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 [...]

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 [...]

This is the second of two articles exploring in depth the question of the impact of Ireland’s tax strategies on developing countries. The first article appeared yesterday.

In the first article in this series, I described the dominant tax consensus, and how Ireland has played the game of tax competition to attract multinational investment through the [...]

This is the first of two articles exploring in depth the question of the impact of Ireland’s tax strategies on developing countries. The second article will appear tomorrow.
Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ireland built enormous short-term economic growth on the single plank of lowering tax rates to attract in foreign direct investment. [...]

That wild and whacky outrider of neo-liberalism, Constantin Gurdgiev, has taken a scalpel to the Government’s budget numbers and I find myself . . . agreeing with him. No surprise there. People from wildly varying perspectives can still agree the sky is blue. Even if the great Fianna Fail sky-gods are doing everything possible to [...]

Warning! If you are lucky enough to be invited on to a national radio programme - for example, the Pat Kenny show - to discuss the economic crisis, whatever you say don’t suggest that those on higher incomes with substantial wealth should pay a little bit more tax. If you do, you will be attacked, [...]

There is an almighty locomotive train of a consensus coming down the tracks at us: taxation. Many commentators are demanding that tax increases be substantial and immediate. Can this help resolve the crisis? The answer is: yes and no and, in some cases, it can make it worse. Taxation is, after all, an instrument; like [...]

Goodbody Stockbrokers is predicting a decline in GDP this year of 6% unsettling public finances. Irish Nationwide has been downgraded by Moody’s to one notch above junk. Ireland is bankrupt. More specifically, its financial institutions are bankrupt, its government is bankrupt and, unfortunately, many of its businesses and citizens are bankrupt. But this is not [...]

In a way I’m surprised that ICTU eventually said no. And here’s the thing. I don’t know why. Maybe they don’t either. But the mood music was such that even Stephen Collins in the Irish Times on Saturday was complimenting the ‘constructive’ role the unions had played. How nice. How good. How patriotic. And this [...]