The year is 2031. With three weeks to go until budget day, the Minister for Finance sits at her desk, exhausted by the budget negotiations. Like her predecessors, she understands the budget is less an exercise in public finance and legal administration of the State, and more a matter of internecine negotiation. She will never, ever have enough to satisfy all demands. Whether she tries to mollify most people with homoeopathic amounts or plumbs for two or three large programmes, people will leave her Budget 2032 speech saying she ‘should have done more’.  Budget decisions are always about increments. In…

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