Economic stimulus packages

Purple said:

I agree with all of that but at the moment we are fire fighting so we don't have the time.

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The problem is that real economic plans will never happen, especially in Ireland where the unions are so strong.

Real liberatarian economics (free market, minimal regulation, extremely low taxes) which would be good in the long term are seen as creating too much problems to achieve such a destination in the short term.

Globally politicians don't have the balls to let bad companies go under and thus allow new industry to prosper.

Rather than have a sharp quick and large downturn in order to sort out all the financial problems (i.e. by not proping up any company or industry), we are delaying the consequences.

Japan propped up their industries and created zombie firms, ones which should not exist today. They have cost the tax payers over 25 years where they should have failed after 1 year and now they would have profitable companies to replace them.

Governments think they Keynes is the answer. Unfortunately it is the problem.

I honestly think that the US, UK and Ireland are in for a lost decade at least. Economic stimulus is merely delaying the real recovery until a longway down the line.

Chris said:

Just one example would be to get rid of all the motor tax offices bar one. There is absolutely no need to be wasting money on every county having one (in some cases two), when you can tax your car online, by post, by phone and I believe also at the post office.

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I agree with all of what you say but would like to add that when I'm getting my van (commercial) taxed the DOE cert has to be delivered with the docs by hand.

Purple said:

I agree with all of that but at the moment we are fire fighting so we don't have the time.

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Exactly, there is no time to be wasting on half-hearted attempts at reducing wages in general, after constant wrangling with unions. Instead of, let's say 10% reduction in public service wages, get rid of 10% of the public service staff. Yes, this would add people to the dole queues, but bottom line is that the public service is too big, and even in good times should never have been increased.

sunrock said:

Well, for a start our high earning public servants could have the same levels of pay as the U.K. and/or Germany. This would see a big reduction in our high earning public servants pay and if they could do as good a job as their european counterparts...we would all be happy.First the higher up civil servants and others getting paid by the public purse like consultants etc demanded benchmarking to match the pay of Executives in the private sector. Then they just benchmarked against each other.
Of course now that we are in serious financial difficulties they resist reverse benchmarking.The pay demands of our top bankers is just crazy...and its all out of the taxpayer...personally I`d prefer 10 graduates on 50k each than one man on 500k

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Very good point. In addition to this I would suggest completely overhauling public sector employment contracts. Jobs for life and upward only benchmarking are probably the biggest disincentives to increasing productivity.

S.L.F said:

I agree with all of what you say but would like to add that when I'm getting my van (commercial) taxed the DOE cert has to be delivered with the docs by hand.

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I didn't know that, and it is just adding to my argument for getting rid of certain unfeasible public services. I cannot see any seriously plausible reason, other than adding bureaucracy, that you should not be able to at the very least post in the cert. This is a complete and utter nonsense process with the sole purpose of keeping people in a job at the expense of everyone else.