Chancellor George "it's not his real name" Osborne has announced that the government will reduce the cost of welfare programmes, by replacing the current mish-mash of benefits with a single social credit and taking benefits away from higher-rate taxpayers. Going forward, no household is to make more from benefits than the average household makes from working; the idea being, of course, to encourage the benefits-dependent to join the workforce.
For the longer term, Osborne remains committed to reducing income taxes on the higher paid, in order to reduce disincentives to work that higher taxes supposedly create.
It's all very Reaganomics, and calls to mind the comment of the late John Kenneth Galbraith about the underlying fallacy of that mindset: that the poor don't work harder because they have too much money, and the rich don't work harder because they have too little. Maybe George doesn't think that's a fallacy.
By the way, if the need to reduce the deficit is so all-fired urgent, how come the withdrawal of benefits from the better-off won't start until 2013? You'd almost think these changes were ideologically driven, rather than being forced on the government by financial necessity. Surely not.
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