It seems Keynesianly unwise to lower benefits in recession, especially when the government has long abandoned Jim Callaghan's ignorant claim "we can't spend our way out of recession". It's really a chance to take advantage of an opportunity - the idea isn't that employment will go up if benefits go down, that's a delusional idea, the idea is that they want to lower benefits and a crisi-tunity has arrived.
Trauma Based economics, shock doctrine. A far better idea to get people into work from the dole would be to allow people to keep signing on and retain half of any pay they earn. At present you can work while on the dole, up to 16 hours, but you can only keep five pounds, less than one hour on the minimum wage. When there are jobs again people could be convinced into taking the temporary or part times ones far more easily if they didn't mean signing off, then waiting months for the council to sort out new housing benefit claims. If it meant having more money, not just getting and extra fiver a week.
Certainly such a carrot would bemore effective than the stick of the voice stress analyser.
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