Suffer little children: families cut deepest by changes
BEWARE the first of May. If you're aged roughly 30- to 40-something, it's the day you really start to lose.
Your mortgage relief is gone, your early childcare payment halved, then killed off. No matter what you save in lower interest charges, you'll be seriously out of pocket.
That's before you pay increased tax and levies, assuming you've still got a job.
It's difficult to imagine a less family-friendly Budget than yesterday's.
Hard times do make for hard decisions yet there's a fundamentally dispiriting attitude in the new measures, probably due to the absolute lack of structural reform at any social level and a worrying lack of fresh, creative thinking.
The good news is that social welfare isn't cut and that child benefit stays for now but will be means tested next year.
Reassuring
It is reassuring that the unemployed, elderly, widowed, disabled and disadvantaged will receive their entitlements at 2008 levels.
The bad news is that family incomes are affected negatively over a range of measures because of its scattergun approach.
It will be difficult for families to plan ahead and be prudent because the Government hasn't shared its future plans.
The Budget is especially unfriendly to couples who bought a home in or before 2002, had Baby One in 2006 and are expecting Baby Two any day now.
However, you scrape through 2009, you face into 2010 losing €1,000 per young child and without any increase in child benefit to help pay necessities such as crèche fees. This amounts to an extra tax on working parents.
The Budget is almost as unfriendly to average-earning families with senior cycle children, who, from nowhere, will have to beg or borrow the cost of third-level fees, while also losing their mortgage relief.
Students won't be able to work their way through college, because grown adults are competing for the jobs students used to claim, so they and/or their folks will have to borrow, and be indebted for years.
A family earning €50,000 will be hit by a minimum €2,500 a year and likely much more. At €75, 000 you're giving an extra €4,500 minimum. Add on crèche or college fees and you're looking at five-figure sums from reduced take-home pay.
The news that child benefit stays, for now, shouldn't distract from the policy hole at the core of the Budget's family measures.
It is a mess.
The necessary focus on saving the country from bankruptcy has distracted Government from the social and human effects of being told there's nowhere to go but down.
It's also distracted attention from the urgent need to use this economic crisis to initiate welfare reform, not by crudely chopping schemes or entitlements but by designing a system that reflects the social and economic realities of these times.
In a sensible world, the welfare system would be individualised to bring it into line with the tax system.
Things would run more smoothly and more fairly.
As of now, the social welfare system is a dinosaur that survived only because no one had the will to change it.
It's an ungainly creature that consumes a huge amount of taxes and will be vulnerable for severe cuts if the Government's current measures don't work.
Suffered
Families today don't now what faces them.
They've already suffered if they have a child with emotional, physical or emotional difficulties.
They are worried about how to pay their bills.
But they must be very unsettled at having to take the hit for troubles that really weren't of their making.
The challenge for them is to lead their families from the front -- and maintain family morale.
- MEDB RUANE
