Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Change to scheduled programming!

We regret to inform you that tonight's scheduled episode of "I'm A Civil Servant Get Me Out Of Here" has been postponed so we can bring you a bit of a post-budget rant.

Budget 2010 was a predictable mixture of the good, the bad and the bullshit.

The Good:
  • The public service has finally been taken in hand! At long last the decades of undeserved pay rises have come to an end. Not only have the public service had their pay cut but their top class pensions also look like they will be reviewed. Welcome to the real world public service - you now know what it's like for the rest of us poor fools who have been living with pay cuts, deteriorating conditions and general misery for the last few years.

  • Brian Latchico Lenihan has reversed his ridiculous decision of last year and returned the standard rate of VAT to 21%. That, coupled with Britain's impending VAT increase, should make shopping up North a less attractive prospect. The decision to reduce the price of a pint by 12 cent will also help in this regard.

  • A prescription charge of 50 cent per item has been introduced for medical card holders. Hopefully this may lead to medical card holders and their doctors thinking twice before allowing pharmacists to overcharge the state for trolley loads of overpriced and sometimes unneeded drugs.

  • Hospital consultants will have their pay cut by 20%. We'll see how a nice financial smackdown affects their god complexes and general lack of respect for patients.


The Bad:
  • Children's allowance cut by €16 a month. My main problem with this is that it will affect people who are already struggling with the high overheads associated with bringing up a family. The government were too spineless to take on the pensioners again and they certainly didn't want to piss off their mates in the horse racing or greyhound industry. So they decided to butcher the finances of the young families of Ireland instead of sharing the burden amongst all sectors of society. But the publicans of Ireland can rest easy tonight as the child benefit cuts don't apply to their reliable dole dependant customers.

  • Entitlements under the Treatment Benefit Scheme have been reduced to "examination only". Essentially this means that the hard working tax payers of Ireland are no longer entitled to subsidised dental or optical treatment. No more free cleaning, subsidised fillings or eye glasses. What a great reward for paying your taxes then - another kick in the hole delivered by the Latchico.

  • No increase in income tax. Despite my complete lack of sympathy for the public service there is something inherently unfair about cutting the pay of someone earning €30,000 a year by 5% and not increasing tax on an overpaid fossil like George "The Gargoyle" Hook. Surely the necessary bitter pill of a pay cut would have been easier for public servants to swallow if the whole country had to face some sort of a token tax increase.


The Bullshit:

My biggest beef with this budget is the measure introduced as a kind of political reacharound to the bunch of imbeciles that are the Green Party. These tofu eating, city dwelling, tree hugging ass clowns have participated in a financial and moral holocaust for the past couple of years in return for the introduction of this unjust tax. They have ensured that a generation of people who have been forced to live in badly built and poorly located shit holes will have to pay a substantial penalty because they don't have the luxury of the 46a and the DART on their doorsteps. Try telling the poor bastard who is forced to commute from Mullingar to Tallaght because he couldn't afford a house anywhere else that a 5 cent per litre "carbon tax" is good for the planet. Try telling him to use a non-existent public transport system to cut his carbon emissions. Not that the green sleeveens care about the average slob. They serve a class of self styled dogooder who drinks fair trade coffee, lives in a mortgage free gaff in a leafy suburb and worships Duncan Stewart as a god. May they taste our collective lightning when the next election comes around!

No comments:

Post a Comment