The most popular costume in New York this Halloween is a Bernie Madoff latex mask. For $49.99, New Yorkers can be the $65bn Ponsi Scheme monster for a night, complete with orange jumpsuit and handcuffs.

The 15,000 masks sold by Rubie's Costume Company, in the fine tradition of all-American satire, allow New Yorkers who were burned by Madoff to release some of their anger through humour. It's all part of the healing process in a society where actions have consequences, where everything from politics to police work is carried out with transparency and where people, for better or worse, take responsibility for what they do.

Here, the Halloween holiday is just hell, the hell that hath no fury like a nation scorned. We wear anger as a mask, a burning, visceral, seething, unexpurgated, unrelenting anger that simply won't go away. It has become so all-encompassing, so divisive and so enriched by martyrdom that we have lost the ability to be ourselves – to laugh at ourselves, to cry at our failures, to enjoy ourselves – but also to be honest with ourselves.

Now as the budget starts to take shape and the targets for cuts take focus in Brian Lenihan's crosshairs, all the failures in how this country is run are manifesting themselves again. Over the past week, minister after minister has come out with the ritual strong assertion of the scale of the problem. We are spending €55bn but we are only earning €32bn. Only two weeks ago, we were borrowing €400m a week. Now, it's even worse – €500m a week. Grim-faced, we're told, we're all in this together. At last, the "fiscal adjustments" are plain old "cuts".

But if the language is clearer, is the strategy for reform? As the public-sector unions found out last week, that is impossible to know because the plans for the management of change we so clearly need are so poorly communicated, people are questioning whether the roadmap that is supposed to get us from A to B exists at all.

With the exception possibly of Nama, very few government policies have been cleanly executed. Brian Lenihan's track record on implementing the nitty gritty dirty political bits of budgets has not been good. They have been littered with mistakes, from underestimating the scale of the financial problems we were experiencing at the very start, to overselling more symbolic measures such as cutting the pensions of sitting TDs; from undervaluing the need for fairness in the imposition of levies so that they had to be re-set to take more from very high earners, to failing to see obvious landmines in the withdrawal of medical cards for the over-70s. The renegotiation of the programme for government with the Greens has been a masterclass in education budget U-turns.

Now, very similar patterns are beginning to emerge with the pre-budget build-up.

The €1.3bn being asked of the public sector is about one-third of the retrenchment planned in the 2010 balance sheet. Cuts in social welfare, and a mix of savings from efficiencies as well as income from a carbon tax will make up the rest. Calls for a third rate of tax for the super rich are not being entertained, nor, inexplicably, is wider taxation reform as recommended by the Commission on Taxation.

Yet because the public-pay and pensions element has been isolated in the talks with unions, public-sector workers feel they are the only sector of society expected to take the pain. While elements of taxation naturally cannot be revealed until budget day, it would surely be sensible, in the interests of trying to prevent damaging strikes, for the government to be much clearer about where it intends to save or raise the remaining €2.7bn. Public-sector workers are not totally in denial, as they have been cast. Like everyone, they are also managing on a lot less than they have been used to. What they will have to come to terms with, however, is that there is a price on job security and the notion of "service".

But the result of putting a frightening bottom-line figure on the table without filling in the detail of how it fits into the wider strategy, or how it will be implemented within the public sector itself, has simply created a vacuum of information which is being filled by fear-fuelled anger which will be vented through protests and strikes. These strikes will further divide the public and private sectors and feed into resentments that may or may not have any factual basis. They will also hurt the weakest and most vulnerable in society, which can hardly be the aim of the union leaderships or their members.

Cuts of this scale are very difficult to deliver without protest. But if they are framed and managed carefully so the higher earners among the 330,000 public servants employed by the state bear the greatest proportion and so that lower paid, often frontline, staff are sheltered as far as possible, they can at least be sold to the unions and staff with a degree of moral authority.

Wielding a generalised axe is not going to work. It will not deliver reform within the public sector so that work is incentivised and clockwatchers are sidelined.

It will also mean those on short-term contracts (home helps, council maintenance workers) – often doing work that is vitally important to consumers because an inefficient public service has been too inflexible to provide what was needed in the past – are the first to get the push.

The last thing this budget needs to do is reinforce the inefficiencies within the public sector. Brian Lenihan insists he is not wedded to the idea of a straight cut in pay and pensions and will look at allowances, overtime, shift structures, flexibilities and increments as a means into making the savings. But ministers in all departments must also deliver structural reforms that provide savings for the longer term.

Another budget mis-hit will be catastrophic for this country because the last thing we need is a winter of fruitless marches, strikes and rows.