Economies in crisis - Still taking comfort in delusion

AN exchange — it would be delusional to call them negotiations — will begin this morning between our Government and the EU/IMF on reversing cuts to our minimum wage, reducing the lowest VAT rate and changing tax arrangements for first-time house buyers to help them cope with the tsunami threatening their financial security.

There’s no point in pretending that there’s any significant latitude to make things easier or even fairer for all of us available to those involved in today’s meetings. The options are limited and the inevitable implications of our terribly skewed national budget make a whole range of cuts to wages, social welfare payments, services and jobs as close to a certainty as to make little or no difference. How can it be otherwise?

Our representatives are asking permission to impose a little less flogging if we agree to a bit more thrashing. Though it’s a long way from rearranging the deck chairs on Captain Edward John Smith’s ill-fated White Star liner — which hit its iceberg 99 years ago this Friday — we might yet contrive to get to that point unless we take one of those hard, honest reality checks that can be, to use another of the day’s awful phrases, kicked down the road for only so long.