Labour Budget Submission

The Labour Submission is here

Key points:

Spending
700 million jobs fund for employment subsidies and placement schemes
1.3 billion reduction in pay budget
1.3 billion reduction in capital spending through lower tender prices
900 million reduction in non-pay spending (list given at end of document)
Reinstate Christmas Social Welfare Payment (240 million)

Tax
Third rate of income tax (48 per cent kicking in at 100k for single and 200k for couple)
Abolition of a number of tax expenditures
Carbon Tax

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

Fine Gael Budget Proposals

Fine Gael have released their budget proposals (though presumably not in time for the government to adopt many of them). The detailed financial breakdown of the proposals is at the bottom of the press release. There are a lot of proposals in here and they are, inevitably, a bit of mixed bag. For now, I will merely brandish a yellow card for unsportsmanlike behaviour at the idea that we can “save” €500 million in infrastructure spending by funneling it through an off-balance sheet vehicle.

The large welfare costs of second-best EU climate policies

The EU is committed to limiting the rise in global average temperature to 2°C above pre-industrial levels and aims to achieve this through a range of policy instruments. This column warns that climate policy need not cost a lot, but imperfect implementation could cause hundreds of billions of euros’ worth of unnecessary welfare losses.

Global rebalancing and the euro

This column was not written with an Irish audience in mind, but given its trade patterns and openness Ireland is obviously one of the countries that is most exposed to the risks it discusses.