The Work and Pensions Secretary has taken aim at those on benefits but they are not the only ones taxpayers pay for
There is nothing worse than people who live off the state for decades and give nothing back.
Help out the unfortunate when they need it, by all means - but give them hundreds of thousands of pounds because they won't get off their arse and do a proper job? Shocking.
As Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has rightly pointed out, it is"madness" for the state to subsidise large numbers of children born to parents who do not stop to wonder first if they can afford them.
And it would be fairer to the "vast majority" of responsible, normal, reasonable taxpayers to limit the amount they are made to cough up for these irresponsible breeders, who as soon as anyone suggests they're being a teensy bit greedy with the far-from bulging public purse start whinging about "fairness".
After all, IDS has promised to cut another £10billion off the state's handout bill and it has to be found somewhere. Obviously, the people who take handouts they don't deserve should be the first to take a cut.
So let's start by talking about someone who lives off the state and has little experience of the world of work you and I know.
He is 58 years old and has suckled upon the publicly-funded teat for most of his life.
He's signed on the dole. He's had four children and received child benefit for all of them. He has put them each through private school, too.
His wife hasn't worked since they married, except for 15 months in which he got her a job paid by the taxpayer.
He and his colleagues eat and drink food you subsidise in a palace you pay for, he is driven around in a car you own, and when he is too old to 'work' any more you will pay for him to have a better pension than you, too.
He started out at the age of 21 with six years of taxpayer-funded military service, during which he acted as bag-carrier to a Major-General.
Then in 1981, aged 27, he left the Army and signed on the dole for several months.
He then began a period of ordinary work based upon the skills he had gained at the taxpayer's expense, and worked in sales for arms dealer GEC-Marconi.
He then moved on to a property firm, where he was made redundant after six months, and then sold gun-related magazines for Jane's Information Group.
After 11 years of this all-too brief career he succeeded in once again boarding the publicly-funded gravy train in 1992.
In the intervening 20 years he has been paid by the taxpayer every year more money than most taxpayers earn. He has topped it up, along the way, to more than six figures for a few years here and there by being more pompous than the other pigs.
In 2001 he helped his unemployed wife to have a suckle, arranging for you to pay her £15,000 to be his diary secretary.
These days he is given the grand total of £134,565 a year from the taxpayer.
He lives for free in a £2million Tudor farmhouse on his father-in-law's ancestral estate in Buckinghamshire.
He has three acres of land, a tennis court, swimming pool and some orchards, which is not bad for a life in the pay of the state.
'Who is this scumbag?' you might cry. 'Tell us his name, let the authorities know his address, let's get this guzzler out of the cushy life and show him what life is like for the rest of us,earning £7 an hour with a rise once every eight years and a pension consisting entirely of penny sweets if you're lucky.'
His name is Iain Duncan Smith, and his address is the Palace of Westminster, LondonSW1A 0AA.
It's not the insistence that the welfare bill needs cutting I object to; it's that the scissors have been given to people who really can't be trusted not to stab everyone else in the eye.
As IDS himself says: "Can there not be a limit to the fact that really you need to cut your cloth in accordance with what capabilities and finances you have?"
The trouble is he doesn't seem to have the capability to cut cloth any more than he has to get himself a proper job that might actually be of use to anyone other than warlords.
I wouldn't trust him to cut paper, never mind a welfare bill of billions.
The sooner he's back on the dole the better for all concerned - because then he'll have to live on £71 a week for 26 weeks and if he doesn't pull his finger out in that time it's all over.
If only we could say the same for the gravy train.
Mirror
