OPINION:The Budget is suffused with unfairness and nobody thinks there is anything odd about it, writes Vincent Browne
THE PEOPLE who brought us the medical card fiasco are also those who just over three weeks ago placed the entire viability of this society at risk by the guarantee they gave financial institutions. What confidence can we have that they have not bungled this as well, and consigned the country to additional debts of maybe €20 billion, €30 billion, €40 billion, €50 billion or more, thereby ruining the economy, devastating our society for a generation or generations to come?
The impulse to attack the aged was hardly surprising with this Government, given the presence within it of Mary Harney. It was she who sought to legitimise, via legislation, the theft of millions from old people over decades, old people who had their social welfare payments illegally taken from them in residential homes.
The Supreme Court stopped that retrospective caper, but now she has contrived to do it prospectively. Old people who need the care of the State (ie of society) will have their assets raided before and after they die.
Was it surprising that she should attempt to take from other old people a crutch they had come to rely on: the undertaking by the Government of which she was Tánaiste that, irrespective of means, they would have the assurance of a medical card?
It is splendid that the Government has been forced into the retreat they announced yesterday morning but the poison in the system remains: the refusal to retain the essential feature of the scheme - its universality.
It would be delightful if they were forced into some other reversals as well: the budget they introduced eight days ago is so suffused with unfairness.
How can it be justified to fire 1,200 teachers from the primary system and 1,000 from the secondary system? The injury this will cause to the life chances of thousands of Irish children is incalculable. An essential foundation of fairness in society is that we provide a decent education to all our children, irrespective of means, ensuring them of the chances of life fulfilment. That this would be compromised now by attacking the primary system, where life chances are determined, is inexplicable.
That, in addition, the poorest of the working poor, those so poor as to be outside the tax net hitherto, should now be subjected to taxation through the universal income levy (note the double standards on universality) is astonishing. That the poor reliant on social welfare should have their supports cut in real terms by the failure even to match inflation for social welfare recipients is just part of the ideology that informs this budget. (Yes, the provision for social welfare exceeds marginally the general projected inflation rate, but for poorer people, the inflation rate is higher as prices of essentials rise at a faster rate.)
All of these measures are deplorable. But doesn't it say something that the only deplorable measure in this budget to have caused such universal outrage is a measure that afflicts not the poorest of the poor or the less-well-off generally but those in the middle-classes: the old people who were to be subjected to a means test for the over-70s medical card? This is unjust because of the expectations that were aroused by the commitment made by this Government seven years ago when introducing that over-70s medical card scheme. But at least equally unjust is what has been done to young people whose lives will be compromised by the cuts in education; the poor subjected to tax now for the first time; and the social welfare recipients whose welfare payments are now cut in real terms. Their voices go unheard, unlike the voices of the would-be-afflicted over-70s.
There was no need for this. We remain a very wealthy society with average household gross incomes over €107,000. We could sustain the present recession without difficulty if we were indeed "all together in this", but that is not how society is organised and nobody thinks there is anything odd or unfair about this.
But wouldn't you at least think that the burden of readjustments in times of economic hardship would be borne not by everyone, but by those earning five, 10, 20 times the average; that the burden would be confined to everyone earning above the average? What would be wrong about a tax increase of, say, 15 per cent for everyone earning over €200,000. Barrack Obama is proposing a tax increase in the US of around that, so if that is okay for America (as it seems to be) why not here?
Commentary on the Government's travails has included the agitated observation about the lack of "discipline" within the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party in enforcing the cuts - as though discipline in the pursuit of injustice was to be admired. And as for the Greens? They want to save the planet and, apparently, it's too bad about the people.
An abject lot, those Greens.
A final reminder: if these are the geniuses who thought up the medical card ruse, have they made a similar mess of the bank guarantee? If they did, game over.