10 years of austerity?  What is the ex-ESRI researcher Richard Tol talking about?  Wasn’t austerity to only last until 2015?  Is this what we have to look forward to?  In a word, you bet.
Tol’s reference to a decade of austerity is well-founded.  While the debate is focused on what’s going to be in the next [...]

It didn’t take long.  Patrick Nulty, TD voted against the budget on Tuesday night.  Suddenly, on Thursday morning an op-ed appears in the Irish Times attacking the young TD.  And not just ‘attacking’ - it is one of the most vicious attacks on an individual TD you’ll read on an issue of policy.  After all, Nulty [...]

Act two of the budget:  increased taxation on capital and property amounts to a quarter of the cuts in social protection alone (never mind education and health).  That takes €15 million off those holding on to legacy property tax reliefs (out of a total of €435 million they gain in relief).  Lone parents are going [...]

When we move from the numbers in the budget papers out into the real world we find that Child Benefit and child income support has been cut again - not only for larger families but for all families.  The instrument for this cut is that most effective stealth tax of all:  [...]

Despite the Taoiseach’s 17 references to jobs in his national address last night, the budget presented this afternoon will cut out between 15,000 and 20,000 jobs from the economy next year.  In other words, there would be between 15,000 and 20,000 more people at work next year were it not for the budgetary measures announced [...]

The Taoiseach is to speak to the nation - on Sunday evening, when we will all be huddled around televisions, radios and computers.  In the spirit of being helpful, the Taoiseach - and his speech writers - could do worse than read President Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside addresses to the American people.  I reproduce an abridged [...]

According to the CSO, there is a growing number of people experiencing deprivation (read here and here for a full discussion of this on Progressive-Economy). In fact, nearly one-in-four of the population suffer two or more instances of deprivation. But that doesn’t stop our man, Minister Leo Varadkar, from assuring all those folk that, hey, the budget [...]

The domestic economy is headed into a double-dip recession according to the ESRI.  And that’s just the beginning of the bad news.  Government ministers and certain commentators will put it down to the Eurozone crisis (‘we’re doing a good job, hitting our targets, it’s those darned Greeks, and Italians and Germans‘) but the fact is we [...]

The Minister for Finance has said there was a need to have ‘an informed debate’ on the issue of the proposed VAT rises, and ‘not simply resort to rhetoric’.  No one would disagree except that only a day later the Minister admitted, in response to a query by Fianna Fail’s Michael McGrath that the Government did not [...]

The Dublin Council of Trades Unions’ March Against Austerity tomorrow (12 Noon from the Garden of Remembrance) is taking place against a rising European and global awareness of the power of the top 1 percent.  So what about our own home-grown 1 percent?  How much wealth do they own - wealth that translates into economic and [...]