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 [...]

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 [...]

According to Brian Cowen today, NTMA’s Oliver Whelan has “made it very clear that we are seen as a stable economy, forging ahead with taking decisions.” This was said in relation to Moody’s decision to downgrade Irish debt to Aa2 from Aa1. So, while rating agencies carry the usual health warning considering their part in [...]

Statement from the Communist Party of Ireland
The announcement by Bank of Ireland that it would be cutting its workforce by 750 jobs to be imposed over the next two years is clearly just the beginning. These job losses come on the back of thousands of jobs already gone from the financial services sector and at [...]

There is a new Think Piece on the TASC website co-authored by one of our regular contributors, Justin Frewen.
Called The Socio-Economic Realities of Mental Health, by Justin and co-author Dr. Anna Datta, the paper can be downloaded from the TASC site here.
“An ever-growing body of research indicates that the failure to adequately tackle mental health [...]

Incomes of the low paid must be protected
Speaking in response to the ESRI Quarterly Economic Commentary, Anne Costello of the Community Platform stated, ‘we agree with broadening the tax base but strongly reject suggestions that this should mean bringing the low paid into the income tax net.’
Ms Costello went on to state, ‘the Community Platform [...]

Social Justice Ireland has produced a well-argued proposal for refundable tax credits - a long-standing demand to make the tax system more equitable. In essence, as SJI describes it:
‘A refundable tax credit is one where, in the event that the income of an individual is insufficient to use up all of his or her tax [...]

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 [...]

The number of Ireland’s rich, measured as those having investable assets of $1 million or more, rose by over 10 % last year. To top it off ‘Ireland is perceived to be ahead of the game’, because apparently, our efforts to rein in the public finances have paid off for the Irish economy. This is [...]

Paul Mason, the economics editor of BBC2’s “Newsnight” and author of “Meltdown: the End of the Age of Greed” has an excellent article in the May 19th edition of the New Statesman. Like the Simon Johnson and Peter Boone article in the New York Times Economix blog on Ireland yesterday, its one of those [...]