Next week, it's the Budget and all the "are you up, are you down?" ready reckoners the morning after. I do believe voice recognition software could be trained to capture the flow of Mr McCreevy's discourse, his dramatic hesitations, sudden torrents and cascading free flows. The data could be fed into the tax calculators and, instantly, one could see the ups and downs. A bit like Alan Greenspan and the wire services.

Who wins and loses has been the focus of post-Budget analysis for years, but in current boom times, it's more a question of who wins more than others. The accusations of selfishness abound; anyone who dares celebrate cuts in the marginal rate of income tax will be berated. Stick to silent satisfaction.

How about this then. Let the Budget give me nothing. I don't want any so-called giveaway from the misnamed beneficence of the Finance Minister. A net zero would be just fine.

But I do want the zero to be the result of pluses and minuses, most definitely. On the minus side first, my pre-Budget submission, desperately late at this stage, would be to abolish what are called middle-class tax reliefs. We don't need those middle-class tax breaks any more.

For instance, mortgage interest relief is slowly being wound down as a real benefit. It is supposed to benefit those desperately seeking to afford a first-time house purchase, but with its origins in times of high interest rates and when the forces for a rental sector were much weaker, it has lost a lot of its rationale.

Most people who benefit from mortgage interest relief are not struggling first-time buyers. It is also well accepted now that measures which increase the purchasing power of house buyers only really benefit builders and do nothing to increase supply. Mortgage interest relief has long been criticised by economists as bad tax planning. The circumstances are now right to heed those arguments.

Next on the list is the old PAYE allowance. What on earth is this? A small token of a few hundred pounds after tax to compensate PAYE workers of all salary levels for not being able to avoid tax as the self-employed supposedly can. In the 20 years or so since it was introduced, the tax collection system for the self-employed has improved considerably. Policy should not compensate one section of taxpayers for a failure to tax others adequately. Rather, it should address whatever deficiencies do exist.

There is no need for a thing called a PAYE allowance as part of the on-going tax system. This is not to say there is no moral justification for the PAYE sector being compensated for having been over-taxed in the past, although the practicalities of making a once-off repayment to the PAYE sector, and the equity of any system, argue against that idea.

Third, there is no need for a universal untaxed payment of our own money back to us, such as children's allowance. I know that people argue that this goes to mothers predominantly, but I wonder how long that behavioural reason for a tax policy decision will remain valid, with more and more married women working.

Apart from that, it is a waste to collect tax and then pay it back universally to anyone with children no matter how well-off they are. Well-off people, indeed the majority of taxpayers, do not need to get lump sum untaxed payments. This is a mix-up of welfare and tax that is inefficient and not justified by equity.

With a major plank of addressing the childcare issue being an increase in children's allowance, I don't expect that Mr McCreevy will announce that it is to be taxed. It would be correct, but politically horrible.

So, there are three minuses against me, middle-class man. The plus? In return for all that, I would dearly like to see the tax bands and rates, particularly the top rate, cut to balance the whole lot.

I realise that the Minister can't do this in one stroke. But is it selfish for me to argue that, at my current level of income, the Exchequer can have the same amount as before, even if that meant accumulating a surplus?

Is it selfish for me to ask that in return for stripping me of my middle-class tax breaks, that if I do manage to earn some more next year, I can keep more of it? I do not believe that the Government should maintain a high rate of personal tax to support a built-in requirement that it should get nearly half of all additional income earned.

Oliver O'Connor is editor of the monthly publication, Finance; email: ooconnor@indigo.ie