Horrendous child benefit cuts

By any ones’ estimation December’s budget shall be interesting.

The Government has threatened to cut child benefit by 20- 25%. This is hardly surprising considering the state of the economy. However, what is surprising is that this is to be a straight- cut, across all households. It is unreasonable to suggest that poorer households should suffer as great a cut as richer ones.

The Sunday Tribune, 25/10/2009, quoted a senior source ‘You can forget about taxing or means testing it.’ Efforts of this nature are proving ‘horrendously complicated.’ Horrendously complicated? Both the social welfare system and allotment of student grants are based on means testing systems. Of course these have no doubt proven imperfect but are preferable. The only thing that is horrendous is that a means- test- system had not been introduced earlier. It makes as much sense to give houses of unequal wealth the same assistance as it does to reduce in equal amounts