It's a great old country - £5 a week for old-age pensioners and a bar of chocolate for the kids. Perhaps that's oversimplifying it - it's a great old country for single old age pensioners.
The pension goes up by £5 a week from June, but the extra amount for a spouse only goes up by £1.50.
And an old age pensioner being cared for by a son or daughter need not expect to see the carer jumping for joy today.
One of the most constant complaints of carers is that the rules for the Carer's Allowance are such that very few qualify for the full allowance and indeed only a small minority of carers qualify for an allowance at all.
If the Carers' Association has got its figures right, changes introduced in this Budget will enable an extra 50 - yes, fifty - carers to get the allowance.
But what about the children? Children are practically invisible in the social welfare sections of this Budget.
There is to be no increase in the weekly child dependant allowance paid to people on social welfare.
In one sense that's fair enough - the policy adopted over the past few years has been to transfer child support into the monthly Child Benefit and the last government implemented hefty increases in Child Benefit in pursuit of that policy.
It is a policy that has many advantages. For instance, because Child Benefit is not means tested it is not reduced when a person moves from being a welfare recipient to being an employee.
But this renders it all the more important that Child Benefit be adequate.
This Budget gives an extra £1.50 a month to each of the first two children in a family. That works out at just 35p a week.
You can buy a bar of chocolate for 35p. So that's the good news. The bad news is you have to make it last for a week.
Let us be scrupulously fair about this. For each of the third and subsequent children the Child Benefit will be increased by £3 a month.
That's two bars of chocolate a week. So if you had four children you could afford to buy six bars of chocolate a week between them out of this Santa Claus budget.
There is only one slight problem: they'll have to wait until September.
You see, the big people - Mammy and Daddy and Grandma and Grandad - will get their increase in June and then the children will get theirs in September.
Another way of looking at it is that it will be nearly a year before the increase for children comes through.
This is in a context in which children are at greater risk than anyone else of being poor in this society.
The Combat Poverty Agency suggested that child poverty be tackled by means of a substantial rise in Child Benefit - it proposed a flat rate increase of £7 per child per month.
Such a proposal seems wildly optimistic - yet it's only £1.60 a week.
The general increases in social welfare come to about four per cent per week - a rise of about 2 per cent in real terms, if inflation continues to stay low.
It has to be acknowledged that a great many budgets for a great many years have given welfare increases in line with inflation.
A Budget which gives increases above inflation, however modest, is welcome, as Combat Poverty said last night.
Also welcome is the fact that the majority of payments are now above the rates recommended by the Commission on Social Welfare - though, again as Combat Poverty pointed out, this still leaves unemployment assistance and the supplementary welfare allowance below the rates recommended by the Commission on Social Welfare 12 years ago.
One is, of course, grateful for any increases for social welfare recipients from Mr McCreevy, given his record of the Dirty Dozen cuts when he was minister for social welfare.
Yet this Budget, with the Celtic Tiger roaring and strutting around the place, could have done more.
It was, as Combat Poverty said, "the first real test of the Government's National Anti-Poverty Strategy" and it has failed the test.
Readers who have not heard of the National Anti-Poverty Strategy need not worry - clearly there is no hurry about implementing it and they have plenty of time to acquaint themselves with its finer points.
In the meantime, when the adults get their social welfare increase in June, we can only hope they won't spend it all on themselves and that now and then they'll remember to buy the odd bar of chocolate for the children.