| Topic: | Re:Major things we get wrong. | |
| Posted by: | Francis Rowe | |
| Date/Time: | 10/07/13 14:37:00 |
| These kind of 'aren't we clever and aren't the general public stupid' articles are indicative of a very deep malaise in UK media. If you were to ask people to guess what percentage of the world's population is going to starve this year they would probably overestimate by a wide margin. That doesn't mean that there is no problem and nobody would claim that is the case. Yet that the logic being made to justify this rather specious argument. The British public are instinctively right when the identify benefit fraud as an issue probably because a large proportion are aware of examples. That they over-estimate the proportion misses the point. By expressing the official estimates as 70p for every £100 of benefits is a fairly crass attempt to obscure the real figure which if these numbers are true would be £1.45 billion. In fact the official estimates are likely to be on the low side. This is not a 'non existant' problem. |