This week Caritas released a report called A Minimum Essential Budget for a Decent Living - 2024.

It revealed that food expenses dominate the financial burden on low-income families in Malta, consuming up to 56% of their annual budget.

By and large this is what low income families around the world get to fork out, plus or minus. In fact, a useful spin-off would be to compare what the low-income families in different countries get to pay: that would give us a useful indication of the different levels of different countries in this regard.

Most media houses covered in one way or another the main conclusions of the report but few, as far as I could see, bothered to go beyond the report and give it some sort of context.

The worst offender, in my opinion, was the Nationalist Party. This called a conference given by Claudette Buttigieg, Alex Perici Calascione, Jerome Caruana Cilia, Graham Bencini and Ivan Castillo - in other words among the most respected of its front bench.

But these, at least according to the report published by the party itself, contented themselves with reproducing the main bones of the Caritas report without giving it a wider context.

To my amazement neither the media which reported the Caritas report nor the Nationalist Party thought fit to compare the findings of the report with the Stabbilita initiative launched with a lot of fanfare by Minister Silvio Schembri at the beginning of the year and wall-to-wall advertising all over the place.

An initiative that was meant to cut down on the increased costs of mainly food items due to the galloping inflation through joint action by the players in the field. That is anyway what the initiative said it wanted to do.

They even commissioned a side report to beef up the report's fundamentals.

Now I admit that strictly speaking the Caritas report is not in the same context as the government's initiative - it's like comparing oranges to lemons.

But the subject is the same - how the weaker section of the population is coping with the increased costs as a result of inflation.

The Caritas report tells us what kind of income must a couple with two children, a single mother with two children and two elderly persons have to cope with the costs caused by inflation.

The study is mesmerising and goes into all sorts of figures.

But neither the report itself nor any commentary on it that I have seen saw fit to hazard the conclusion that the figures of the Caritas report mean only one thing - the collapse of the much touted Stabbilta programme.

It did not work, it could never work, it was only meant as a decoy in the run-up to the European Parliament election.

In fact, it was soon forgotten and the media itself and the Opposition party too did not see fit to remind people about it.

So now we know, with facts at hand, that all the boasting in its regard, by Minister Schembri and even by the prime minister was all poppycock.

It's like a centre forward having an open goal in front of him and shooting the ball out.

The government's initiative was to put some pressure (not too much or people would be reminded of the bulk buying disaster of the Labour government of the 1980s) on importers and retailers to get them to help bring prices down.

It did not work, as we always said it wouldn't. If we hadn't wasted all this time re-inventing the wheel, we would probably have done what normal countries have been doing and are succeeding.

And we would have understood the futility of locking energy prices which is wreaking havoc with our economy and our finances.

But, I forget, in the coming budget we are going to get the biggest tax reduction in history, the prime minister told us on Sunday.

On to the next delusion after the Stabbilita one.

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