Irish politics discussion thread

how do you tax that tho? other than low interest rates, or an increase in local taxes for big houses etc

I may be underestimating the difficulty of getting a register of assets? Or am I? Why would that be so difficult?

There's huge asset wealth in Ireland, a lot of it rests with the very sections that have both benefited most from the boom and were disproportionately responsible for the property and banking crises. And many of them have little or no declared income now, just huge houses, mercs and golf club memberships to get through the day. Aside from the legitimacy of taxing wealth as a general measure, in our current circumstances it becomes damn near a moral imperative that assets are generating some income for the state in the recovery process.

Freely admit I'm riffing here, but I haven't seen a coherent argument as to why a wealth/asset income-generating approach would be any worse than the IMF loan-shark bailing out of the banks method.

I'm sure someone on ILX can give me one, tbh.

yeah i'd agree, but how would you go about it? i guess you could tax rental properties cuz nobody will want to sell them right now, but then ppl will just increase rent en masse

how would you tax liquid assets?

tax on rental properties already exists, the 200 quid NPPR levy. that'll rise.

How would I tax liquid assets? maybe

goal

on a transactional basis? thing about liquid assets is that they're at their most useful when easily transferable, so you'd have to keep that low.

assets like property- well, the govt are terrified to do anything with property, but the reality is that market is still fairly heavily overpriced for the most part. rents are falling all the time, and there aren't enough of us out there to fill the fucking things. the only thing that could help now is govt intervention on the purchasing side- use NAMA to clear the housing lists and get anyone with a long term need off rent supplement and into their own home. the amount of people with second homes they cant afford to keep vs the number of people without primary residences of their own will dawn on some bright spark one of these days

noonan, even when talking sense, creeps me out.

love cranky old economists. mccarthy just moaning and digging at today's uninspiring document.

Excellent work there

noonan, even when talking sense, creeps me out.

that's my mum's brother you're talking about...he is genuinely a great guy, likes good music, great to have a pint with. i'm starting to get a bit bamboozled with the sheer volume of opinions on ireland right now so can't really comment on his credentials. surprised he (or anyone) wants to be minister for finance but he does it seems.

sorry i realise my backing is utterly irrelevant to politics but hey hum...

no, look- his opinion on prime time last night was refreshing. He didnt like the plan, but for all the right reasons, was quick to agree that fg would be seeking the same level of savings, kept on topic and was more grounded than the other panellists.

But he just.... leers a bit, imo

intrigued about noonan's music taste.....

wonder if bruton wont get finance after the election tho.

he likes lots of stuff you'd expect, van morrison or whatever, but he also likes jazz a lot, he would have miles davis and stuff on a lot at christmas i remember when i was younger and we used to spend it in limerick. in my extended family that's about as good as it gets in terms of musical taste!

i think the leer thing is just kind of his manner. it's sort of sad sometimes, i feel like when it comes to being a serious politician he's never managed to also show his personality, cos he is genuinely a really funny ultra charismatic dude.

i imagine most politicians at that level are better in person in any number of ways tbh.

Except micheal ring. Srsly.

yeah of course, prob plenty of them are nice guys, can't expect it to matter really given they make the decisions they do.

good luck, ireland

― Greatest contributor: (history mayne), Wednesday, May 12, 2010 5:23 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark

we're takin ye with us imo, regardless of 8bn compensation offer for 1603

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

BACK THE FUCK UP BACK UP

6.7%

6.7%?????

fuck this imf deal, tbh. we're fucked, but we're not at the last resort yet. this is international loan-sharking that benefits fuck-all of the irish people.

hey shut up, this is no time for dissent

If you don't pay we'll send Wolverhampton and St Helens over to break your knees.

if i thought the union-organised march would be anything but baaaah-ing i'd go.

but shit, 6.7%?

85bn, 6.7%.

1/6 of whatever we draw down from this fund, every year, in repayment.

and i'm not convinced they're not going to just throw it into the banks. they're being very quiet on what this fund will be used for. i don't believe for a second that FF won't try to commit, irretrievably if possible, as much of this capital into black holes before they leave office.

this just got terrifying imo. an election tomorrow wouldn't be soon enough. i don't think anyone is stressing the damage that could be done by these guys between now and january.

Where is the 6.7% figure being reported?

I don't really see that the election will fix the major problem, though it will hopefully put some (less in-)competent people in charge. Unless some party is willing to countenance default or the idea of leaving the Euro gains serious traction, we're throwing all our money into securing the banks' debts anyway.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/opinion/26krugman.html?_r=1&hp

reported on rte1 news.

election of a new govt will not fix the problem, but we need new decision makers. cowen and lenihan will not countenance an new options now, they're more concerned with consistency than competency or rational weighing-up of alternatives.

ps- i want a new govt to 'countenance' any and all options, including, if not default, then the very real option of retracting the bank guarantee to the extent possible.

krugman otm otm otm ffs

cant believe the extent to which the debate is being stifled in this country, with people all to willing to repeat what they're hearing from a very small group of highly self-motivated individuals who were mainly responsible to begin with

anything higher than 4% on the fraud imf bailout is disastrous, not even taking into account that the whole imf thing is disastrous.

i think our tigerrogance kinda prevented anybody from believing the ramifications of what was happening until recently. The boom was such a seemingly instantaneous thing that it seemed that the decline would be like turning a light off and when it wasnt everybody believed it had sortof um, gone away a bit leaving us some stuff we could grumble about. Now it kindof feels like the bottom has completely fallen out. its like the pacing is all off and i dont really know how im supposed to feel about it at any given moment?

less of the 'we' talk, tbh. don't let yourself get dragged into that, unless you have an offshore account or 1m+ pension.

the decline was like turning a light off, which was a part of the problem (though not as large a part of it as FF insist- underlying bank/property issues were not going to be defeated by any length of a slow decline)- 'soft landing' was the phrase of choice back when things were still good.

the bottom hasn't fallen out until FF have definitely bound us to the IMF loan and closed the door on any possibility of negotiating a settlement with the banks/bondholders. that is close, and seemingly inevitable, and crazy that we're letting it go ahead in the circumstances. it's like letting the nazis sit in judgement at nuremberg.

how you're supposed to feel now- well, imo, the media are still sugarcoating this.

worse, they're still censoring the debates imo.

jeez, i'm the irish morbs aren't i?

now now youre not THAT bad

yeah, but i mean i'm 20 years or w/e younger. if we have to put up with fg/ff as the irish dem/rep covering the same narrow band of ides/outlooks for the next 20 years, i'll go insane.

we all will

homer simpson: "Default! The two sweetest words in the English language!"

vincent browne show killin it right now. kathleen lynch in particular throwing out CSO figures. some fat young dude shouting her down.

“As Ireland can no longer ensure the solvency both of its sovereign [ie State] and of its banking system, Europe must choose between two contagion risks. Put an end to Dublin’s suicidal promise to make whole its banks’ senior creditors and risk a wave of bank failures. Or keep the Irish State on the hook for private losses and risk an even more virulent spread of sovereign troubles. This should be a simple, brutal choice: many banks cannot survive a sovereign default. This is a time to strengthen sovereign defences and prepare for bank restructuring [ie let the banks take the hit.]”.

financial times still seems to think it's an option. but nobody in our dail believes so. i guess jackie healy-rae knows best.

not that i think it'll come to it, because nmost of our 'independents' are ff floaters, but lucinda creighton will abstain on the budget vote just because she's been slapped down with all of the other bruton followers since the leadership challenge? christ, she's poisonous, and that strikes me as both wrong (most importantly) and politically incredibly naive (she will de facto be the person that allowed the roughest budget in memory to go through, regardless of whether any revamped one would have been significantly different).

two different challenges afoot on whether the govt have the power to enter into a binding 4 yr plan with the IMF. they claim it's not inding anyway, so n'yah. i think we can all accept that if we borrow any significant proportion of the moneys negotiated for, we'll be bound so tightly we'll be phoning brussels/berlin for permission to flush.

lol this is gonna suuuuuck

Nearer home, Mr Healy-Rae said he had got a firm commitment for a new community hospital for Kenmare from the Taoiseach last Wednesday.

He also got “a good enough commitment” from Mr Lenihan for funding for the €100 million bypass for Tralee, the biggest road project proposed to date for Co Kerry.

Sob.

we need, and i'm serious here, the public execution of healy-rae.

via omar little https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koY6kXhQDQo

real talk

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2010/1223/1224286171110.html

damn

not that it's a huge thing in 'the grand scheme of things'

but it's a fucking disgrace