One of the key planks of Gordon Brown's clientelage strategy was stuffing the mouths of the middle class with their own gold. A perverse short-term strategy that defied economic gravity and ensured the long-term bankruptcy of the state. That plank is about to be knocked away, not!
In order to fund the universal credit system proposed by Iain Duncan Smith, some universal benefits may be tightened, when they should be abolished. The luncy of helping everyone whilst helping the poor will be continued. Just to make his poverty of ambition plain:
Seeking to soothe voters' fears over the coming spending cuts, Cameron stressed his plans would not take government spending back to the levels of the 1980s, but to a level last seen in 2006. He said: "Let's put these savings in perspective. Many businesses have had to make far greater reductions than us in one year."
A good plan would be if you wished to take state expenditure back to the 1880s. Prior to the expansion of the state, we had less law and more liberty.
Still, from a policy perspective, a single credit system eases some of the inefficiencies and confusion of Labour's legacy:
Duncan Smith said there is "something fundamentally wrong" with a system that pays 5 million people not to work while immigrants come in to do jobs those on benefit reject: "You're just replacing one group of unwilling workers with another group of willing workers. That doesn't make a lot of sense."
But will your reforms remove dependency? Hardly.....