Fun Online Polls: Working age welfare and New Year's Honours

The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Working age and child benefits amount to what percentage of UK's GDP?

1% - 14 votes
2% - 16 votes
5% - 13 votes
10% - 16 votes
20% - 21 votes

The correct answer is of course 5%, which any sane person can guesstimate by assuming that a tenth of the population are on working-age welfare and that their income is half that of working households (certainly in pre-tax terms and probably in post-tax terms as well).

You could make all sorts of up- or downward adjustments, and at a pinch, you might just about be able to arrive at 2% or 10%, but how is it even possible to have a sensible debate about welfare spending when half of people don't even have a clue how much it is?

If you want the actual numbers (in £ millions):
Employment and support allowance - £6,554 (the new 'Incapacity Benefit')
Jobseeker's allowance - £5,455
Income support - £5,121
Incapacity Benefit - £2,847
SSP, SMP and Maternity Allowance - £2,770
Carer's Allowance - £1,859
Working Tax Credits - £6,999
Child Tax Credits - £22,915
Child Benefit - £12,221
Total - £66,741

GDP is said to be around £1,575,000 million. So that looks like about five per cent to me, or about ten per cent of total UK government spending.
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And lo to the last Fun Online Poll of the year 2012!

Further to The Stigler's recent post about the New Year's Honours IT mixup, I wonder which of the people on the list accompanying this BBC article would have been on your New Year's Honours list?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar. Pollcode counts the number of voters, so if you just vote for one or two, that automatically shows up as a negative vote for everybody else on the list.

New Years Honours in IT mixup

The Honours Committee have today had to reluctantly admit that many recipients of new years honours were the results of a test data mixup.

"The team always uses some names in their test data that are never going to get honours, you know, Mao Tse Tung, Genghis Khan, Jedward. This year, they had those and also added Hector Sants, Cherie Blair, Alan Budd and Margaret Beckett."

"It's designed so that if the test data run accidentally gets printed, at least the postman will stop them. Unfortunately, the postman couldn't quite put his finger on who they were, but thought they sounded plausible and let them go. Of course, having been sent, we didn't exactly want to own up to it and thought no-one would notice amongst the Olympic honours. We thought it was easier to let them slide".

[Beyond satire] "We're all in this together"

From the BBC:

Hector Sants, the former chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, is joining Barclays bank.

He has been given a new top job to improve the bank's reputation with governments and regulators internationally. His salary is not being disclosed, as he will not be a board director.

Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins said Mr Sants would ensure that all staff met the spirit and letter of the law and regulators' expectations.

"Relationships with our regulators and governments around the world are obviously also of critical importance to us," Mr Jenkins said. "With a huge wealth of private and public sector experience, and having most recently led one of the world's pre-eminent regulatory authorities, I can think of no more suitably qualified person than Hector Sants to take on these challenges."

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