Debt by a thousand cuts, however it’s sold

It’s a dangerous endeavour to comment on a budget the morning after it was presented high on pageant but low on detail.

There are always ‘bits and bobs’ in the printed text that the minister deliberately forget to mention in the speech.

The bottom line is this is another negative budget, more focused on satisfying political needs than dealing with he needs of the country. It is, to borrow and mangle a cliché, debt by a thousand cuts.

Cutting maternity benefits, reducing payments to the young unemployed, removing telephone supports from the elderly and arbitrarily refusing medical cards to those in greatest financial or medical need does not suggest that this was a people budget.

Increasing and then extending the pension levy despite its promises just delays the inevitable.

In the Dáil yesterday morning Enda Kenny took considerable exception to Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou MacDonald’s comments that the budget’s efforts on job creation were ‘Mickey Mouse’. It’s not just Sinn Féin who believe that direct job creation by Government is a waste of time and is simply just another way of massaging the dole queue statistics. However, if the statistics on the 9% Vat rate for tourism are correct then its retention can only be good.

Indeed, our experience has been, with this government and all of its predecessors that funds allegedly collected for a particular purpose are never ring-fenced. As a result the funds collected end up as just more government revenue to allow it to continue to avoid doing what is right for the economy not simply satisfying government’s own narrow objectives.

Those objectives are simple, kick the can down the road and do enough to get re-elected. That might sound unfair, but it’s what a lot of people believe.

It is common to blame the last government for everything. It should realise that some of us remember that even in the height of the excesses by the Fianna Fáil and Green government both Labour and Fine Gael were arguing that the Government was not going far enough. God forbid that Fianna Fáil had gone even further. We can only guess how much worse the mess we are in might be. It’s time to move forward and not keep looking back.

The headline items of our budgets over the last several years were driven by the troika. However, the detail of how these targets might be achieved is down to the government of the day. It cannot blame the troika for how it chooses to prepare its budgets. Targeting the young, old, and sick is its choice.

Not dealing with the banks/bankers and those others who carry major responsibility for our economic demise is also its choice.

One of the major elements demanded by the troika but thus far avoided has been public sector reform. It has not been touched in any meaningful way. Ministers and politicians are among the highest paid in the world. Our senior mandarins occupy a similar position.

Enda Kenny foisted a referendum on us a few weeks ago that no one wanted — the turn out proved that — on the basis of saving an alleged €20 million. An overhaul of the over-the-top salaries and pensions paid to permanent and political government members would recover that €20m in no time and we would not need a referendum to agree on it.

The Government could also bring in, on a short-term emergency basis if necessary, increased taxation for those earning over €100,000. Despite what he might think they are not going to run away. Where are they going to run to?

Yet Enda would prefer to go after the old, the sick even the dead, rather than give us an economy that is designed to meet the rigours of today’s world. Shame on you, Enda. Shame on you, Eamonn.