The wrong people are living in fear of a hatchet budget

Schools and free third level education. Transport, capital projects and social welfare. Wages, child benefit and childcare.As the Government puts the finishing touches to its emergency budget - due out next week - speculation is rife that any of the above staples of a healthy economy are facing the chop.The cutbacks may affect children, the guardians of our future; the unemployed, who have worked hard for years only to find themselves jobless and struggling to survive; or young families, who are mortgaged up to their necks.For those of us who are lucky to have jobs, our wages may be reduced even further by another income levy, while monies set aside for the roads we travel to work on may be recalled.There is a sense of impending doom hanging over the forthcoming budget, as there will be with successive budgets in 2010, and probably 2011.The horrible gut feeling is made all the worse by the news that the international credit rating agency, Standard and Poor, has removed Ireland"s AAA credit rating, meaning that we will find it much more difficult to borrow money.With the country tied to the euro, and politicians desperate to shift the blame for the recession to 'international circumstances', every day salvation appears to be out of our hands.But as things get worse, it becomes more and more evident that the wrong people are living in fear of budget cuts.Let us not forget how we got into this mess in the first place. Let us not forget who created the property boom, with its skyrocketing house prices and indebted young families, who mortgaged themselve to the hilt for fear of not getting on the property ladder.Let us not forget how that situation developed, and who was involved along the way. Let us not forget the years of Government where every conceivable property incentive was dreamed up to keep the golden circle happy.But now that the banks and developers have bitten off more than they can chew, we are being asked to 'share the pain'.It"s completely unfair. Businesses are going to the wall on a daily basis, and people are losing their homes.The Government spent years humming and hawing over what schools they could finance, or what hospitals they could or couldn"t expand. It was all a question of figures, we were told.And yet when the banks - private businesses run by private individuals, nothing more - got into trouble, billions upon billions of euro were ready and waiting to bail them out, and we are now paying for it in the currency of hospital beds, schools, wages and futures.These billions have been borrowed to bail out private banks, and now that our credit rating has been sliced, it will be near nigh impossible to borrow any more funds to get the economy moving.All we have heard over the past six months is nauseating platitudes about 'ten percent voluntary pay cuts' from people already earning €400,000. We have not heard anything about ministerial pensions, Government jets and the other layers of the vast financial sinkhole that is what the Sunday Independent"s Gene Kerrigan referred to as 'the culture of entitlement'.Instead of going to the top levels of government, state agencies, the civil service and the banks to inflict some justified pain, the Government has chosen to take a meat cleaver to those carrying a burden at the bottom.A Pandora"s Box scenario is on the horizon, and it will be opened when people suffering most from the recession realise that swapping one party for another will not improve their lot.They will realise that this is a systemic problem: an endemic culture of backslapping, handshakes and élite privilege which, as history has proven, will continue only as long as the people tolerate it.That"s why before finalising the emergency budget, the Cabinet and Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan would do well to reassess their definition of 'sharing the pain'.