I see George Osborne is preparing to make the poorest people pay even more for the mess capitalism has got us into. He told the Treasury select committee that “many billions” would need to be “shaved” from welfare to avoid deeper cuts in Whitehall.

Many billions? That doesn’t sound like a shave, George. That sounds like a major operation needing a general anaesthetic.

George wants us to know he finds some of these decisions “difficult”. The decisions only seem to be difficult, however, when it comes to cutting the Whitehall bureaucracy. In the case of cutting welfare, he can just go ahead and do it. Not that he mentions the bureaucracy. He indicates that any further cuts in Whitehall would endanger education and science. Well, that’s sliced-bread territory for sure – can’t touch them. So what to do? Let George explain:

“I don’t think all the savings need and should be made within the departments. I think we should make a balanced judgment about where government spends its money and, yes, we have got to make difficult decisions to save money further in Whitehall, but we should accompany that with savings in the welfare budget.”

So what are the results of these “accompanying” savings in welfare? They sound a bit like a piano in the background, soothing, encouraging, comforting. But it’s not quite like that. Just one example will do – and it affects some of George and Dave’s favourite people: the “strivers”, the people who are allegedly happy to work for low pay rather than claim benefits because, again allegedly, “they know it is the right thing to do”. Hidden away in two sentences in Osborne’s autumn statement are £600m worth of cuts to Universal Credit. The Guardian explains that the cut comes

“because Universal Credit work allowances will now be maintained at their current cash level for three years from 2013. The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts inflation (CPI) of 8.7% over this period, meaning that the value of universal credit work allowances is set to fall significantly in real terms. During last year’s autumn statement it was announced that most working-age benefits and tax credits were to be uprated by 1% a year for three years from 2013. Taken together, the 1% uprating and the reduction in work allowances mean that by 2017 a single-parent household will be up to £420 per year worse off and a couple with children up to £230 a year worse off.”

No wonder Gavin Kelly of the Resolution Foundation calls it “a real blow to the working poor”. “It’s the sort of stealthy measure”, he says, “that often attracts little attention but still has a real impact.”

“Little attention” was George’s aim, of course when he hid this lot away in two sentences. The question for us all is: should someone as tricky as this be in charge of the public purse? Or, indeed, our welfare?

Some of the detail: see http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/12/osborne-working-families-reduced-allowances-2017