The Commission on Taxation is about to descend upon us – six hundred pages worth, apparently. The Commission report is of a different order than the McCarthy report. The latter was set up to find ‘savings’ in order to reduce the high borrowing requirement (it failed to do this as we discussed previously – the [...]

Dr. Garret Fitzgerald is not impressed with the notion that if the majority of legislators believe that Government proposals are wrong or misguided, they should vote against them. No, according to the good Doctor, whatever legislators think of Government policy, whether on NAMA or public expenditure cuts, they should just bite their lip and support [...]

John McHale of NUI Galway has produced an outline for a fiscal plan. It is well worth reading. It’s a serious treatment. It’s also an unnerving treatment. For it has the capacity to wreck the Exchequer’s finances with little ‘stimulating’ effect on the economy.
On the way to presenting his fiscal plan John makes some highly [...]

Stop the Presses!
‘Irish workers earn 4th highest wages in the world!’  ‘Irish workers one of the best paid in the world!’ ‘Wages for Dubliners are among the highest in the world!’
So, all that guff from trade unions and progressives and (and as we will see - just about every official data collection agency) is just [...]

‘There are people who are working right now, who are looking at the possibility of losing their jobs, they cannot save, they cannot build up the savings to cushion potential loss, or potential risk of their job.  And, yet, they are paying increasing rates of taxation in order to sustain what is in effect, as [...]

Maybe it’s the Leveller in me, but when times are hard we should all put our shoulder to the wheel, share out the pain and protect the lesser able in our community. Listening to the great debate over wages you’d think that everyone was a Leveller. There is so much ‘share the pain’ going around [...]

However, given the enormous scale of the problem, it would be fanciful to suppose that it can be solved without at least some reductions in public spending, and anyone who doubts this cannot really be regarded as a serious participant in the public discourse on the matter.’
Well, that put us in our place. Not only [...]

Spare a thought for Mary and Sean. Both work full-time - not great paying jobs but together they pull in 60K with overtime. They need it. They bought a house three years ago, paying over the odds, but with a one-year old child they had to leave their one-bed flat. Their second child came along [...]

On the One News at One, RTE’s business editor David Murphy concluded his piece on the National Treasury Management Agency’s Annual Report:
‘The other problem is that the credit rating agencies have downgraded Ireland’s debt. International markets will want to see serious spending cuts so the country can stop bleeding money day after day.’
There are three [...]

Boy, have public sectors workers been kicked around the block for drill. They wear the mark of Cain. They are one of the main reasons why the economy is in such rank order. There are too many of them. They are paid too much. They don’t work hard enough. Aren’t you glad you’re not a [...]