This meeting today between Fianna Fail, The Green Party, Fine Gael and Labour is difficult to fathom. Reading reports you get the feeling that the media is reporting from the other side of the looking glass, describing a world filled with Mad Hatter’s Tea Parties and other surreal events:
The framework itself is the most unreal [...]

Consider this…
Fine Gael said last night it would back the Government’s four year economic strategy to reduce the deficit, but insisted it favoured cutting spending rather than raising taxes.
The party’s communications spokesman Leo Varadkar told the Dublin Economics Workshop in Kenmare last night that his party is committed to reducing Ireland’s deficit to 3 per [...]

It’s pre-budget submission time and IBEC has come out with a barn-stormer. They have all the usual demands we’d expect: more fiscal contraction, no increase in marginal tax rates, maintain our ultra-low corporate tax rate, more spending cuts, etc. etc. No surprises and no indication in IBEC’s submission that evinces either an understanding of the [...]

The crisis is deepening within our society, current and future generation of working people, small businesses, family farmers, self-employed, the growing ranks of unemployed and the poor are and will be forced to pay a heavy price for a system that is incapable of delivering a just and equatable society.
It is being kept alive [...]

One can only chuckle. Last year the pronouncements of rating agencies were treated as though they were written on Mount Sinai. Downgrades, or the threat of such, were interpreted by our high priests of deflation as demands to cut public spending. That’s what we did - big time; slashing public spending by nearly €9 billion [...]

There have been some outrageous and hilarious things said in this economic debate. I don’t know how economic historians will come to rank them. But surely at the top must be the claim that the rich have paid a ‘far higher price’ than other groups in society as a result of the economic downturn. You [...]

What would you say if a Government Minister, discussing Budget 2011, came on to a current affairs programme and said the following:
‘To increase economic growth, we intend to cut growth. To promote employment, we’re going to cut employment. And as for emigration - we don’t care if it increases. Indeed, the Government sees some upside.’ [...]

Yesterday afternoon TASC presented ‘The Minimum Wage‘ to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment. During the presentation TASC Director Paula Clancy argued that any moves to reduce the minimum wage or JLC rates would represent what she termed a “double strike against economic recovery”.
This presentation follows on from TASCs ‘Square Deal? The [...]

I have to admire those who claim we must bring the low-paid into the tax net. I admire their chutzpah, their audacious willingness to flaunt in public their remarkable ignorance of the tax system. For the low-paid are already in the tax net - big time. Let’s go through the arguments and see if those [...]

Over on Progressive Economy Michael Taft says that progressives need to unite around a common analysis and respond to what appears to be the aspirational nature of many of our demands. Or as he put’s it:
“…to call for all manner of good things without specifying where we are going to source the money: why should [...]