The UK has desperately needed welfare reform for almost two decades, thankfully George Osborne has started to fall the axe on a system that has seen Britain become the benefits resort of the western world. Too many different benefits, too much money, too many people claiming. Of course he has started by hitting the middle classes, those who get off their backsides and go to work. Higher rate taxpayers will lose entitlement to child benefit from 2013, their taxes though will continue to finance those who are earning less money and – this is where I choke – those who have no intention of ever working. I accept that those who earn over £40,000  year more than likely wont miss the benefit when it is pulled unless it was being used to help finance the family holiday to Barbados each year (as some do if people are honest…)

But I would like to know what these people will get in it’s place to make working still the best option. Child benefit, as we know, was introduced to put cash in the pockets of mothers who did not work outside the home and whose husbands were not so generous with the housekeeping money. This gave many women years ago their own cash for helping to feed their kids without needing to stick their hand out to their husband while dodging a left-hook at the same time. It was designed for women who had no money of their own. These days most women work and many even earn as much as, if not more in some cases, as their partners and so for them the child benefit really is not necessary.

No more taxpayer funded litters like these.

So far the announced cuts look pretty fair and somewhat tame but I would like to see this reform make a bigger difference.  Remembering that people in the higher-paying tax bracket are working their backsides off while losing a benefit for which they technically are paying for, it is time to hit those in the non-working classes where it hurts…their breeding programmes. It is NOT fair that people working and paying tax are losing out while others make a living out of lying on their backs producing up to 13 and 14 children and doing nothing themselves to pay for their own kids. Time to stop.

Cap the child tax credit and child benefit at THREE kids because if you are not working, have no intention of providing for your own family, then you have no business having litters of kids. George Osborne can win himself some respect for doing this; if he is going to take from people who work then he can also apply some measures to those who don’t – not cannot – who DON’T! there’s a difference of course. If lazy couples cannot practice some self-restraint in the breeding department then it has to be made less profitable…A LOT less profitable so that they have no bloody choice but to tie a knot in it.