Re: How do the CoCo know?
Hi rainyday. In response to:
Hi Darag - Clearly we do disagree on the principle involved. But I'm
interested in your view how the other benefits should be 'fairly
distributed' - If you think that use of income as a criteria for this
benefit is unfair, wouldn't it be equally unfair for other benefits,
e.g. social housing etc?
First of all I'm surprised that you believe that
government social spending should be directed toward
non-welfare (in it's literal sense) goals but there you
go. What you seem to view in this case as "free money"
from the government, I view as money that is taken from
all of society and given to a rather arbitrary small
section of society who are not suffering any real
hardship.
Regarding fairness, I don't at all object to using
income a criteria for distributing benefits. I think
Tommy made the point earlier
There is something smelly about a scheme where a select
number of lucky people are awarded a massive financial
benefit based on what are ultimately abritrary criteria
while people who don't satisfy the criteria get
absolutely nothing.
The comparison with 3rd level maintenance grants &
medical cards means testing is appropriate only to a
point. Your child would be a long time in college or
your granny a long time getting free prescriptions
before their maintenance grant or medical card would
yield them €100K in benefits.
I also made the point:
Because the system will work like a lottery, I object to
social spending where the receipt of a huge benefit can
be described as "occurring by chance or fortuitous"
rather than on the basis of suffering some sort of
hardship.
The grammar might be a bit dodgy - I copied a definition
of "lucky" from a dictionary - but the unfairness of
awarding benefits by lottery is obvious to me anyway.
I must say 'though that this scheme is a masterstroke of
Irish politics. The financial aspects are opaque or
deliberately obfuscated ("sure it's only unused land" -
it's not like it's costing us anything). It manages to
appeal to lefties while at the same time it is diverting
government money into the pockets of big builders.
There has been no economic or financial analysis of the
scheme; no one has even asked: where will the extra
building capacity come from? What will happen the
regular FTB market both secondary and the new builds?
What will be the effect of forcing between 10,000 and
20,000 people to live in the same place for upto 15
years in terms of economics (worker mobility) and
general social and personal welfare? Finally it makes a
good sound bite and the lads get on the nine o'clock
news trumpeting what they're doing for the poor FTBs.
The largely middle class electorate think appreciably of
their kids starting work on salaries of 24K trying to
buy a house and so you also get the supportive callers
to Marion Finucan.