Quote:
Originally Posted by O.A.F.K.1.1
Elrazor,as an academic cant you see how bad your methodology is for thinking about these issues is?
Social issues have to be thought about in the aggregate, that is what society is, an aggregate and the interaction of aggregates.
Do you think a scholarship exists for every single person across every discipline who might need one?
You never think that Persons X who need a scholarship to continue education might find they cant due to finite funds for scholarships?
Ok so as were discussing methods,
here is the IFS report that is often cited for the argument against removing tax cuts, and here is a nice graph to illustrate why:
However, i skimmed the full report and quite frankly the way they described their study would be rejected by most peer reviewed academic journals, due to their lack of description about the number of hours used to calculate new earning under the National Living Wage. This is directly from their method:
Quote:
To estimate the impact of the new NLW the OBR therefore uses data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE). This contains a high quality measure of both earnings and hours. However, it is not possible to use this survey to produce an estimate of household income and it has relatively limited information on individual characteristics. Therefore we choose to supplement the information in the FRS with data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS).
Why not just say how many hours a week their results are based on? It's one sentence. I've read enough journals to know when something as fundamental as this is missing, it's because the authors are trying to gloss over something (However, it could be there and I've just missed it).
One of the main problems with tax credits it that it penalises people for working more than 30 hours (they lose something like 40p in the pound of tax credits when their earnings increase). My guess is that the IFS report uses a number of hours worked per week much lower than 35-40 hours. The reality is that many people who used to work those kind of hours before tax credits came in, will have have cut their hours to 30, and this is why they are "losing money" under the new system - because the old system contained a fundamental flaw that people exploited.
Moving back around to the question of tax credits, while at face value what the conservatives have done makes a lot of sense, I'm worried that certain populations are being penalised to the point where they won't make ends meet. I personally don't think this extends to single people with their own house and low income, but clearly this move may adversely affect other populations more severely than it would have affected me when I claimed, as for people in my situation and similar, it was all cream spent on lifestyle choices, and in my opinion this is not why the welfare system exists.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chezlaw
What sort of accommodation do you have? If it's the sort designed for the convenience of students, close to the university etc then that's not a realistic comparison to how non-students have to cope.
As a regular adult on very limited means you would find yourself having to deal with the grottier end of the private landlord market some distance away (in time and money) from where most of the jobs.
My house is a 2 bed-semi in a pretty decent neighbourhood. By way of comparison, an identical house next door is available to rent for £595pm. It's easily big enough for 2 people to share, and with the bills split between them their housing costs should be similar to, if not less than, mine.
Last edited by Elrazor; 10-24-2015 at 08:29 AM.