"A welfare state revolution"

I am afraid I have gotten a bit out of date with what is going on in the UK. Their welfare system is very similar the ours.

The great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, an investment banker who apparently gets given all the dirty jobs, was hired to review the British welfare system. Here is some of what he found;

"It's a mess nobody understands or can manage."

"There are about 3.1 million people not working, I think we can get about 1.4 million back to work."

"The system we have at the moment sends 2.64 million people into a form of economic house arrest and encourages them to stay at home and watch daytime TV. We're doing nothing for these people."

"If you want a recipe for getting people on to IB [incapacity benefit], we've got it: you get more money and you don't get hassled. You can sit there for the rest of your life. And it's ludicrous that the disability tests are done by people's own GPs - they've got a classic conflict of interest and they're frightened of legal action."

Mr Freud's recommendation? Privatise the unemployment problem. Pay employers a huge fee to keep a previously unemployed person in a job for 3 years. Treat everyone on benefits not working the same (except for lone parents with children under school
age.)

"We can pay masses - I worked out that it is economically rational to spend up to £62,000 on getting the average person on Incapacity Benefit into work."

"[There is] one simple reason why it's got to be the private sector. You cannot incentivise someone on payment-by-results if the person who is paying is the Chancellor of the Exchequer. There has to be some risk."

"The point about my approach is you don't need to make a huge fuss about categorising people - everyone should be able to work."

Mr Freud has now been hired by the new Secretary for the Department of Work and Pensions (WINZ equivalent) to help implement "nothing less than a revolution in the welfare state."

I will watch with interest.

Source: The Welfare State We're In