Category: Uncategorized

Budget 2010: Public Sector Pay

The government has cut public sector pay in the budget. A description of these cuts is available on page 27 of this document.

Pay has been cut by 5 percent for low earners gradually rising up to 8 percent for those earning €125,000. The cuts stay at 8 percent between €125,000 and €165,000 and €175,000. Those earning between €175,000 and €200,000 have cuts of 12 percent and those earning over €200,000 have cuts of 15 percent. An Taoiseach Brian Cowen gets a special cut of 20 percent.

Annex A of the document linked to above also described the cumulative cuts for different classes of workers, including public sector workers. To give one example, a public sector worker earning €75,000 in a one-income household with two children over 6 years of age has had a total reduction in net pay since last year’s budget of 18.2%. The comparable figure for a similar couple in the private sector was 5.4%.

I know there are many who will feel that these cuts have been too extreme. More interesting, I guess, is whether those who favoured cuts in public sector pay now think that this is enough or think that the government should come back and cut public pay some more.

Who Blinks First? Ireland, Greece, the ECB, and the Bank Guarantee

The rules of the game have changed for Ireland.  Should Ireland respond to this new risky-game environment by selling off some or all of its domestic banks to large foreign bank holding companies?  I believe that it should.  We can keep the names on the high street bank offices, but lose the liability guarantee.

Continue reading “Who Blinks First? Ireland, Greece, the ECB, and the Bank Guarantee”

Climategate

This continues a previous discussion.

My piece in today’s Irish Times was meant for Friday.

The chair of the IPCC has now called for an investigation. A day later, WG1 of the IPCC declared that all was fine. A vice-chair of the IPCC declared that this whole affair is a waste of time.

The Irish Times published two regular articles on this matter, under foreign affairs (here and here). The environment correspondents was in the Maldives (at the taxpayers’ expense), incorrectly claiming that “it could be lost unless progress is made at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen”. The momentum in sea level rise is such that atolls are doomed, now matter what we do about greenhouse gas emissions. Frank McDonald is now in Copenhagen, where he toes the IPCC WG1 line. The Irish Times today published an appeal to Copenhagen, writing that “the science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to two degrees”. This suggests that science demands such a limit. This is not true. Any target is a value-judgement. The two degrees target is a political fact, not a scientific one. (See here.) It seems that, like the Climate Research Unit, the Irish Times mixes up science and politics.

TASC Pre-Budget Submission

TASC argue for savings to be made (approx 5 billion) from removing various tax breaks. The document contains a useful list of the large number of tax expenditures in the Irish system, taken from the Commission on Taxation report. They argue that reducing many of these breaks would be an equitable way of raising finance.

link here

‘Ireland after NAMA’ – New Blog

There is a new and interesting blog written mainly, but not exclusively, by geographers at http://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/

For a start, people may want to take a look at this map of vacant properties developed after 2006 – the national vacancy rate in 2006 was 15% but this updates the pattern with data on vacancies in properties developed after 2006, with some small areas going above 50%.