GE 13 : The Real Costs of a Welfare State

Pakatan Rakyat intends to create a significantly more expansive welfare state. This would send Malaysia in precisely the opposite direction of the developed world at precisely the wrong time.
Denmark is reforming its system because of the story of 'Carina', a 36 year-old mother of two who has been on the dole since she was age 16, has been receiving RM8,000 per month, and has more disposable income than over a third of the country's full-time workers.
In the UK, Mick Philpott – who has been convicted of manslaughter after burning down his house with six of his children to obtain a better property – has touched off a furious debate over Britain's welfare system, with even Labour ceding ground on the issue. Philpott has spent years in scrapes with the law with a minimal work ethic and history, and yet it has been reported that Philpott and his various partners claimed up to RM250,000 in benefits for their children.
In Japan the Diet has reduced welfare payments by more than RM2,2 billion over a three-year period to take the 'comfortably poor' off benefits after discovering that many welfare recipients make more than the average low-income working person spends on costs of living.
The developed world, over the last thirty years, has worked to reduce welfare systems to true safety nets to aid the poor. This began under the late Margaret Thatcher, who broke the very real situation in which able-bodied adults chose to stay home and be supported by a decreasing number of workers. Britain had fallen to a three-day work week at one point, and abuse of leave and welfare was so bad that the country was known as the 'sick man of Europe'.
It was only after the UK forced adults who could work back into the work force that its economy regained its old poise and became one of the leaders of Europe, and the world, again. The UK's labour participation rate (the percentage of working-age adults actually working) rose from 62 per cent in 1984 to over 70 per cent today.
Currently, Malaysia has a 58 per cent participation rate. However, because that refers to having "worked at least one hour of gainful employment in the preceding week", many economists believe that only 47 per cent of the working population is employed for more than 20 hours per week.
Experts on welfare systems almost unanimously agree that the more generous the welfare system, the lower the labour participation rate. Pakatan Rakyat is nevertheless proposing that we should take able-bodied workers out of the work force at the very moment the rest of the world is desperately trying to keep their workers in.
At a time of global economic uncertainty and a universal consensus that welfare should be trimmed back, this would strike most political parties as ridiculous. Somehow, Pakatan looks back to the crippled UK of the 1970s and sees a situation worth repeating.