasted 10 hours plus tapping away on our phones or laptops to strangers so they can see a picture of what we were about to eat, wasting half an hour on the running machine closest to the glass wall so the world can see we are members of a gym or being stuck in traffic because we refuse to walk anywhere.
And the answer to all the problems is? Yep, need more money spent.........and the whole material cycle of needing more money to be earned to feed the obsession of being the Jones' means that everything goes up in price, no one wins and then we want more and more money spent.
How many people do you really think will decide to drop hours because they are getting an extra £12k? Probably the same ones that can afford to decide they will take paternity leave or other types of time off work. The rest will see it as an extra £12k to spend on top of their earnings and no-one wins other than the government getting a chunk back through VAT etc. It won't reduce hours for the other 99.9% and that I would guess is why the Norwegians dropped it. They probably saw evidence that it didn't change habits enough to be worthwhile.
If we really want to sort this out then it would have to be some sort of system that stops blasting through our TVs that we should all have everything, live in super styled homes to be constantly redecored every couple of years and stop spending so much money on rubbish. But that is not the western model. Consumerism will not allow people to decide to work less because apart from a select few that can already afford to drop hours the system is geared up for making people want more money to keep up and this continually drives costs of essentials (housing etc) upward and it is a spiral.
I guess I sound like I am promoting communism or socialism there but then socialism in its modern guise is exactly what I describe above. Constant drive to increase earnings/benefits to spend more to "improve" your standard of living which is then judged on a scale of what you have materially rather than what your actual quality of life is. "What is the health of your assets" without a thought to "How do you feel." You must feel great because you have a pretty new car, live in pretty nice house all decorated in this year's colours and styles, fitted with massive telly and all the subscriptions you could ever want etc."
And then they talk about concern over mental health? I await the calculation of mental health in £ terms because that will be their real concern. It will all be related (in their minds) to money.
I would blame the Russians but then all their money is London so it can;t be their fault this time.
