Despite harsh nature of budget, there is still a lot of pain to come

BUDGET 2010 is quite an extraordinary budget. It is one of the thinnest budget books seen in some time and the speech was very short. It is dominated by expenditure measures, with little of immediate interest on the tax side. For example there was no change in tax bands, allowances or rates, but there is a promise of tax pain to come further down the road.

Most of the budget had also been leaked over the past couple of weeks, so the Government appears to have done a reasonably good job in managing expectations and there is little in the budget that should come as a shock to anybody who has been observing the budgetary debate in recent weeks.

Having said that, an awful lot of people will be considerably worse off come January 1, particularly public sector workers.