Well firstly, if you're wondering if all those carefully compiled and detailed books full of precise numbers intersect in any meaningful way with reality, just compare this budget with Treasury's previous two attempts at defining reality. Those predictions - even those just a year out - have had to be revised so often it's become obvious exactly what they were. Guesses. That's not a problem and we can understand why the forecasts were so wildly out.

The point is, however, to recognise that the current projections are almost certainly guaranteed to be equally wrong.

Instead of wasting your time and listening to breathless reports about how, somehow, this budget's going to transform the economy, you'd be better off going to a '50's American baseball player for your economic advice. The all-star player Yogi Berra still holds many of the games records although he's become far better known for his remarkable way of distilling truth. As well as saying "you can observe a lot by watching" and "when you come to the fork in the road, take it", he correctly pointed out a key reality Treasury would do well to heed: "it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future".

That's never been more true than today.

So when you see reports about what the budget says the future will being, ignore them. They're not complete rubbish - although picking random numbers from a hat would also, occasionally, produce accurate results. The mathematically inclined, however, will have already realised that the safest, highest paying bet is that whatever figures actually make it into the Budget are the ones that are absolutely guaranteed not to occur.

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Even Treasury knows this. The clever people have begun inserting outcomes in terms of ranges, rather than pretending specific figures can be projected to a number of decimal points. The problem is we demand precision, even when it can't be produced.

This doesn't mean the entire effort is waste of time: it simply means that we should concentrate on the immediate future and ignore future projections.

Unfortunately, doing this simply highlights the problems.

Government naturally wants to focus on the middle distance. That is, after all, where the figures can most easily be massaged to deliver delightful visions of future prosperity. Unfortunately those images are nothing more than illusions.

The way we got through Covid was by ignoring economic 'rules' and working together as a society.

If you want to know what the budget means and who it will help, don't look at the big numbers but investigate its effect on the less advantaged. At a time like this, unless everyone's a winner, nobody is.