So, the government has 'lost' the personal details of millions of families in the UK. Ho Hum.
This 'crisis' (the most over used word of the age) serves to demonstrate only two things to me, one surprising, one not.
The unsurprising is that governments tend towards incompetence, all governments.
The surprising? That there are 25 million children on child benefit. Call me old fashioned but I had always assumed that the welfare state existed for the benefit of the poor. Are we all so poor now that the families of 25 million children must claim state support in the raising of children? No, for child benefit is one of those that does not require means testing, you get it by default as the government cannot be bothered to find out who, if anyone, actually needs it - resulting in the spraying around of my money to rich and poor alike.
What a sorry State we are in. On one hand we are physically attached at birth to that destroyer of individual responsibility, pride and initiative; the teat of the welfare state. On the other hand we have a system of government financing that takes huge amounts of money away from families via an absurdly over complicated tax regime and then doles parts of that money back to those same families via an absurdly over complicated benefits and welfare system, pausing only to waste a large portion of it in between.
And yet throughout this whole fiasco I'm hard pressed to find anyone who comments on the absurdity of the welfare machine, merely the incompetence of its operators. That is the real 'crisis'.
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