Senator Bacik: The Budget is a bitter pill for families
A Bitter Pill for Families
Ivana Bacik, Labour Senator for Dublin University
9th December 2009
This Budget is a bitter pill for families to swallow. The cuts in child benefit will force many into poverty; the reductions in welfare payments will throw many more onto the breadline. In slashing benefits for children and the young unemployed, the Minister for Finance has picked on the softest targets.
This is a deeply cowardly budget. Not only will it hit the weakest hardest, but it will also block the road to economic recovery. The Minister spoke of the need to stimulate the economy and boost consumer confidence, but by making draconian cuts to the incomes of the poorest families, he will ensure instead a reduction in the spending power of ordinary people – and an even more severe drop in consumer confidence.
Job creation should have been the main focus of this Budget. Instead, the Minister provided only for 26,000 extra training places – woefully inadequate at a time when we have over 400,000 unemployed.
Fairer taxation should have been another focus - but the Minister left income taxes alone and instead cut public spending drastically – without giving any hope to those families facing the loss of their jobs and the repossession of their homes.
In his Budget speech, the Minister made some bizarre references to JFK and the Kennedy family – and announced funding for a local project to honour them in Co. Wexford, This was a most inappropriate reference on a day of critical national importance. He said almost nothing about NAMA, yet the crazy level of debt being shouldered by every woman, man and child in Ireland under that scheme is likely to throw all his careful calculations about containing the national debt into disarray.
Of course the reason why we face a multi-billion euro debt under NAMA is this Government’s mismanagement of the economy. For the past 12 years, Fianna Fáil and their allies caved in to the interests of bankers and builders, thereby creating an artificial boom based on unsustainable stamp duty revenues and tax breaks for development. That shortsighted economic policy has now come back to haunt us all, as ordinary people are left with crippling mortgage repayments on homes worth only a fraction of their purchase price.
The Government have asked for our trust in their ability to get us out of the mess they created - yet they have missed the opportunity to adopt a budget focused on job creation and fair taxation. By contrast, the Labour Party’s five point plan for National Recovery is based on a coherent jobs strategy, a moratorium on home repossessions, negotiated agreements on public sector pay, and taxation changes based on fairness rather than on soft targets.
This budget is anti-family, anti-children and anti-recovery. A bitter pill for us all to swallow, indeed.