A budget for working families - what does it mean for the unemployed?

You might think the populist rhetoric espoused by our newly minted treasure (still fresh and smiling out of the plastic cling wrap) in his maiden budget speech would be detrimental to the likes of TWiU listeners. Afterall, a policy of favouring 'working families' in the zero-sum game of divvying up the public pie has that mutually exclusive effect of burdening everyone else, and form our point of view, those that don't quite like that bit about 'working'.

But then I had a thought - how much emphasis is really put in that 'working' bit?

Let's take means testing the baby bonus as an example.

Wayne has capped it at combined household incomes of $150, 000.

The real criteria here, it seems, is that you have to be a family, not even working, and in fact, not working too hard.

The crux of social engineering schemes such as the baby bonus seems to me to simply be that of the family, not the honest working life. We at TWiU have thus no qualms with this, perhaps even advocate it if it's going to produce a greater legion of offspring with the unemployed ethos genetically imbued within them.

I, for one, welcome our new economic populist, productivity hampering overlords.