The problem with government budgets from whatever party has always been trying to determine what they actually mean, and whom exactly they might benefit or harm. After a week of controversial leaks that even had Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House, complaining that due process had been abused, there were really very few surprises left in Rachel Reeves’ first budget.

The whole problem with budgets and spending is that nothing can avoid the obvious reality that there is only ever a certain amount of money  in the pot, primarily derived from taxation, and fiscal good news is simply another way of saying that money is going to be shunted from one place to another. So there will always be losers, and that’s invariably the poor and vulnerable who have the lowest capacity to absorb financial deprivations, whilst conversely there are very few financial penalties that actually diminish the position of the more wealthy. When you have comfortable personal wealth, taxation may hurt a little but you have the buffer to deal with it; at the lower end of society pennies can make all the difference.

Recent chancellors have tended to justify their budget calculations by complaining that a previous administration and/or unanticipated global events have decimated the coffers of the Treasury. In coming to power in the Summer, Labour was quick to argue this familiar retort  – that the black hole created by austerity was far deeper than anyone had anticipated, and the air quickly became acrid with dire warnings that drastic things were going to have to happen if the country was ever to be put back on its feet again.

It seems that over the past few months the worries and gloomy predictions must have been somewhat off target, as the Chancellor delivered an ebullient budget this morning that promises big taxes, big borrowing and big spending, to a degree that left analysists and political opponents somewhat bewildered as to how such things might be achieved, and what the real consequences for ordinary people might be.

Of course, the question of who constitutes an ‘ordinary person’ is a moot point, as the Prime Minster has been speaking a great deal over the past week or two about how this budget will not damage “working people”, without being able to establish exactly who or who not is a “working person.” The government line seemed to be that it was an employed person who receives a pay packet at the end of the week, a definition that is fraught with difficulties and challenges – as the Prime Minister and his colleagues quickly found out to their acute embarrassment. The low point of the week was probably the BBC presenter Laura Keunssberg bemoaning that ‘working people’ really ought to include those who “have scrimped and saved to become the landlords of one or two properties”.

In a similar vein there have been complaints from parents who are currently able to afford to send their children to very exclusive private schools, but apparently may now not be able to do so because of the imposition of VAT on the school fees. The notion that parents who have ‘scrimped and saved’ to meet annual fees in the tens of thousand of pounds will now have to send their kids off to state schools because of an additional annual hit of a couple of grand for VAT is nonsensical; it ignores the fact that such parents self-evidently have significant disposable income in the first place, and that it will still be down to private schools to decide to what extent they pass on this additional taxation – many of whom have said they won’t. In fact a group representing 1,400 private schools has already said it’s going to put up a legal challenge to the VAT on fees imposition.

Similarly, concerns have been expressed about the impact of the chancellor’s budget on inheritance tax, with farmers in particular complaining –  as previously they have been exempt from paying any inheritance tax when passing a farm down to the next generation. Under new rules such assets over £1m will be taxed at 20%. Whilst this may seem like a fair request for wealthy landowners to share their good fortune, the government will need to be very cautious here, as the reality is that the wealth of most farmers is tied up in their land and is thus only realised when it is sold, and the farm is potentially lost – too often to land hungry developers keen to appease government house-building targets.

In practice, the prices for farmed produce have been under attack for years, as successive governments have lauded free market capitalism and did little or nothing to protect UK food production, an absolutely critical resource in an increasingly unstable word. We may like to enjoy luxuries, but farmers we need three time a day, and deprivation and suicide rates amongst an increasingly struggling agricultural community certainly won’t be helped by discouraging skilled farming families to divest from generations of feeding the public. Of course, there are other tax loopholes in this area which will also serve to underscore that wealthy landowners will be able to escape such taxes, whilst smallholders and marginal farms will be the worst affected.

In the broadest terms, the amount of taxation that we are all contributing as a country has now reached a record high – by 2030 under the current proposals, 38% of the gross public income will be going to the tax office, the highest figure since the Second World War. This will make the state bigger than it has ever been, but don’t think for a moment that this will bring some radical transformation in public services, in fact the increases proposed today and going forward are very unlikely to keep up with the burden of servicing health, welfare and the eye-watering interest payments on the public debt.

At the level of blunt philosophy, government budgets are actually a carefully balanced exercise in allocating misery and happiness. According to the most reliable research, the austerity policies introduced in 2010 by the Cameron government resulted in some 150,000 excess deaths, and recent study in the British Medical Journal led by Dr David Walsh of the Glasgow Centre for Population Health claimed that contrary to what been admitted previously, the it was more likely that “approximately 335,000 additional deaths occurred between 2012 and 2019′ due to the UK government’s austerity policies.

Whilst it may seem ambitious to place such deaths at the door of government policies, it’s a very simple fact that decreased welfare spending means decreased welfare provision and there is firm evidence that at least 300,000 additional deaths in the wake of the 2010 cuts were defined as being ‘additional’ because – with good health provision, social care and poverty support – they were perfectly avoidable. Put another way, a decision was made somewhere to let 300,000 people die in favour of a 1% cut in healthcare expenditure. Given that this funding was then moved elsewhere to appease voters other concerns, or at least the government’s conviction that such concerns existed, how exactly do we weigh up or measure the morality of allowing hundreds of thousands to die in favour of – for instance – providing more funding for wind farms? One might want to argue that more wind farms means cheaper energy, means lower fuel bills, and then people can heat their houses more and buy more food, which has a survivability benefit all of its own. But are these moral considerations even beng debated?

When presented as part of a government budget, or of general policy decisions, the emphasis on the presentation is all about “boosting the economy” and “boosting people’s wealth”. This is underscored by reliance on the government’s Office of Budget Responsibility to have independently assessed fiscal decisions and their impact on the general population. But these are always economic calculations dressed up in fiscal economics and delivered with ambitious promises of better days ahead – one of the Prime Minister’s favourite phrases of the moment, and a central plank of his mission-led, long term goals style of government. ‘Jam tomorrow’ may be an old adage but it’s still a central fallback of many government policies, be they capitalist or socialist, and unfortunately whilst the boldest plans may indeed need the longest term to implement, it’s also handy that long term strategies also need a long wait to verify, and clearly many voters may never live to see whether or not such targets are ever achieved.

For a snapshot of the reality of government budgets, you could do worse than to have listened to care worker Amina Mitchell, who was topped in the street this afternoon by a BBC reporter and asked what Rachel Reeves’ budget meant for her. Amina said that the increased carers allowance meant that her current £151 a week salary is going to increase to about £196 per week, making her £45 a week better off.

“I nearly started crying when I heard about the announcement. It means at the end of the month I won’t be struggling, worried or anxious,” Amina told the BBC. “If I want to get extra food that month I can, I won’t have to ask my nan for extra funds.”

The really sad thing is that actually Amina is quite lucky. If she shops particularly carefully and restricts herself to cheap, additive-loaded foodstuffs she may indeed get a couple of meals out of her extra £45, which she has said will actually come from working extra hours each week. For many others, all the bluster and bluff about budgets and the fiscal lecturing and complaining will only put a few single pounds extra into their pocket each week, if anything at all. Building a better, healthier and more prosperous Britain may be the rhetoric, and socialism may now be its colour, but the fiscal strategies are still pointing squarely at sheltering the wealthy and exploiting – or at best ignoring – the plight of the poorest and most vulnerable in society.

The past decades of austerity have evidently led to tens of thousands of unnecessary and avoidable deaths; sadly until we get morally led rather than economically-led government policies we’re very unlikely to make any meaningful impact on the sum total of  human social welfare.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian