That’s the generally accepted truth in economics, outside of the Austrian and Chicago schools, supply side economics etc. which was probably the worst thing to happen to the world in the last 50 years.

When you’re borrowing 15 odd percent of your day to day living expenses that is not austerity. It only seems like it when you’re used to borrowing 30%. One way or the other that is unsustainable, and eventually the folks lending to you will stop. This is nothing to do with ideology. Keynes would only have argued that borrowing more was a solution when you start from a low base. When debt is the cause of your problem, more debt is not the solution. Bit like cocaine, really.

Comment of the week. Kudos.

Hi Jason, That was my fault for not being more specific. See amended above. Thanks, Susan

I noticed that too.. Soon the only thing Ireland will have will be debt.. Sure, why don’t they just sell us too.. At this stage I reckon our government just sees us as collateral anyway..

A good day to bury bad news. 9/11 Irish style.

In fairness, we have not repaid a penny, we have been funded from abroad to pay for our huge deficit.

A deficit that is only our own governments fault, with bloated public service pay bills and ridiculous allowances in all departments.

If ever we manage to balance our books and start to make repayments then I will be annoyed…..

But on the upside, if we ever balance out books it means we will have sorted out the public sector and stopped the ridiculous overspending.

P.s. every “repayment” we have made to date has been funded by borrowing. It’s surreal and almost funny.
Promissory notes were money borrowed from our own central bank to another bank. Repayments were made to ourselves….crazy world

What about sorting out our ridiculously high levels of social welfare, a disincentive to work ….

It is plainly ridiculous to assert that our problems are caused by the public service pay bill. The cause is a collapse in the tax take from the private sector due to both the recession and our commitment to pay back private bank debts. Even if we halved PS pay we would still have huge debts to service.

It’s not the rate of welfare they need to fix. It is the duration. Living costs are high here to be fair.
It was meant as a safety net but some use it as an indefinite-term bed. Arbitrarily, I would say 6 months, then emigrate or find some temporary work that might not be exactly what you want. But please end this indefinite stream of payments to dossers and hammer the ‘disablity’ codology by getting the state to sue doctors who issue notes in a negligent fashion.

Winston after six months a person is off social welfare,they can’t find work,your answer is emigrate?

@Brendan
I never asserted any such thing, simply pointed to the issues with the current deficit, and highlighted that debt is a red herring as all repayments have to borrow before they are made.

FYI the “cause” was a property bubble created by poor government, greedy banks and greedy developers and greedy house buyers and stupid “property ladder” believers. AND a simultaneous public sector pay bubble.
This PS bubble was a government ploy to buy votes and buy the unions, and this bubble is still in place protected by CP.

In case you doubt it, compare salary scales across the PS with every other modern western economy who manage not to be bankrupt. Then compare all the ridiculous allowances and expenses.
Look at politicians, judges, OPW, police, prison service, nurses, doctors, consultants etc etc.
look at department budgets and note the proportion spent on salaries as oppose to capital costs….etc etc…

Debt is a red herring, and will not be addressed and considered seriously from anyone abroad until we stop the waste.

Anyone who thinks social welfare is generous has never had to live on it..

Divide and conquer! Only 4% of the population were unemployed during the boom. Since some greedy people who wanted more broke the banks ,this figure has gone up to14%. It would be higher but for emigration. It wouldn’t be as high in this country only that the banks were bailed out. They still aren’t lending which is suppposed to be their man business

A few years on welfare would do you the world of good.

Shanti… A friend with wife and 4 kids lost his job last October… He got 475 into his hand after tax etc out if which he paid 86 Euro per week rent for his council house and roughly 120 euro per week travelling to and eating at work…

Since he lost his job he gets 520 euro per week in welfare… His rent has dropped to 24 euro per week and he has no work expenses…

He is a proud man but says he would not work for that money again and would rather not work unless he was getting way and above what he gets now

€520 per week welfare? Really?
My mate lost his job 2 years ago. He has a mortgage on the house he lives in with his wife and 4 kids.
They bought their house down the country 10 years ago, they moved into a bigger house to accommodate the size of their family (they were planning for 3 kids and got twins) 7 years ago.

He’s been looking for work, no joy. They get (including the extra bonus for having twins) €350 per week.

Out of that they have to pay their mortgage, bills, food, kids at school, the car (because the school isn’t within walking distance).

I wonder what your friend is claiming that they aren’t – considering they have a family member in citizens info, they are definitely claiming whatever they are entitled to.

If your friend is only getting that he obviously has a bit of a nest egg put aside ;) he was means tested and they take savings into account

The high tax take 6-8 years ago was fictitious in the sense that it resulted from property taxes (vat and stamp duty) paid by borrowings. Money was imported and some of it went to the government. We did not have a high tax take from sustainable business. Those days have to be forgotten as any good model of the future economy. The high interest payments we have now mean high taxes on an ongoing basis. Pity the coming generations and everyone less than 50 years old.

Has he? I’d better tell him that because he’s unaware of one.. You don’t mean because the house is his – a house on a ghost estate that was valued at much more when he bought it and is still paying as much as he can of the mortgage as he can for counts as a nest egg do you?

You’re just making stuff up. There has never been more older persons working in the history of the state.

http://i.imgur.com/I7ni5.png

Mmmmmm….I was not referring to how many older people were working rather to the demographic of the long term unemployed

Damocles

A general election might help get productive people elected, and consign the failure we have to the dole.

The IT skills gap.

Productive people such as whom? How about former murderers in Shinner-land, or more of those lefty-fools like Clare “Hot Whiskey” Daly, Class-A Drug-User Luke Ming Flanagan, or what about Mick “Tax-dodger” Wallace. Not thinking they are really the people I want running the show.

The laugh of it all is that people voted in Labour thinking they were going to do the divil ‘n’ all, and they just showed themselves to be a bunch of socialist, so-called liberal incompetents. At least if some good comes of this government, it will be then end of those oxygen thieves.

Well done guys. I haven’t seen a better example of “ignoring the question and pushing your own agenda” in quite a while.

What a load of pure shite talk. Go back and paint ur 3 bed semi brilliant white. Clown

Damocles

I have remember a story about an unemployed engineer being offered a training course in Excel for beginners. That about sums up how they are planning to plug the skills gap if you ask me.

Professor

I would take an honest drug taker over a failed teacher any day. At least the drug taker can become a productive member of society one they give up their drug taking. I dont see how failed teachers can be productive unless they first become drug users and then reform.

As for the tax cheat I think the current Government have borrowed from him, doing the wrong thing but for what they believe are the right reasons.

In terms of the IT skills shortage, there’s Springboard courses in ICT which are available for free for anyone who’s unemployed..

http://www.springboardcourses.ie/AboutUs.aspx

There’s also Bluebrick IT courses for someone’s who’s unemployed but not on social welfare

http://www.bluebrick.ie/Default.aspx

The only way the goverment at this point can stop the IT shortage would be closing the borders.

What is being done to plug the skills gap? Not a whole lot.

But in fairness, I don’t think you can entirely blame the government for that. In the last week I have spoken to two people who were in construction until the sector went tits-up. They haven’t worked for 4 years, but are both still hopeful of getting back into construction. Exactly why they will be more employable now than 4 years ago isn’t very clear.

What could you do in 4 years? An undergrad degree. Qualify for most trades twice over from zero knowledge. Learn a foreign language to a decent standard. Insert here.

The govt could do more to incentivise people to retrain in something meaningful, but if people won’t do stuff for themselves it’s difficult to see it working.

I was claiming partial JA to supplement income from self employment.. I kept getting sent ads for training programmes in industries that had exactly zero to do with what my employment is. I was also working on increasing my own workload and did, so I could sign off. But really, the many courses they sent me I do for was just a waste of paper and postage.. I work in healthcare – not IT..

We owe money to other banks, to people who bought government bonds, to the ECB, to the IMF, to the ESM, to any and all who have borrowed money to us.

Could t be simpler.

If you are looking for an info graphic of the cross lending and debts between European countries that is another question, and can be found in seconds with a google search.
As regards who owes us money….answer is practically no-one. (With the exception of Nama developers living the high life)

“We” don’t owe anybody anything. Our government owe money because they increasingly borrowed to pay for excessive pay and pension awards for themselves, and our banking and construction industries owe money, which our government conveniently paid off on their behalf by borrowing even more money.

“We” are just being forced to pay for all this madness because, collectively, we are too stupid to do anything about it except moan and whine.