Out of the MSM loop but caught Noonans comments this morning on the radio. Well that didn’t take long did it! It should be completely clear to all sides that they’ve lost it. Lost whatever it was they thought they had and there is no plan. Did you hear that NO PLAN.
I think we are witnessing the political equivalent of Moores Law in action over the last 4 years.
This “interest on the Bailout vs the attack on our Corpo Tax” must be the greatest strawman perpetrated on the people since the “Guarantee”.
At this point I would say its time to start really considering the worst worst case scenario or out of the blue event that spins us to another out of control point. You will have to dispense all you thought you knew to move to the next phase.
The past is certainly not the future. Those in power are already lost to it.
I laughed out loud when I heard the ***** prick. He seemed to me to be quoting a 2008 vintage Lenny almost verbatim. It wasn’t so much what he said as his apparent total unawareness that we was reprising Lenny, this time as farce.
Fine Gael, running in the last election against the worst, WORST, government in Irish history, instead of having a coherent plan to try and turn things around, instead had a 4-point soundbite and had a bunch of US professional political spindoctors calling the shots on the campaign. It was all about playing the percentages and making sure they got in, which they couldn’t even do outside of a coalition. They are a fucking joke, a bunch of schoolteachers trying to run a country in crisis.
Coc-I think I’ll have to report this comment for BALDISM. Those of us follicly challenged
pinsters are not impressed! Otherwise I agree with you, it definitely had shades of
a Scrap Saturday send up only it was actually for real.
Unilateral default? If so, can you - or anyone - say with certainty that that’s a better plan than the structured default mechanism ourselves and Greece are currently (clearly) involved in?
1-year deficit reduction? If so, can it be demonstrated that that’s an immeasurably better option than doing it over 5 years?
A better jobs initiative? Just lol, because no government can create jobs top-down like this, at least not without spending copious money we don’t have on building stuff, which will land us right back where we are in a few years anyway with 200,000 re-unemployed brickies.
Leave the Euro? Why? So that we can avoid giving ourselves pay cuts and a reduction in our collective standard of living? And whither our €-denominated debt? Whither imported inflation the instant our Punt Nua tanks? Whither our EU membership? Whither Irish pension funds?
And what if some of the above, or similarly radical, measures precipitated a EU/EZ-wide banking or sovereign crisis? Tough shit? Not our problem? Let them swing? Again, is anyone arguing that with certainty we can be so blasé about such high stakes?
…
One might argue that any or all of those *could *be tried (for example, I wouldn’t mind giving the 1-year deficit reduction thing a go)…but can anyone honestly say that it is abundantly obvious that these are better options? No. All of them are a roll of the dice. I don’t think it’s realistic or honest to argue otherwise.
Well actually they did have a plan, it was their 5 point plan. What I complaining about there and was really annoyed about at the time is that whole thing with the campaign being run by the US pros - Fine Gael were running for elected office to lead us through a major crisis and they drafted in external help to polish them for the electorate. I know for a fact that a lot of the campaign decisions were made by these guys who have since departed and left the schoolteachers to implement the “5 point plan” which didn’t once mention the Croke Park agreement or how the public sector pay bill could be radically cut. They didn’t mention what might be done with all the excess housing in the country. It did mention sharing the debt burden, but that seems to have been abandoned. What I’m getting at is that they were more about style when what we really needed was substance. They were a shoo-in anyway, why bother with the expensive politicial marketing consultants
These guys have known for a long time that they would be forming this government, and based on the old 100 days in office test, I’ve not seen much that they have achieved. Have they abolished the excessive Dáil holidays or will they be finishing up soon until September like always?
I didn’t suggest any of the things you have listed here as alternatives, so that all looks like a straw man argument to me.
Reform bankruptcy laws.
Don’t ask public to pay private debts.
Renege on bank guarantee.
Work out structural deficit over a few years.
Not a whole pile more needed after that.
The best way to fix a bubble is to not have one. Otherwise there are only nasty choices. At the moment, the best choice available is to stick with the plan, however much one might like to do something else about it.
If the previous government (and the permanent government) had decided to burn Anglo and INBS as part of the guarantee (i.e. liquidate them immediately), that would have ‘saved’ 35 bn euro. It probably would have left us in the position where far less was required by the rest of the banking system. The fiscal deficit would have had to have been reduced more quickly, IMO, than the current troika plan envisages, but it would have been doable.
Neither of these two things happened. While we might arrest, try and hang from the nearest lamp-post those responsible we can’t undo the actions that have been taken. We not only are where we are, but we are going on the path that we have been set on. There isn’t just a lack of political will to do anything different, there’s a lack of popular will too.
Oh for goodness sake. How do you work out the structural deficit over a few years when your only funding is coming with a condition that the public purse pays private debts?
The only action I can fathom they may have taken is in changed the seats in the Dail but have they even done that?
They had one great white hope…Renegotiate and now they’ve made a total balls of it. The state is not sovereign and once again rudderless tethered to the pirate ships of the Bankers but that is where they wanted us to be all the parties of the dail despite their faux protestations. They are playing us for monkeys.
Its Game Over. The country is now in a terminal decline phase.
Maybe I heard Kenny say something about Economic Independence today? Was that a printing press I heard cranked. I’ll believe it it when I see it but for now their are two centre right FAIL parties who got it totally wrong using up clogging up the Dail and using valuable space time and resources in the context quickening death spiral.
The PLANE is in STALL.
The talk of us as “peripheral” economies imbues clearly the imbalance in the EU.
There is no vision at the top so be afraid be very afraid. Some say it will be 20 years creeping death. I can tell you now it will be much faster followed by 30 years of living death and some more.
The truth is no one has a plan and no one knows what to do in all sincerity. The A-Team could do a better fucking job at this stage. We knew this was the case even before they got elected but I didn’t think they’d drop the ball so fast but I am not surprised and now time i running out FASTER.
Fuck Fine Gael and fuck their past strategies and all that other crap is TIME WASTED. The future is our concern and how our present jeopardizes its meaningful existence with us in the picture.