There is also a serious danger in relying on current spending to assess the needed level of spending in Ireland (barring for deficit calculation purposes) - the deficit in accumulated spending over the years is enormous (particularly as a high % of expenditure in the 90s was debt repayments). So the underlying level of resources is much weaker than in many countries with similar levels of spending (all those mising libraries, computers in schools, community centres etc - and roads of course…). Not that relevant in terms of immediate balancing the books but highly relevant when thinking about ‘waste’ and medium to long term development.

Also, to really figure out how to square the tax and expenditure sides we would need to make some assessments of changes in GDP and in the tax take from GDP. Both are highly uncertain at the moment but it should be possible to work through some altrnative scenarios. Anybody got any good ideas/ data on that?

I agree that the above graphs seem to lead us to this conclusion, and that is exactly my problem with the way these graphs present the problem. If you look at per capita figures, you get the impression that expenditure has increased moderately while tax revenues have fallen rather drastically.

Then it is fair to say, tax needs more attention than expenditure.

Would it be fair to say that expenditure needs more attention than tax?

While not explicitly mentioned in this post, there is also a worrying tendency among contributors to this blog to studiously ignore the capital side of the budget, as if current spending was necessarily public sector waste and building lots of train tunnels and roads automatically equated to a positive return on investment.