Re: economic house arrest

Alex, I suspect "If you pay people to be poor, you'll never run out of poor people" is just too simple and/or unpalatable even for many who give a lot of serious thought to the issue. See, for example, two pieces in the most recent New Statesman. Both articles recognise welfare dependency, but only as a separate issue, almost unrelated to poverty. Neither gives any apparent consideration to the possibility that dependency is a real and major cause of poverty - rather than a mere side-effect of its allievation. But there are plenty of grounds for believing that in anything but the short-term, tackling one inescapably means tackling the other. Do the authors really think there is unarguably a trade-off between fighting poverty and fighting dependency?