A recent report in the UK’s Sunday Times magazine stated that this generation of teenagers are going to be the first who cannot hope to be more well off, or even as well off as their parents. Those parents generally between aged between 35 and 50 who have a lifestyle our parents and grandparents never dreamt of.

While we take it for granted that each generation will be more well off, financially at least, than the previous one, various factors now seem to be militating against this, not least the scarcity and high cost of oil, gross environmental degradation which may partly explain the over abundance of natural disasters this year, escalating house prices (ever higher prices for an ever smaller space!) and the impossibility of sustaining the welfare state due to plummeting birth rates and increased longevity.

So, as we all speculate what lies in store for us tomorrow when the Prime Minister presents his Budget, it may be worth considering how Budgets as we know them may soon be a thing of the past; how the Budgets of tomorrow, or our children’s, may all be more about survival and no longer about frills like the price of fags. How the economic booms which Europe and the rest of the developed world have enjoyed for so long may soon be part of history, how we may all have to accept, if not a lowering in the standard of living, perhaps a levelling off?

This may not all be bad. There is no doubt that we are part of the spendthrift generation. We use water carelessly. All mod cons are extremely wasteful and damaging to the environment, from air-conditioners to fridges to many other appliances. We never walk anywhere. Many of us don’t send our children to the local school but ferry them to schools miles away, and private lessons everywhere else.

Our social lives are not often local either. Almost everything we do, in every facet of our lives is environmentally damaging. Yet, despite all the advances in health care, there are so many young people being diagnosed with so many cancers that we all know something is wrong, whether it is our diet, or in our air or sea or a combination, we seem to be getting less healthy not more. Despite all the advances in the past we appear to be losing our equilibrium.

Perhaps this is overly negative but I think we all have to wake up to the new realities. I agree that the increase in the surcharge was a terrible shock. I agree that perhaps it should have come earlier. But actually, whether I started paying much more in January or now, it is still difficult to find the extra cash. So I am doing like many others (and which I should have done before) and trying to cut down on consumption even more. No extra light bulbs on, much more careful with my water consumption, not jumping into the car at every opportunity but trying to rationalise my journeys.

As I was watching the usual parade of men debating the Budget on JoeGrimalive this week (funny how most of the money managers are men when women are so much better at it I think, with the usual exceptions of course!) you had to realise that nobody has a solution to our problems, that the quick fix does not exist, unless we are lucky enough to find our own oil or some other similar miracle. The unions demand that the government creates jobs. The GRTU specifically is demanding less taxation. The Employers Association Rep demanded that the government lead by example and was economical with itself before demanding economies of everyone else.

The Parliamentary Secretary for Finance, who according to Vince Farrugia is handicapped because he is only an accountant and not an economist (when are we going to stop this petty professional rivalry?!) tried to sound positive. And we do need someone to sound positive in this country. Back in 1996–1998, almost everyone who was not deep red was critical of Alfred Sant for sounding negative. He was accused, perhaps unfairly of talking down the economy. And yet today, strangely enough, we are all in Alfred Sant mode. We are all finding it difficult to be positive, perhaps because the chickens have now come home to roost and there are less and less free lunches and freebies to be had. Even inexpensive electricity is now a dream of the past, and it is just one of the many bitter pills we will have to swallow in the coming years whoever is in government, with or without EU membership.

And yet, most of us in Malta still have a lifestyle that our counterparts in most EU member States bar the wealthiest would envy. Perhaps we should all wake up from our slumber cum bad dream, stop feeling so irritable, make the most of what we have and work that much harder to give our children, if not the financial lifestyle we had, a cleaner and a healthier Malta than the one we have to date.