FFS. Are they being stupid or 'deliberately misleading'?

From the City AM:

CHANCELLOR George Osborne said he will clamp down on the "completely out of control" welfare state yesterday, and promised to gut £4bn from the annual benefits budget. He said the choice to sit at home "with the blinds pulled down"* is coming to an end, in an interview with the BBC. "The money won't be there to support that lifestyle," he added. The £4bn cuts to come in by 2015 are on top of the £11bn savings set out in the June Budget. Osborne said around 5m people of working age live on benefits, which costs around £192bn a year.

The £192 billion is understated for a start, the cash cost is slightly over £200 billion per year, of which over £80 billion is old age pensions (see page 89 of the DWP report). And we could add on about £90 billion for the value of personal allowances for income tax/National Insurance, which are inherently redistributive (albeit in a good way), about £40 billion for tax breaks for pensions savings (i.e. subsidies to the insurance companies) and £20 or £30 billion for the annual cost of public sector pensions, so the total cost of all this redistribution (upwards, downwards, sideways, whatever) is more like £350 billion (in very round figures).

And out of that £350 billion, how much actually relates to unemployment benefit in the traditional sense, i.e. Income Support; Jobseekers' Allowance; Incapacity Benefit; and Employment & Support Allowance that those five million people are claiming?

Click and highlight to reveal: £20 billion.

Check your answer at Table 3 of the DWP's summary (Excel)

* Hey, Georgie - I've a cunning plan on how to get such people back to work - scrap income tax, VAT etc and tax land/property values instead - that'll hugely increase work incentives and people won't be able to afford to just stay at home (unless they live in a very modest home indeed, in which case, fair play to them).