Can I rant from a different perspective?

I'm from a working class family in the UK, most of whom are on benefits and half are immigrants. My sister is a single mum (by choice), because she wanted to move out and in the UK the only way to really do that if you're working class is to have kids and hope the government gives you a home.

My partner's mum is earning around £45,000 and lives in a £500,000 house. She's also a single mum and has never worked a day in her life. She has done pretty well though because she (reluctantly) had 5 kids and managed to get one diagnosed with autism despite most GPs believing he doesn't actually have autism – you only need one doctor to give you a diagnosis, so she just keep trying until she got it. A few months back she was thinking of getting a job (not because she needs the money, but because she was bored while the kids were at school). The guy at the job centre told her not to get a job because it wouldn't make financial sense given what she's receiving from the government. Another nice perk is that she gets free food from the food bank every week which she'll often give to us because she doesn't actually need it – sometimes she'll get some nice deserts from M&S so it's worth getting either way. In fact, most of my family go to the food bank despite not needing to do so because why not?

In contrast me and my partner live in a very small home, which we work full time to afford. We can't afford kids, but we hope one day we might be finically secure enough to have at least one before we turn 35. Not that we'd want to, but if I'm honest I'm doubtful whether we'd ever be able to afford 5 kids or live in a £500,000 house like her mum.

As someone from the working class I can honestly say I have no idea what my upper-middle class colleagues are talking about when they talk about wealth inequality. Apart from me only people I know who are my age who don't live with their parents are those that had kids. If fact most of the time those in my family who have had children live in much nicer homes than my middle-class colleagues. Thankfully I consider myself somewhat lucky that I'm weirdly good with computers which allowed me to get a middle class job despite the fact software development would typically be out of reach for someone from my background.

What upset me the most though is that when I lost my job a few years back I received very little government help because I had around £10,000 saved up to pay taxes (I had to fill self assessment at the time). Apparently if you have savings that disqualifies you from help. I recently found out the reason my sister blew all her savings on a BMW after having her kid is because that way she had a better chance of being given a house by the government.

Sometimes I wonder if our welfare state would actually help the working class more if it focused on incentivising people to make good decisions rather than having as many kids as possible and spending everything you get on cars and holidays. As far as I can tell the system right now doesn't actually help the working class, that is unless you're content living on welfare your whole life. In my experience the middle class is completely detached from how hard it is if you're from a working class family a want to simply make an honest living instead of following the more traditional working-class route of not working and having children. As far as I can supporting this system is just propagating a system that leads to further poverty and income inequality.

I see this reasoning bias in many middle-class positions though. For example, most of my middle class colleagues seem to think drugs are harmless and that's presumably because they do them now and again at parties, but they're not the kind of people who would allow drugs to consume their lives. Yet, just yesterday I had my partner crying to me because both her mother and brother are addicted and abusing drugs. I also have alcoholics and drug users in my family. There is a very clear reasoning fallacy going on here, specifically how the middle class just assumes that working class people act like they do. But they don't. Most working class will prefer living on welfare if you give them the option because they don't have many options and that's all they know. Just like many will abuse drugs if you allow them because these aren't people who make the best life decisions, especially if they're not incentivised to make the right decisions.

I'm sorry if this comments comes off as overly emotional, but it does upset me having to watch this cycle of poverty happen over and over again in my family. What the working class needs are good incentives to work and negative incentives to have children they can't afford or to abuse drugs. They also need good opportunities, so if you're a business owner I'd urge you to consider hiring some people from less well off backgrounds who may not having a university degree, etc but who you can train up and get on the right path. This push for more people to go to university has also done a lot of harm to the working class – you get automatically ruled out from a lot of jobs (including software development roles) regardless of your experience simply because you weren't privileged enough to go to university.