Hilda the hairdresser

Local shorthand for working people, invoked on all sorts of occasion, generally towards dubious ends.

Welcome to the blog, we appreciate your indulgence of and patience with this nitpicking blogster.

Every culture we personally know a little has its big and small themes, the boilerplates for public discourse and cohesion. Stateside, we invoke "the American dream", and whenever there is big speech on taxes and government money, someone will use "hardworking American families".

It gets so boring after a while, but when you change countries, you get a whole new set of themes to discover.

Around here, we have found one such meme to be  Hilda the hairdresser or Hilda the part-time low-wage sales clerk. Actually, they don't use the name "Hilda" but we adapted the name to the job title of hairdresser.

Their role is very similar to the "hardworking American", in that our Jane Doe is invoked in support of social justice and fairness as well as in "highlighting the life of average people".

A couple of examples.

In a recent discussion on the (re-)introduction of tuition fees for public universities, one commentator in favor of fees said: not having fees means Jane the sales clerk, through her taxes, helps foot the bill for putting the son of a wealthy doctor through med school.

When the most recent figures on sanctions imposed by the job centers on long term unemployed showed more than 1 million adverse actions in 2012, we heard this: remember that the long-term unemployed have exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits and get paid out of tax revenue. This means that Hilda the hairdresser helps pay for their benefits, so it is only fair to enforce reasonable standards of compliance for these long term unemployed.

Not a single soul in this country stood up and said:  if a family receives, say, 1000 euros a month in the form of this benefit, at least 100 euros (actually more like 200) of this money goes back to the state in the form of indirect taxes. Wouldn't it be fair to say that the folks on welfare pay for some of their own benefits?

Neither the political left nor the right seem to ever make this argument, why? Because welfare benefit recipients did not work for the money?

Farmers get subsidies without working for them or even to prevent them from working on some of their fields. Companies get subsidies and tax breaks without work. Well, lobbying costs money but so does traveling to the welfare offices and standing in line.
But welfare recipients could work if they only wanted to! Same for the farmers, they could do something else. And the lobbyists could work too, give them a shovel and one hour's worth of training and voila, they become productive members of society.

Okay, so let's say welfare recipients just take money and spend it -- why not call the benefits an indirect subsidy for local business?

With the side effect that fewer people die as would if this subsidy to local business did not exist.