The fear of dissipating relevance can often make some people be controversial and the post-Budget story that has the most potential to grab headlines, and attention, is that Dr Jim Chalmers has added to inflation with his $20.6 billion worth of spending.

Presumably, Treasury supported (or at least understood) the Treasurer’s fiscal plan and then tried to work out its economic effects, and what we learnt on Tuesday is that inflation would be 3.25% by 2023-24 and 2.5% by 2024-25.

However, some economists, such as those at UBS, think the Budget will mean the RBA will have to keep raising rates. If that happens, the cash rate, which is now at 3.85%, will be 4.1% by July or August.

So, it’s the guess-makers at UBS versus the guess-makers in Treasury and no one really knows who’s right.

Sally Tindall, who’s research director at finance comparison site RateCity, could be more on the money. This is what she told the AFR: ‘‘A 12th rate hike could very well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for some households, but the reality is, others will have broken before this,’’ Tindall said.

The RBA has done enough with 11 rate rises and the negative impacts of these hikes would now be building and will be magnified when the mortgage cliff makes many home loan debtors pullback on their spending.

We’ve lived through the most aggressive monetary tightening in such a short time and I’m hoping Dr Phil Lowe has the guts and good sense to wait a few months before he goes with another rate rise.

Overnight, the Yanks got a good inflation number that would have shocked a lot of economists, especially those tipping the Fed would keep hiking rates. Inflation came in at 4.9% rather than the predicted 5%. This builds the case for the Fed to pause on its rate rises. It could signal no more rises are necessary. And we could also be in line with some surprise drops in inflation in coming months.

Betashares chief economist David Bassanese said that Tuesday’s budget was ‘‘unambiguously expansionary’’, adding to the risk that the Reserve Bank would need to raise rates at least once, and possibly twice, in the coming months. ‘‘The disappointment is not that the government has attempted to support some of the less well-off in the community but rather that greater effort was not made at a still relatively early stage in the electoral cycle to introduce tougher measures elsewhere in the economy,’’ he said in a note, which was reported by the AFR.

If the previous 11 interest rate rises haven’t done their job, then this Budget could add to inflation and force the RBA to raise rates again. However, if there is a pipeline of negativity that has built up because of those 11 rates rises (when mixed in with the mortgage cliff that could lead to a big economic slowdown), then this Budget might save us from a recession.

Let’s hope the RBA governor, his economics team and board can guess what economic destiny lies ahead.