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 [...]

If, as Keynes said,
‘If you look after unemployment, the budget will look after itself”
then no wonder the economy remains mired in an economic and fiscal crisis. Fianna Fail has not looked after unemployment; the budget has not looked after itself; no one is looking after the economy.
How does Irish employment fare in comparison with other [...]

A group of economists has written an open letter to European policymakers criticising their collective failure to address the Greek crisis as a European crisis. It sets out the various causes of the Greek crisis, of which poor fiscal management by that country is only one, and points out the European dimension of the problems. [...]

Originally posted on Socialist Economic Bulletin.
The Tory Party has launched a joint manifesto with the Ulster Unionist Party.
This is a revival of a formal alliance that stretches back nearly 100 years, when the anti-Home Rule wing of the Liberal Party (the ‘Liberal Unionists’) split and joined the Conservatives to form the Conservative and Unionist [...]

The only enjoyable aspect of Eurostat’s decision to reclassify the Anglo-Irish Bank subsidy as a liability on the General Government Balance/Debt is to watch the Government’s hands move even faster in an increasingly vain attempt to prevent us from seeing under which shell the real deficit is hidden. But they must be getting tired; and [...]

The past few decades have seen a growing awareness among health professionals and policy makers of the role that social and economic factors play in determining good mental health. As the WHO Regional Committee for Europe noted:
Widening disparities in society or economic changes in individuals’ life courses seem to be of particular importance here. Whether [...]

An economy relying on consumer spending to drive a recovery is an economy that will be eventually be disappointed. Not that consumption cannot play a vital role. Indeed, businesses dependent on domestic demand need a robust level of spending to survive and expand, invest and employ. But it must always be placed in context. For [...]

There’s a problem with the way reports are covered in our media. Take the recent ESRI Spring Quarterly Commentary, for example. The demands on journalists to cover a statistically-dense 85 page report for the next news bulletin or the next day’s paper means that they can’t possibly work their way through it to get a [...]