Print A Housing Benefit Claim: Fill & Download for Free

Rajan is a renowned economist so Congress is using his name to give credibility to this scheme. However if Congress leaders and supporters really listen to what Raghuram Rajan has to say, they will never quote him. ;)Rahul Gandhi needs some credible proofs for his big announcement, so he claimedTake the list of all big economists of the world, we consulted them... Raghuram Rajan.[1]But sadly his claims of having consulted all big economists had crumbled even before he made announcement. The Print, a well known left-leaning media house had earlier claimed[2] that Nobel laureate British economist Angus Deaton were advising congress, however he denied it completely.Let’s take a closer look at what Raghuram Rajan have said. All quotes are directly his own. (Source here[3] )1. “If done effectively it [NYAY scheme] can change how things are run.”This is a big IF put by Raghuram Rajan himself. Can we measure income of Majority of poor Indians, especially when most of India works in unorganised sector which provides no way to estimate income. Experts so far don’t think it is possible. So there is a huge question mark about practical implementation of the scheme, and even Raghuram Rajan is asking this. But Congress, and supporters have failed to answer this question so far.2. “it is important that schemes offered to poor do not hold them back from job hunting. The basic idea, he said, is to target the poor and give them an ability to create good livelihood.”Raghuram Rajan is cautioning that such schemes should not hold poor people from Job hunting. If someone earns 4000 a month after entire day’s work, and government gives 2000, it is a natural thought that even if I give up Job, I will still earn 6000 a month, so why to work. Congress has not commented on it so far.3. "You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. Post-election whatever government comes in will have to figure out what it actually does.” The 'poetry' referring to lofty promises; 'prose' implying compromises in implementing the promises.Rahuram Rajan very cheekily said that all which is announced before polls is not easy to implement. Given that congress has not provided any details about the implementation of scheme, this looks plausible.4. “In some sense, you cannot add scheme or each side's schemes on top of each other's”He is clearly telling that this scheme cannot be given along with existing welfare schemes. Since Raghuram Rajan has been consulted on this scheme, he must have advised same to Congress. So we can infer that congress has been advised to run this scheme after restructuring other schemes.There are 900+ welfare schemes going on for poor section. They have a budget of 3.14 lakh crore. And Rahul Gandhi’s plan also has a budget of around 3.5 Lakh crore. So there is a chance that Rahul Gandhi simply re-brand the help to poor by giving them cash instead of benefits? Benefits are given to selected eligible individuals. It is targeted. But money is blindly given to everyone fulfilling the criteria. Economists find such schemes counter-productive and harmful, for the beneficiaries and for the economy. Rajan’s following words further confirm this.“Given where we are, can we add another 7 lakh crore subsidy? The answer is no.”7 Lakh crore is sum of money spent on poor at present and Nyay Yojna. If Raghuram Rajan says it is not possible, it means 2 things,Raghuram Rajan has been consulted, and he believes that NYAY cannot be implemented with existing schemes. So 900+ existing schemes will be shut down to implement NYAY. It will be catastrophic.NYAY will be implemented with existing schemes. But even Raghuram Rajan thinks that it is impossible. So congress is bluffing.So choice is between Catastrophe and Bluff. And I hope that India won’t have to choose any after the elections.Footnotes[1] NYAY scheme: Rahul Gandhi names Raghuram Rajan among economists consulted; former RBI governor sceptical about funding[2] Thomas Piketty & Angus Deaton help frame Rahul Gandhi’s minimum income promise[3] Raghuram Rajan says Rahul Gandhi's NYAY scheme workable, conditions apply

Nope. You can’t.For a start what we call a public school is actually an independent fee-paying school. Eton and Harrow are public schools, and what you’d call a public school we’d call a state school. We do not have elementaries and Junior Highs. We have primary (to which you’d go until you are 11) and Secondary (or senior) to which you would go to until you are sixteen, after which you may go to a college, stay with the school to do A levels, or go into work (you must do one of the three). That’s in the state sector. In the public, you’d go to Prep School, then to a Senior school, after sitting your Common Entrance (CE) exam usually when you are thirteen, although ten schools do an examination at eleven, using a different set of papers.In neither case can you choose unequivocally. We are in an area whereby my niece could have gone to one of two schools because the distance from our door is equidistant to a few feet, and it is common to see brats in two different sets of uniforms milling around in the early morning and the afternoon. Most are not in that position and the brats are in a catchment area for one school, to which they normally must go. You can state a preference, but for the overwhelming majority, it’s the nearest distance to where you live. That is for the state side.There is some choice in public, because you pay for it, however for the top schools there is competition, and this is where the CE comes in. You may well be willing and able to pay for little Timmy to go to Eton or Harrow, but if little Timmy is as thick as a cow’s arse he’s not getting there, because they only let in the top scorers on CE.Being a top scorer on CE means that academically you are very good, and you will almost certainly get high academic marks, and good O levels (well, whatever it is they take now) and may even shine at A level, and if you do that you will get to the best universities, and then the world is your oyster, or mussel, or cockle, or whelk, or whatever thing that comes out of shells is your preference. This is why those who are rich and clever send their children to the top performing preps- they will hothouse the little darlings into matching the academic requirements of the most prestigious Seniors, and even little Timmy, who may be naturally as dim as a penny candle, has a good chance of getting into Eton if he’s having a good day at CE. However it’s not as draconian as it sounds, because if somebody can display a remarkable talent in one subject, say maths or history, the school may decide to take him even if he is a complete duffer at all the others, at which he can be brought to par.Eventually all the brats, wherever they have come from, if they stay on, will do A levels. A levels are the great leveller, because these are what the universities look at (the Polys used to look at HND too if you were going for technical subjects, but that’s gone largely by-the-by now) and it doesn’t matter where you are, A level is the same for all. Again a public will have hothoused the brats through their courses much more than a state school and it shows, because grades per pupil are higher in public than in state generally, but that isn’t an excuse, because you get out what you put in, and you can be a pauper or a prince, if you do the A level work and learn how to study for what the examiners want to see then you will get a good grade. In science the answers are either right or wrong, and no inbetween, and the scientifically minded are a bit luckier there because there’s a definite goal to attain, but still they want to see your methodology and you’ll get marks for following the correct paths. In arts it’s a bit murkier but still there are dos and don’ts and this is what you need to sort out. In things like modern languages it’s murkier still because they want an accurate translation, but not one that’s written like a robot; and so you have to balance the accuracy of your translation with the art of your wordsmithery, and in many ways it’s one of the hardest things to do; too far one way and you’re a dalek, too far the other way and your accuracy suffers. In sociology of course, it doesn’t matter, they print A levels in Sociology on the back of Corn Flake packets.What? What?? I’ve been sensible and restrained throughout umpteen paragraphs and really, how long did you think that was going to last? Besides, I haven’t poked the sociologists for simply ages, and in this answer I can’t have a go at the French, so the soc-nuts are getting it instead.Anyway, back to the answer.We used to have a third way, which was grammar. You took the 11+ exam, and if you did well, you got into grammar and most of the benefits of a public school education regardless of the fact that you might have lived in a house with two rooms, neither of which was a bathroom. A lot of piss-poor (materially) kids got their start out of poverty that way, but a Labour government decided they were elitist and set about abolishing them with vigour, thus consigning a lot of raggy-arsed kids who could have held their own at Oxford to be forever excluded. Good job there, comrades, because if the most evil baron had plotted to keep the plebs in their place he’d have struggled to better that wheeze.The point is you don’t have the absolute choice your question implies. In state, you normally go to the nearest school. In public, you go to whatever school will have you on your CE results (and whatever money your family can stump up). There are exceptions; in state if you have siblings at a school your parents may apply for you to go there too, but there’s no guarantee. In public, there are scholarships. To get a scholarship, you have to be really academically bright.I’m sure you’ve spotted the flaws in the system. For public, it’s money- the more you’ve got, or at least your family has got, the better the chance of a top university. For state, it’s location. There have been instances where parents in a catchment area of a poorly performing school have claimed the child’s home address is with a family relative who lives in a catchment for a more prestigious one. One supposes you can’t blame them; it is a bit of a bounder move, though.The second is the concentration on academia. Just because you’ve got a clutch of A levels does not mean you’re going to be any good in the real world. I’ve got six of the buggers and a degree.I’ve also got an HND, more CGLIs than you shake a big stick at, and two BTEC L3s in both Electronic Engineering and IT Electronic Hardware Support (mending, maintaining, and installing the insides of computers, printers, monitors and anything else in the IT world that needs screwdrivers and soldering irons pointing at it). Guess which are the more useful?Hmmm.

NOTE: This answer is not written to specifically explain why interest is haram in Islam. It may or may not have any links to the real reasons. I am also not an Islamic scholar. This is a long answer, but if you are interested in understanding how money works, keep reading.Have you ever thought about the fact why every country on Earth, including US, the country with the highest GDP, all are in debt? not just a small amount, but trillions of dollars of debt? Have you wondered who do we owe so much debt to? Read along and you will understand why.Let us for a sake of understanding forget all the queries you have mentioned about the benefits of interest and take an example of an extremely simplified scenario which when extended you will realize why interest is the root cause of all the evil in the world. I am going to use this example to simplify the relation between interest and inflation.Assume a hypothetical scenario, John and Bob, the only two guys living in a small, economically independent village. John needs money to start a business or for whatever reason, doesn't matter, say $100 (For example purposes $ is just a reference for money and not an actual US dollar). He doesn't have it, so he asks Bob to lend it to him. Bob has exactly $100 and so he agrees to lend it, provided John pays back with 10% interest. John agrees. John takes the $100, uses it. He has to pay back $100 + $10 as interest. The problem is, there are only $100 available in the village, how is he going to get that extra $10? This small village is now in $10 of debt. Bob will have to find a way to resolve it, else the economy will collapse.Enter Inflation. What Bob does is, that he print another $100. Since new money has been created out of nowhere, without any backing, this currency has now become Fiat. Now Bob wants, that John again borrows this money from him, for this reason, he lowers the interest rate from 10% to 1%. This is the reason why interest rates are low, during high inflation.John now sees a lucrative deal to borrow another $100 for such a low interest rate, and also pay off his previous debt. Great idea right? WRONG! He borrows the newly printed $100, and pays back his previous loan of $110.Lets summarize this scenario.Total money in Economy: $200Money remaining with John: $90Money already returned to Bob by John: $110Money still left to be paid back by John to Bob: $100 (from the new loan) + $1 (interest) = $101This means that if John again wants to pay back his loan, he will now be $101–$90= $11 in debt instead of the previous $10. So with the new printing of money, the economy went further into debt, from $10 to $11. There is no way John can ever repay this loan because the extra $11 does not exist in the economy and this cycle keeps continuing.At this point, Bob really does not care that his $11 cannot be repaid by John ever, because now John is essentially his slave. John doesn't know it yet, and will never know, that's the beauty of Modern Slavery.Bob will also provide a host of other options to John to make him feel he is trying to help, like giving him new credit/credit card to pay off his previous debt, or EMI, or cashbacks, or some stupid gift or bonuses, or credit rating.Scale it up, and this is exactly how the real world operates, but to make sure that a huge majority of the people do not understand this scam, the system is made much more complex with bonds and federal reserve or reserve bank, and all those hocus pocus terms you hear but hardly understand, by our own democratically elected govt and the lobbyists. Replace John with the Govt that wants the money to avoid the collapse of economy, Bob is the Federal Reserve or the Bank that prints money. Similarly, John can also be replaced by common citizens, businesses, banks that borrow money from other banks, or basically anyone that borrows money on interest. Bob on the other hand, is anyone who lends money, banks, private moneylenders etc.Not to mention the chain of interest from Central bank to govt, from govt to big banks, from big banks to smaller banks and so on. Add to the chaos, the issue of Compound interest i.e interest on your interest. Now its not just the $11 that John is short off to repay, but also the interest that will be charged on that $11 until he repays the full amount. That's why no country will ever be able to pay-off its debt ever. Certain percentage of each nations GDP is just allotted to paying off debts which were created out of thin air. That money is so huge, that if it weren't there, those funds could have paid for providing free education, healthcare, social welfare and retirements.Debt CeilingSo you think there should be a way to stop this chaos and keep things in check. Well there is, it is called the Debt Ceiling. This is basically the amount set by the current govt for maximum amout of debt its nation can owe. But no govt ever wants to reach the debt ceiling in its tenure, because it would be catastrophic to the nations economy and it will cause devaluation of its currency. So every new govt keeps on raising the bar for the debt ceiling to keep the economy rolling, leading to increase in inflation and the vicious cycle goes on.Have you noticed the words written on your bank notes? Every dollar, euro, rupee, sek, dek, pound you own, is basically a debt, that you owe and have to repay with your sweat and hard work. Fiat money backed by interest is the modern form of slavery.Rockefeller, JP Morgan Chase etc were the first ones to think ahead and make the whole world their slaves. Started with US dollar, when dollar was no longer backed by Gold anymore Nixon's Colossal Monetary Error: The Verdict 40 Years Later.One by one, the powerful elites of the US made sure that each and every country in the world follow this and switch to fiat money. The ones that didn't oblige, turned into Iraq and Libya of today. Gaddafi wanted gold backed currency, US made sure that never happened Gadhafi’s Gold-money Plan Would Have Devastated Dollar.This definitely is the BIGGEST SCAM IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. Watch the adjoining video by Mike Maloney to know more.Interest + Inflation is the reason why you will hear many older people say something similar to, “When we were young, we use to buy 1kg of apples for just 10 cents”The problem with interest is, that you are trying to directly create money from money, without any actual contribution to the world, without putting in any sweat of your own.Whatever positive points are mentioned by the questioner, comes far later in the picture and are they really worth it? Its similar to destroying an entire nation, killing millions, devastating their livelihood and economy and then claiming, Heyy, but atleast now they have Democracy (Quote from a debate by Shashi Tharoor).Fractional ReserveThis is going to be fun. So, if you think all money is created and printed by the Central bank and is strictly regulated by the respectively government, then you are absolutely wrong. In most economies printed money accounts to less than 10% of the total money within the economy. Where does the rest comes from? It is created by banks just in digitally stored accounts with the help of Fractional Reserve. This policy states that a Bank can lend out the deposited money by keeping 10% as reserves.Let us say John takes his $1000 and goes to the Bob/bank and deposits it. This $1000 is physical money also called M0. This means that by using Fractional Reserve Bob can lend out $900 to Alice keeping $100 as a reserve. Makes sense?Now the total money in the economy has suddenly bumped to $1000 (John can use his cheque/debit card against his deposit) + $900 (Borrowed by Alice) = $1900. Bob would pay some interest to John for his $1000 and charge interest from Alice on $900 which he lent. Needless to say that the interest paid to John will be lower than interest charged from Alice. I would say completely acceptable. This is summarized in the image below.Here it gets interesting, our friend Bob is a clever scam artist. This is not how he operates it. What he does is, that instead of keeping $100 as a reserve, he puts in the whole $1000 deposited by John as a 10% reserve. This means that now he can lend out a total of $9000 instead of the previous $900. Once again, needless to say that he will pay interest to John on $1000 and charge a higher rate of interest collectively to whoever he lends out the money. He increased his profits 10 fold without violating the policy.Also remember, the interest will always be compounded and the money lent will be redeposited with Bob or Bob-2 or Bob-3 or Bob-n and the cycle continues.However, there is one issue for all our Bobs, what if John, Alice or anyone else who borrowed the money wants to withdraw $100 as physical currency? This means that Bob will have no fractional reserve left and the remaining $900 cannot exist. Very simple fix, John or anyone else cannot withdraw more than $1 a day :P (Just so that everyone understands, this is why you have withdrawal limits from the ATM)This is a Pyramid/Ponzi schemeThere was never a time ever in human history, that the top richest 1% can own 50% of our planet. Yes it did boost economy, but the bill always comes due, like in 2008 housing market collapse in US. People spend there entire lives just trying to pay off the loan they took for a house, or medical bill or education. The basic of human rights.Cannot repay your debt? Don’t worry, banks will help you, they will offer you another loan charging even higher interest rate to repay your previous loan and you will take it, else you will lose your house/car or whatever collateral they have on you.The economy of today is no different than a Pyramid/Ponzi scheme, where the people in the top of the pyramid will keep on gaining interest flowing upwards, paid by the hard work, sweat and slavery of ones that are at the bottom.(Source: I Want the Earth, Plus 5% - Health Wealth & Happiness - Relfe.com )Something as basic as owning a credit card can lead you into an spiraling debt due to interest. Want to watch something fun? here’s a nice honest Ad for a credit card.This reminds me of a nice quote from the television series MR. RobotGive a man a gun, and he can rob a Bank.Give a man a Bank, and he can rob the World.TODO (will add later if I find time)How money is actually created?How Bonds work?Many people have pointed out in comments that in my first example, John does not create any value. I would like to say that value is abstract and cannot be quantified, money can. The point of my answer is that there is no way all our debts can ever be paid, because the money required to pay the interest never exist. Money always comes from Banks when someone lends it out on interest. That someone can beYou, who wants to buy a houseYour boss/company, to pay your salaryYour company’s customersMoney always generated and distributed through banks on INTEREST!!Moral: Debt created due to interest can never be repaid, because the money required to do that does not exist, no matter how much value it generates.