Beer child
It’s not exactly second prize in a beauty contest, nor a bank error in my favour… but today I, like many of my poorly paid friends, found out that I am going to get a one-off payment of £60 from the government.
Woohoo.
Well then, that makes up for the massive student loans they introduced, and the fact that they let my local council levy a tax that is extortionate. It certainly makes up for the fact that whilst my rent, utility bills and food prices have gone up, my wage, like many of my poorly paid friends, has yet to go up.
I’m practically rolling in it.
But I’m trying to treat it as it is intended, a windfall to cheer us all up…
So, I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to spend my government sponsored money on… and I’m thinking along the lines of ’sticking it to the man’, so to speak. Perhaps I should get £60 of indelible black marker pens and scrawl my displeasure and dissent across the walls… or maybe a government sponsored drinking binge – ‘isht hokay mayte, is govament mhoney’.
I’m not sure yet… I’m open to suggestions.
But let me be clear. I’m not angry at all that stuff, the student loans, the council tax, the food prices and the utility bills, that’s the price I pay to live, just like everyone else… and I know I’m certainly better off than most people. No, what I’m angry about is the rather cheap way my government thinks I’ll accept it’s bribes in return for obedience.
I can be bought – I’m only human – but come on, £60?
We got $600 or so apiece as our bribe. I remember thinking, a while back, when I heard a news report about all these new jobs created…
“Sure, new jobs are good. But how many of these jobs have people working at below the official poverty line, which is much higher than it should be to begin with. For that matter, how many people have had raises that have kept track with inflation over the last ten years?”
The answer? Not many.
$600… that’s a slightly better bribe, but a bribe nonetheless. I had no idea that this was happening all over, but it makes sense as we plummet head-long into a recession.
It’s a bit like treating the symptoms rather than the cause, a short-term fix at best and at at its least effective it’s a bit like sticking a band-aid over a severed artery…
If the Canadian government were to give me 60 dollars I would probably show just how unimpressed I am by donating it to the official opposition. That would *officially* show them. Maybe I would send them a nicely phrased letter to inform them of the money’s use.
That, or I would buy some flowers. It’s a tossup really.
Or you could write the letter and actually just drink the money instead!
But…but then it wouldn’t be true!!!
I have considered a similar action… also maybe giving it to an organisation that is persecuted by our government (though I can’t think of that many that I agree with).
Flowers are good, and £60 should buy enough of them too… but pretty as they are, ‘the man’ probably won’t pay any attention… not unless I start buying poppy seeds, they’d notice that quickly enough.
Depending on the government you could always just give it to a charity that leans the other way, if you so happen to agree with it. It wouldn’t be quite as much a punch to the gut of The Man, but the money would be going somewhere useful. Or at least more useful than flowers or drinking binges (not that they don’t have their place).
Well, 60 GBP is more like $117 Canadian Dollars ($116.923 as per xe.com, in fact), but I’m with you. Actually, I’d donate it to something our current national government really hates, like an arts endowment.
The charitable donation thing is good, actually because you get a tax receipt for it, too, so you’re sticking it to them twice.
I think it’s safe to say that virtually no one with access to a computer (besides homeless people at the library) is worse off than me. I don’t even get the economic stimulus money because I don’t pay taxes (you have to have an income to file an income tax return (and I suppose homeless people probably don’t get it either)).
That said, it’s not entirely my government’s fault, but they played a very important part.
I’m sorry to hear that Joe, as always it looks like the people that could actually benefit from this sort of thing are the ones that are unable to access it.
A lot of stuff, including benefit payments are linked to bank accounts now… which you can’t get if you are of no fixed abode. Also, you need ID to open an account, like a passport, which costs quite a lot of money… so you get stuck, you can’t get money for the ID and you can’t get an a bank account because you can’t afford the ID.
If there’s one thing i know about modern politics and welfare, it’s that morally and legally, you have to kick someone when they’re down.
Here in the US, we’re supposed to get either $300 or $600, depending on our “economic status.” A woman at work already had a trip planned to Germany, so she’s gone to spend her “Economic Stimulus Package” …in another nation’s economy. Not a bad way to stick it to Bush, in my opinion.
Unfortunately, with the way public transport is in this country, I doubt that £60 would even get me to the south coast… actually I know it won’t, that costs about £80 if I book early enough.
Again, rather than crumby handouts, I’d rather they had spent the money on helping us get around a bit easier.
…but that’s a good point, send the money elsewhere, perhaps I could pay online for something from another country.
Is 60squid enough to drunk on in the UK?
I mean really shitfaced and rat arsed.
I struggle with money from the government. They either won’t give me money if I need it, or will give me to much money and take it all back.
I get paid to much to get such a bonus now, tho I know ppl that get alot more than me and claim disabiltiy pensions and the like.
Whilst I realise how lucky I am, when ever I comment on these kind of situations, I always feel like I am saying “go eat cake”(ref:French rev).
Oh yes, £60 would be a nice binge… especially for me, since I’m a lightweight when it comes to alcohol.
A pint of Guiness costs about £2.50-is at my local, so that would be a total of 24 pints. that’d be plenty to make me sing, stagger and vomit.
Actually, I’d probably need only half of that, so I could spend the rest on a takeaway on the way home to produce even more decorative puke.
We had a problem over here with people being paid too much and the government agressively pursuing them to reclaim it. Again, the poorest people, who need the help most, being threatened because of poor organisation.
I don’t really like the sound of these “economic stimulus packages”- a little too bread and circus-esque for my tastes. Wasn’t there a famous quote saying that democracy will last until the government figures out that it can bribe the people with their own money?
As for what to spend it on, I’m the wrong person to ask. Last weekend I splurged on a $6 smoothie and have been feeling all decadent since then. £60 might well be enough money to completely blow my mind.
“Wasn’t there a famous quote saying that democracy will last until the government figures out that it can bribe the people with their own money?”
I didn’t now about that one, but apart from being apt, it is genius… and true. Except, they’ve been doing that for years, and I think the magic is starting to wear off…
We have the 2012 olympic games coming here too, against most people’s wishes (especially the French, but also our own citizens). We’re expected to foot the bill for that, a decision in which we had no say and are unlikely to benefit from in any permanent way (a sports centre in London is about as useful to me as a McDonalds on Mars).
So far, I’m tempted to try and get out of the country and grow my own opium fields… though £60 would need to be stretched quite far to accomplish either task.
However, for just £60 of my not-hard-earned-money I could blow Joseph’s mind… that sounds like a bargain to me, and now I’m wondering if smoke would come out of his ears.
I would do something grand and noble and symbollic with the money but I have too much reality slapping me in the face. I had a broken air conditioner and live in the south with one child and another on the way. Pregnancy at 90 degrees F is NOT something anyone should have to suffer through. So the entire bribe went to fixing my air conditioner.
The truth is, these ARE short term fixes that rely on a common stupidity that Americans (and I suspect many others) have. We don’t know how to NOT spend money. A larger (and growing larger) percentage of our citizens are in terrible debt (and not the, I’m paying off my mortgage and car payments kind of debt but the I can’t pay it off at all kind of debt) and continue to spend. People’ll get this money and they’ll spend it because capitalism and commercialism have joined forces to create a ME ME ME NOW NOW NOW consumer culture that doesn’t know how to save for a rainy day.
Added to the fact that social security isn’t very secure for my generation, our national debt is out of control and owned by countries like China, and the fact that both China and the EU now have better buying power than us… and the only thing that keeps the US a superpower is the fact that we spend more on our military than probably the rest of the world combined and we have more nukes than God.
“Pregnancy at 90 degrees F is NOT something anyone should have to suffer through”
90 degrees is far hotter than I can handle not being preganant… anyone having to put up with that desrves a medal, let alone air conditioning.
…But that’s the point about the £60, it’s not enough to do anything with for most people, except perhaps help feed the family for a few days and in the context of the economy it’s nothing but a gesture. I don’t have children, and I’m perfectly capable of ‘cutting back’ (I don’t drive, we have a tiny house and I steal food from work), but for most families that’s just not an option.
Similarly, my debts are academic… and by that I mean my student loans, and since I earn way below the threshold for paying them back I tend to just ignore that. I don’t even have a credit card. but still, I’m feeling the pinch.
Consumerism, it’s what got us all into this mess, and I’m not entirely sure that buying our way out of this slump is going to work. There has to be a theoretical point where you’re left with nothing else to buy and nothing else to sell.
Despite having a sound social security system in the uk (and above it all, the NHS, who are responsible for patching me up on so many occasions) our big worry is an aging population with no pensions provision. It’s on the horizon, but it’s quickly approaching us and no one seems to have any solid ideas about how to sort it out… again, £60 in September isn’t going to help old people heat their homes this coming winter.
You’ve raised an interesting point there too, about the millitary… our current economic troubles have been pinned on sub-prime mortgages and some rather dodgy investments, but very little of that is linked with our current wars, which, let’s face, cost a bomb. Nor does it reference the political and economic consequences of our actions. We’ve (UK and US) hardly made ourselves endearing to any of the countries that produce oil and other fuels as our actions are largely viewed with suspicion. I’d like to know just how much money has been spent by my government on a war that nobody wanted and tally that against the £60 handout, which I suspect will be peanuts in comparison.
I believe is was one of the insights of 1984 that by maintaining constant war (as a means of destroying the results of production) the people can be kept working without ever becoming wealthier.
I’ve said it before, but when did 1984 stop being a cautionary tale and turn into a handbook for modern politics?
The current US national debt is roughly 59.1 trillion dollars, if you count in promises of Social Security and medicaid and such that are more or less unfunded. While the war on terror won’t cost that much, it will cost probably around 3 trillion or so by 2010. Perhaps more. What that means is we’re funding the war entirely on borrowed money.
By the way, if you haven’t, I highly recommend reading “Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich. It does an amazing job of breaking down the whole “working poor” idea down to human ideas. How so many people can work their asses (arses to you guys over there, I suppose) off and still end up slowly starving to death in the US.
I haven’t, but I will… the whole idea of borrowed money on that scale is a bit scary, to the point of meaningless.
I mean, how many people could that money support for the duration of the war as it stands, you know, ordinary people that aren’t carrying guns?
They may have more nukes than God, but run the same count on massive asteroids and I think you’ll find who the true winner of that war is
Me?
that’s asteroids not hemorrhoids.
I was really happy there for a moment.
Now I gotta go get the Prep H.
Hmm, is God responsible for all the ass-teroids too? He might have us beat there too.
That’s why I moved my honey about 7.5 degrees north before getting her pregnant.
so we just got our first budget from our new government, and it wasnt exactly crash hot either. yay, there were tax cuts…for rich people. and our already overloaded public health system is going to be inundated with some 500 000 odd more people. me and the 3 other politically aware teenagers i know had a nice bitch about it today.
It makes you wonder why tax issues are always focussed at the low end of the scale, the poor people… surely, the politics should all be aimed towards the richer people… I know they don’t want to pay tax and that they have already demonstrated how fond of money they are…
Good for you, if you don’t talk about it, you’re letting them get away with it.
Never rely on anyone, including the government, for
anything unless you have to. It’s like making your
own meals: the food tastes better and is more delicious
if you cook it yourself. Prepackaged shit is just that.
So, let me get this straight. The UK is a country of about 60 – 61 million humans. Assume half of those are children, and a third of those that are left are ineligible for the benefit for various reasons (homeless, etc.). That leaves about 20 million people receiving this credit, at 60 GBP each, working out to a total government expenditure of 1,200,000,000 (or if you prefer 1.2 BILLION) pounds (about 2.3 billion USD or 1.5 billion Euro), for those who are into international currency markets.
The government couldn’t think of a better way to spend that kind of money other than a one-time cheque?
Oh, and I completely forgot the administrative and workforce costs of actually printing and delivering all of those cheques, too.
I reckon that might have done some good in the education system, or health service.
It’s a scam. People think they are getting something
for nothing, but really what you are getting is your
own money back. Think of it as a temporary loan.
Before you exhale, they’ll tax it back into their coffers.
Down here in Aus we got $900 per person to help stimulate the economy. It seems to have worked thankfully. And stimultate that economy we did