Any monkey can run a business, or a country, when revenues are rising rapidly. It requires no skill to appear to be successful, because you can hide your mistakes easily and nobody asks hard questions when the money appears to be flowing. What does require skill and wisdom is recognising the danger that presents and acting pre-emptively to ensure that when your luck changes you are in a position to weather the storm. Clearly none of our politicians have that skill, the promises made in advance of the last election are worth examining now as a measure of how they are all guilty.
- Fine Gael Election 2007 Manifesto (cut taxes and spend more and )
- Labour Election 2007 Manifesto (sort of play with taxes and spend more to be fairer)
- Fianna Fail Election 2007 Manifesto (spend more and cut taxes, oh and aren’t we great)
I’m amazed that it now appears to be blazingly obvious to everyone that the tax base we had at the time was fragile and over exposed to construction. The fact that not one of the above documents gave the slightest indication that building a sustainable, recession proof tax base was on anyone’s mind a mere 9 months before the current disaster started to unwind is a good indication that the same people are not really equipped to get us out of this mess, regardless of party. Whatever options they put forward for consideration this time, they better show some better analysis of both sustainability and actual vision. It gets even worse if you go back further.
And don’t get me started on the Greens. Or Sinn Fein for that matter. At least the bloody PD’s did us all a favour and died out.
Primetime had a few notable numbers that we should all keep in mind with the election looming. Obviously we’re all aware of these, and the even more tangible reduction in net income after the last few budgets but it’s worth remembering that this is how badly screwed we are. And we would still be here no matter who had won the last election…
Despite last Decembers budget we are still running at expenditure levels that are almost 50% higher than revenues and this is before any of the punitive effects of IMF\EU “bailout” funding kicks in.
| 2007 | 2011 | |
| Tax Revenues | €48bn | €33bn |
| Unemployment | 158000 | 349000 |
| National Debt | €38bn | €93bn |
| Deficit | -€1bn (Surplus) | €14bn (deficit) |
| Average House Price | €340000 | €191000 |
What I want to see is grovelling apologies across the board from all of these clowns and something that will genuinely convince me that they know how to [a] get us out of this and [b] make sure it can never happen again.
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