Thursday 9 September 2010

George Osborn: a bit of maths.

Back of a fag packet variety.

Save 4 billion quid by making the lazy work or starve.

So how many lazy are there?

(Link to news article)

First of all, is this 4 billion a year? Not sure. It could be over 4 years.

So let's be generous and assume it's a billion a year.

£1,000,000,000

Now Job Seeker's Allowance is £64.30 a week. Multiply that by 52 to get the yearly figure...

£3,343.60

OK. That's for over 25's. If you're younger than that, you get a bit less, but again, lets err on the side of Osborne here.

Divide the billion by the 3343 and you get about 300,000 people.

So at the most optimistic estimate, there are 300,000 people who just won't get off their arses.

Of course, if you make that 4 billion saving over one year, then you need to class 4 times as many people as too lazy to work. That's 1.2 million. And the figure rises still further when you take into account the fact that under 25's get paid less JSA.

So either these people will decide to get jobs because they're forced to. (Doing what?) Or they starve.

So what do we do with half a million starving layabouts? Here are some choices.

1. Let them starve to death.

2. Let them starve until they're almost dead and then take them to hospital, where their care will cost considerably more than £64 a week.

3. Let them starve until they're too weak to work, and then let them have incapacity benefit until they've fattened up a bit.

As Merrick Godhaven points out, There are less than half a million job vacancies. If we force the lazy to take those half million jobs, what will those people who are on the dole and desperate to work do?

2 comments:

Peter said...

tax & NI receipts

housing benefit

Boring accountanty-type says please factor the above into the fag packet calculation.

Paul said...

As the link to Merrick's site point's out, the Government are already proposing to cut housing benefit for the long term unemployed.

Much of this stuff is not about saving money. Reducing housing benefit would mean evictions, which local authorities would then have a duty to house, much more expensively, in hostels)

Same with this. If you stop the benefits, people will be forced to steal to eat. More crime. More prison. More shit in the world generally.