If you're earning $150,000 a year, are you living on Struggle Street? Should we be outraged for you if some government decides you don't need family benefits?

No. Taxation statistics imply that only 3 to 4 per cent of Australians earn $150,000 a year. Compared with other Australians, they're not struggling.

Far more Australians have household incomes over $150,000. Updating the latest household income data from the Bureau of Statistics, 17 per cent of households, or one in six, have pre-tax incomes of more than $150,000.

But that's almost irrelevant to the budget cuts. The only benefit that depends on household income being under $150,000 is the baby bonus. And freezing its threshold until 2014 will deny benefits to only about 2000 families.

Coalition and media claims that households on $150,000 would lose the much bigger Family Tax Benefit B are wrong. They would lose Family Tax Benefit B, or the dependent spouse rebate or paid parental leave, only if the income of the primary earner rises over $150,000.

Anyone on that salary is not on Struggle Street. In 2008-09, only 3 per cent of Australians reported taxable incomes of $150,000 or more. Since then, household incomes per head have grown by 5 per cent. If evenly distributed, that would put 3.5 per cent of Australians above $150,000.

Tax benefit anger wasted on those earning $150,000

and on the budget .....

If you listen to the economists and commentators complaining the budget wasn't tough enough - a ''missed opportunity'' - and involves budget deficits higher than earlier expected, you could easily conclude it's a weak effort that does little to keep the economy on the right track. But you'd be misled.

It's true the budget's estimate of an underlying cash deficit of $49.4 billion for the financial year just ending is about $8 billion higher than expected in November. And the estimated deficit for the coming financial year of $22.6 billion is about $10 billion higher than earlier expected.

But just about all of that deterioration is caused by a weaker-than-expected economy, not by government spending decisions. The government's expected tax collections over the two years have been cut by $16 billion as a result of all the natural disasters locally and in Japan, the appreciation in the dollar (which cuts the foreign earnings of Australian companies) and the lingering effect of the recession we supposedly didn't have, which left many companies with losses (which they are now charging against their more recent profits, thus reducing their liability for company tax).

So these setbacks can't be blamed on a government that isn't trying.

It's also true that, though Wayne Swan - or more likely, Penny Wong - achieved savings worth $22 billion over four years (with two-thirds of the savings coming from spending cuts and the remainder from the temporary flood levy and cuts in ''tax expenditures'' or concessions), these have been offset by new spending programs worth about $17 billion over four years.

Net savings of $5 billion over four years isn't a lot to write home about. That's what the critics were saying.

Lousy budget? Don't be fooled by harsh critics

and, to put it all into perspective .....

Take your pick. Wayne Swan's budget was either a savage attack on hard-working Australian families, an act of class warfare by an incompetent government devoid of ideas and out of touch with ordinary people. Or it was a true Labor budget, offering a generous helping hand to those very same hard-working Australian families while brilliantly positioning the nation to take advantage of an unprecedented economic boom.

Ho hum. As ever, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Not that anyone really bothered to look for it. We in the media did what we usually do: the ABC told us, as it always does, that the budget had produced ''a mixed response''; the serious commentators commentated seriously, in furious disagreement; the schlock end of the trade raced about in its traditional search for victims and, as usual, found them. Lindsay Tanner's uncomfortable point about the dumbing down of our democracy was proved yet again, in spades.

The mantra about struggling Australian families is numbingly tedious. The notion is that no matter what we earn, we all feel poor. We are all battling along in such dire economic straits that a hit of even another $20 a week will send millions of us crashing into ruin.

This is what the British philosopher Richard Dawkins defined as a meme, which is an idea or belief that spreads through a culture, replicating itself like a virus. A meme may or may not be true, but that's not the point. Either way, it takes unshakeable hold.

All politicians of all parties pay lip service to the battling Aussie meme because they dare not do otherwise. Oppositions particularly like it because, well, if yer doing it tough it's all the government's fault, innit? Can't afford the latest android phone? Knocked about by the private school fees? Blame bloody Gillard and Swan.

Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey have spent the week banging on about class warfare because they know it gratifies our sense of being hard done by. And it's so much easier than coming up with policies of their own.

The truth is that if you were born Australian, or are now a citizen, you've been hit with the lucky stick. No other people on Earth have it as good as we do.

Yes, there is poverty and disadvantage. Aboriginal people, disabled folk and their carers, single parents and the elderly and chronically ill are often hard up against it. They need real help. But the rest of us are doing just fine, far and away better than any generation that came before us. Time to stop whingeing and enjoy it.

The refugee thing - debate, question, issue, problem, scandal, outrage, call it what you will - has become so toxic that rational policy decisions are no longer possible.

Ever since the Tampa container ship hove into view with its wretched cargo of boat people and delivered John Howard the 2001 election, the Tories and their media toadies have played the race and bigotry cards with cynical skill.

Not overtly, of course. Nobody mentions the yellow peril any more. But the dog whistle in Howard's resounding ''we will decide'' line, and in Abbott's constant bleating about turning back the boats is clear enough: Labor has opened the floodgates to hordes of diseased Muslim peasants who will bludge off our taxes, rape our daughters, and otherwise wreck our wonderful Aussie way of life.

This nastiness is fiercely articulated - if that's the word - on talkback radio, which has lately plunged so far into right-wing sound and fury as to make the late Stan Zemanek seem like John Pilger. That most asylum seekers arrive by air with tourist visas and neatly packed suitcases is carefully ignored.

The ALP, on the other hand, flips and flops in confusion and despair. The Left of the party, Paul Keating's muesli-chewing inner-city basket weavers, utters clarion calls for decency, in the reasonable certainty that none of these refugees will be moving into Louisa Road, Birchgrove, any time soon. The Right has no thoughts on the matter beyond whatever drivel was tossed up by last week's focus group of carefully chosen ignoramuses in Sinny's west, all of whom get their opinions from Ray Hadley. Around and around we go.

Lurching erratically between these two factional extremes, a panic-stricken government satisfies no one. The East Timor solution was never going to fly. The so-called Malaysian solution is a banged-together absurdity, differing from Howard's ''Pacific solution'' only in that it is further west. Poor Chris Bowen, the Immigration Minister, doggedly chews this faecal focaccia.

Only iron pragmatism will stem the invasion. As Abbott is so fond of saying, in that Riverview-school-prefect way of his, you have to be tough to be kind. Thinking laterally, we should send the opposition immigration spokesman, Scott Morrison, into the detention centres with an AK-47 assault rifle to shoot, say, 30 or 40 people to deter others from risking life and limb in leaky boats.

Better still, we could release a few hundred detainees into our national parks and invite the intrepid Robert Borsak MP and his Shooters and Fishers Party colleagues to hunt them down. Borsak has shot bull elephants in Zimbabwe; a few fleeing Afghans or Iraqis would be child's play. Unless you evened up the game by allowing them to make roadside bombs, which is a thought.

Properly managed, this could become an exciting new sport and a unique safari attraction for those high-rolling overseas gamblers who have been staying away from James Packer's casinos in distressing numbers recently.

The Sydney Writers' Festival kicks off next week, hooray. Just as we learn that the University of Sydney's Fisher Library is going to sack 30 staff and get rid of 500,000 unwanted books and journals from its groaning shelves.

That's the trouble with all this writing, writing, writing. So much of it ends up on old-fashioned dead-tree paper, gathering dust. Thank heavens they are thinking of new ways of doing things at Fisher. Eventually they may be able to get rid of fusty old books altogether and rename the joint an e-resource space.

That would put an end to the ancient tradition of horny young students enjoying a quickie knee-trembler late at night between the stacks, but I guess that's progress.

Mike Carlton