We can't afford social care already so let's promise ourselves more

From The Guardian, an example of quite gloriously missing the point:

As the characters and plot of Care show, quality care and support costs huge sums, and local authorities have never been under such a relentless onslaught, with budgets ravaged and social care suffering horrifically. As a result family members are forced to care for older relatives full time, putting on hold their own children, jobs and lives.

More and more people are forced to remortgage or sell their homes to fund care, at a time when parental homes are expected to provide both a pension for the home owners and a foot on the housing ladder for their children: eventually, the money runs out.

That people pay for their own lives out of their own resources doesn’t sound all that objectionable to us. Nor does the idea that families care for families - we always though that was rather the point of that most basic of human institutions.

But then this:

Here, we have a jobs crisis and a care crisis: why not push for a Grey New Deal? It could be a charter of rights each citizen should expect, a formalisation of respect across institutions and socially, and a long-term budgeted cash injection to create the skilled jobs and develop the technology needed to make sure we can care properly for older people. The people delivering that care should receive a decent wage for decent work, and expect job security and job satisfaction.

We’ve already agreed that we cannot afford what we’ve already promised ourselves - that embracing welfare state - within what we’re all prepared to cough up to pay for it. Thus promising ourselves more isn’t one of those things that’s going to work, is it?

The logic being presented to us is that of the restaurant diner who agrees that they can’t afford the mackerel, or the sardines, so why not order the lobster? An entirely wondrous starting point for a phantastical short story perhaps but not quite the way to interact with reality.

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