By Miles Fletcher BBC Wales's business and industry correspondent

Budget time is traditionally the season when the pundits and forecasters are wrong-footed by the man with the battered red box.

What is actually announced on the big day is almost invariably not half so bad as we have been led to expect and fear.

It is in this spirit then that we approach what has been billed as Gordon Brown's Big Tax Increasing Budget.

Or rather it is not a tax exactly which will go up but, but National Insurance.

Budget box: National Insurance increases

That's the contribution to the public purse paid by both employers and employees alike, which has come to resemble a tax in everything but name.

Business, in the shape of the CBI at least, would wish to correct any impression that this is the first time New Labour has sought to increase taxes.

According to the Voice of Business, overall taxation of firms in the UK has escalated by a �29 billion since 1997.

In Wales, where manufacturing output has only recently showed tentative signs of recovery and some important service sectors remain sluggish, anything that adds to the burden, whether financial or regulatory, will be poorly received and the Treasury knows it.

Mr Brown has only recently provided some sweeteners for companies.

Healthy, non-fattening ones, like his R&D tax credit, could well be added to Wednesday afternoon.

Gordon Brown: Sweeteners for companies

A similar credit for investment in training has been canvassed as a possibility.

These measures will help to offset the impression of an Old Labour tax-and-spend government soaking the capitalists to pay for its beloved public sector.

On that front, and mindful that the health service frequently dominates the political agenda, the TUC has been calling for an extra �30 million per annum for the Welsh Development Agency to improve the competitiveness of Welsh industry and its workers.

It's part of a shopping list of trade union proposals reminding the government that sustainable high quality employment is essential to fund the public services we would all wish to see.

So lets just say that, for once, the soothsayers have not been misled and that the chancellor will seek to extract a lot more from the better paid members of society in order to tackle fermenting unease over the state of the NHS and other key public services.

In Wales, where very few earn more than �50k per year, there is likely to be little protest.

In some circumstances the Welsh economy stands to yield a net benefit from a tougher National Insurance regime.

Public spending here accounts for around 23% of Gross Domestic Product and increased spending on areas like health and transport (though probably not defence, but that's another story) will filter through into the wider economy.

It is a mark of the relative weakness of Wales's private sector that a little old fashioned tax-and-spend would, on balance at least, probably do us some good.