Newfoundland just had it’s first of what are likely to be several austerity budgets and having gone through Irish austerity I have to say this is the austerity budget to beat all austerity budgets. I won’t go into details here because there are just so many things wrong with this budget that I could rant for pages and still not have covered everything. I’ll sum it up by saying if you ever wanted to see a budget that could make you wish for the warm loving embrace of the International Monetary Fund this is it. It’s enough to get Newfoundlanders out to protest in their hundreds and thousands, which for a place where protest attendance is usually numbered in single digits shows that the Liberal government may have overestimated how far they can push the ordinary people.