The proposal by the Turnbull government to introduce a cashless welfare card is an absolute clusterfuck waiting to happen.
Basically what it will amount to is this:
- You pay an extortion fee ( possible % ) to be listed as an ok place to spend money
- But since a lot of welfare spending is unpredictable – the poor do not know when they will have spare cash, as they live under the poverty line – many will consider it not worth the fees
- So the poor will find it extremely hard to find places where they can actually get what they actually need, and they will give up entirely on the idea of occasional random spending, since there’s not much chance having money will coincide with the opportunity to purchase anything they actually need – the effort becomes too much strain on top of everything else
- So this feedsback into the system and even less people register to be valid spending outlets
- Meanwhile the tiny % of welfare payments available as cash will be gobbled up by absolute necessities only that are unable to be purchased on the card, and which will amount to only a tiny fraction of the tiny fraction of absolute necessities they couldactually afford if they kept getting the whole payment available as cash
- Meanwhile all those whom ( like myself ) do not smoke, rarely ever drink ( and usually only because someone else is shouting ), don’t do any other drugs, don’t gamble, and don’t have any other vices because we cannot fucking afford them – will be persecuted along with everyone else for no good reason
- Meanwhile also the tiny difference in cost between eating healthy food at home vs. occasionally having something to eat with a coffee, will be deemed an extreme lavish luxury that scum-bags like ourselves are unworthy of, according to the politicians and business people pushing this insanity, as they smoke their $100 cigars and drink champaign at a $500 per head function, and chat about their weekend on the tax payers’ dime at a “conference” in the Bahamas at some extremely expensive resort, where they snort cocaine and think about the good old days where the poor were used as cannon fodder … oh hang on a minute, we still do that
- So cafés will start to struggle when they realise how many of their patrons were just exaggerating about the amount of work they get, and waiting staff will be out of a job
- All of this crapulence and more will percolate through the economy, and as more and more small businesses find it impossible to continue, that welfare money being spent on the cards will go 100% to the bigger corporate players, many of which have overseas interests in their shareholdings, so the money is actually leaving the economy entirely in the form of their dividends.
Ok … that’s all just a guess, but really I cannot see this going well, and EVERYONE should be protesting this.
Also published on Medium.