I borrowed a tin and drummed for an hour to hide
my tears ...
There was only one cry at
the gates of the Dail in my mind "ALL OUT -
EXCEPT THE CLEANERS AND THE GUARDS"
While the Budget speeches drifted like ordure
from the sheds, drover of cattle, Brian Lenihan,
for the second time (Awarded the title of the
Worst Finance Minister of the entire EU by the
Financial Times) with his pathetic schoolboy
rhetoric, pocketed the ice and snow for use
another day, I stood behind the huge Shell to Sea
posters calling for NATIONALISATION OF MAYO'S GAS
CONTRACTS TO SHELL , and beat that drum with a
dozen young people who kept a monstrous heart-beat
echoing over the Dail Courtyard from 3.30 in the
afternoon for nearly two hours, and those with
horns blew their long sombre calls to the grazing
cattle within.
And the grazers came out good, as we all knew
they would as this was a budget for the well
heeled, the rich - maybe Dermot Desmond will
actually re-open the Ormond Hotel on the Liffey
for the race of tourists who will come in to buy
up broken businesses and pocket their tax free
management schemes under their vests.
A grocer who, for three generations has had
special credit schemes in the late autumn to buy
specialities for Christmas was this year refused
by the Bank. He has had to close his doors and
apply for emigration.
How much money flooded out of Ireland since
September 2008 - money that only needed a sharp
decision in the Dail to be restricted. Quinlan
removing even his daughters from their schools to
Switzerland is even now selling his properties in
millionaires row because he GOT OUT WITH HIS LOOT.
He will not have to pay a penny to the superior
bond holders, among whom he surely numbers, with
the French,German and UK Banks.
We now know that Charlie Haughey, whose planned
gift to the stockexchanges in exchange for deals
in his Financial Centre, his green glass palace
on the Liffey, gifts ranging from share buyouts
in nuclear facilities to Shell Oil Company, has
wrecked our independence, our freedom of a
Republic, and he can frolick in his Devil's Bones.
Our grovelling Ministers who in inherited his
financial testaments have, or think they have,
fastened the last iron padlock and told us to
breed, to breed and linger on the street corners
of our Land. They go to the cloakrooms to wash
their greasy fingers clean, to grasp the last
glass on the tap of Fianna Fàil's regimes, and
then to buy buy buy all the small Irish business
they have wrecked and live on those tax free
perks for the rest of their lives.
Here is a jolly parable I read on a Blog:
Who writes this today - the
very phrase that brings my rage and tears: "WE ARE
EUROPEANS. The present battle within Europe -
philosophical + political + economic + financial
+ social + psychological - is happening NOW.
Lets play vigour_US_ly."
One can only quote another blogger Gerry Fahey:True experts, it is said, know
when they dont know. However, non-experts (whether
or not they think they are) certainly do not know
when they dont know. Subjective confidence
is therefore an unreliable indication of the
validity of intuitive judgments and decisions.
High-validity forecasting
environments exist when there are stable
relationships between objectively identifiable
cues and subsequent events or between cues and
the outcomes of possible actions. Medicine is
practiced in environments of reasonably high
validity. In contrast, outcomes are effectively
unpredictable in zero-validity environments. To a
good approximation, predictions of the future
value of individual stocks and long-term
forecasts of political events are made in a zero-validity
environment.
*******************
LETTER
JUST CAME IN FROM AMERICA:
Just saw this on a blog
Government of Gobshites !
Lenihan is officially the WORST Finance minister
in the E.U. - F.T. yesterday. And, BIFFO is an
exception to Shakespeare's dictum that "there
is no art to see the mind's construction in the
face". Idiots and eejits all.
Had there been any E.U. goodwill and any Irish
negotiator worth his over-stuffed salary the
"bail-out" fund for Ireland would not
carry an interest rate of 7+%, overall - taking
into account the Irish dipping into their pension
fund to top-up the " bail-out".
The Irish taxpayer does not owe this vast amount
of money to anyone. The BANKS owe it to other
BANKS and Fianna Fail have treasonously foisted
this debt onto the Irish people and are now
guilty of subverting the State - something that
the I.R.A. have failed to do - up to now.
de Valera stole the money raised for the Irish
Press in America. Haughey stole all that he could.
Reynolds sold Irish passports to Third Worlders
and took money for his dogfood factory. Ahern
paraded his mistress at State expense, to the
disgust of the Nation, and his corrupt financial
dealings have only been touched on by the current
Mahon Tribunal in Dublin. Ali Ba BIFFO was the
Finance minister, unqualified for the job, who
oversaw the financial schweinfest, for the
benefit of the F.F. golden circle of gombeen men,
which landed their country in the current mess.
Why do the Irish, generally astute people, elect
such thick, ignorant and unfit people to govern
them ? As an Ireland watcher I was shocked when
they re-elected Ahern to government in 2007. Even
then, his chicanery and dishonesty was bubbling
to the surface.
The creepy is in the detail which
the Government didnt reveal.
Social welfare rates will fall by 4 percent (except
for pensioners). Regarding low-average earners
this is what the budget tables tell us.
All low-average income earners self-employed
and PAYE (both private and public sector) will
suffer considerable falls in income.
This is where it starts getting creepy. Those
who receive income via rents, dividends, interest
and self-employment (non-wage income, or Schedule
D taxpayers) are, unsurprisingly, the wealthiest
in society. When we hit the stratosphere of high
earnings over 150,000 per anum
those who receive income via non-wages
make up nearly 75 percent of all income received
above that level; the remaining 25 percent comes
from high-earning PAYE taxpayers (e.g. managers,
executives, higher professionals, etc.).
What happens to these high-income, non-wage
earners? According to the budget tables.
They get off pretty lightly seeing
their net income fall by approximately 1 percent.
Contrast that with low-average income earners,
including social welfare income. Its
substantially less.
But this is where it gets really creepy. The
budget tables stop their comparisons at 175,000.
With the help of the Deloitte tax calculator, we
can go higher. This is what Deloitte tells us for
non-wage incomes that leave the stratosphere and
circle far above the planet the rest of us live
on.
Thats right those are not negative
figures. Budget 2011 provides considerable tax
breaks for those on very high non-wage incomes.
If you happen to be a millionaire you are nearly
6 percent better off with Fianna Fails
budget. How does this occur?
This is how Deloitte breaks down the
millionaires budget. They will pay 11,936
more on income tax and PRSI. However, under the
Universal Social Charge, they pay 34,931
less than under the Health and Income levies
which the Charge replaces. That really puts the
Social in Universal Social Charge.
And at the risk of totally creeping you out,
the ESRI estimates that there
will be no wage-growth next year. However, non-wage
income (rents, dividends, interest, and self-employment)
will grow by 29 percent. So those very high non-wage
earners can look forward to not only an increase
in their incomes, but tax breaks on top of that.
Truly, a millionaires budget.
COMMENT FROM IRISH ECONOMY BLOG:
WHAT GOES UP SAYS:
The fundamental truth behind the desire to
name and shame all the protagonists though is the
need to recognise the fraud that is at the root
of the system.
Residential and commercial banks made
fraudulent loans. Investment banks used
unregulated financial instruments to make
fraudulent financial products from these loans.
Ratings agencies used fraudulent methods to rate
these instruments as solid as sovereign
investment. Banks, pension funds and other,
supposedly professional, investors bought these
instruments with the full knowledge that it was
the investment banks who paid the ratings
agencies for the rating. The game was
on and everybody had enough chairs to keep
playing.
And then the music stopped!
People arent angry and wishing for the
State to default because they dont wish to
pay the bill. They are simply saying the system
was built on a mountain of fraud and it is this
which needs to be dismantled.
Creating debts from Ponzi schemes and turning
them into sovereign obligations is an outrage.
another says:I remember
around 2008, a debate erupted in the offices of
Zoe developments over the ownership of the
boom. Someone proclaimed, The government
havent a clue where the boom came from! We
started the boom! The thing that we have to
bear in mind here, is that politcians in Ireland
dont come up with anything by themselves.
They simply latch onto movements that
are first created by the private sector. You can
see a similar thing happening today, in how the
politicians would not know a social networking
concept if he jumped up and bit them. But that
doesnt prevent them from riding on that
wave all the same. I once read a comment on
cool stuff that teenagers devise for
themselves. The corporations monitor this very
careful and then try to reverse-engineer it, re-brand
it as their own and sell it back to the very same
youth market at high street price levels. Of
course, the flooding of the market ensures that
it isnt cool anymore, so some clever
upcoming generation have to make up something new
to distinguish themselves and the whole cycle
begins all over again. What we witness in Ireland
with our politicians is precisely the same. They
never set the ball rolling by themselves, but
rather try to high jack something that
looks cool out there in the
marketplace. I predict that in another 15 to 20
years, we will be sitting here at the Irish
Economy blog site, debating the fall out from the
collapse of the social networking industry in
Ireland. Shock horror! By that stage though, the
political classes will have forgotten about this
property crash, and will be busy cranking up
another. The trouble with this endless joy-riding
on the latest wave of cool-ness in the private
sector, by the political classes - is that they
end up shoving far more resources in that
direction - than it was ever intended to bear in
the first place. The Construction industry would
have been okay, had it not been for political
intervention by idle people in Leinster house. If
a party was to run on a mandate for the next
election, it should be, please politicians keep
you paws away from the social networking industry.
BOH.
and another says:I was
listening to a lecture by David Harvey by podcast
only the other day. He observed that land prices
in Japan are still going down today. That is,
almost twenty years after their peak. But if I
may take this debate out of the context of
politics & macro-economics for a moment. It
is a phenomenon observed within many industries
also - where something is being toyed around with
in the laboratories by the engineers - and the
marketing department of company takes ownership
of that cool new thing, proceeding to
build the entire corporate strategy around it.
This was a phenomenon which people such as
Clayton Christensen have studied in much detail.
Namely, where an idea that would be fine if left
on its own, at its own scale to generate more
modest profits would have developed medium to
longer term into something very interesting. But
unfortunately, management often pumps resources
into something - akin, to the Olympic athlete
going on a force feed diet - and you end up with
nothing, except the scandal and the fallout. And
of course, the management who run out the door
with bonus payments, for destroying the company.
We could analyse property in Ireland, as
that kind of laboratory experiment, which the
engineers in the banks had under development in
the early 1990s. BOH.
KARL WHELAN SAYS: We
may have been rescued from the wolves. However,
it is open for debate whether our rescuers are
planning to feed us to the lions.