On Tuesday the Budget 2018 was announced by the Minister of Finance Paschal Donohoe. He was talking for about 1 hour about the state of the country, the future of the economy and about all the changes that 2018 will bring regarding taxes, charges, social welfare, minimum salary, subsidies etc.

It wasn’t an exciting speech and it is certainly not an exciting budget and since most aspects were already “leaked” beforehand, there were very very few surprises. As it seems, everybody will get a bit more money, but it is a tiny amount of money so no big parties!

Richard Boyd Barrett from People Before Profit is not someone I usually agree with, but in this case he was spot on. He said “This is a budget of crumbs.”

The only thing that got my blood boiling, but I will write about that another time, is the nonsensical sugar tax that will be introduced in April 2018.

Today, though, I want to point out another odd thing. Why is it that all Finance Ministers suffer from an ego-syndrome when they announce the budget. The current minister is not the first one that constantly talked about “I will….”, “I have decided…”, “I am increasing…”, “I am allocating….”, “I am providing….”. What is this nonsense?

No Minister of Finance makes these decisions on his own. He needs to agree them with the Taoiseach, other ministers, coalition partners and in the current government even with the Fianna Fail opposition and before all that, the whole work was done not by the Minister but the employees in his department. So would a “we” not be more appropriate than the constant “I, i, i,….” or “me, me, me, me” focus?

Politicians are odd animals anyway and nearly all are power hungry beasts, but the budget speech is a special ego trip every year, it seems.

I know you will not click on this link. ;-) But in case you want to read the whole speech, you will find it here.