Estimates of Receipts and Expenditure for 2025 published

Brendan Burgess said:

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Look at corp tax creeping up beside income tax!........I've said it before and I'll say it again.......Ireland is now a two times levered SPY or QQQ mutual fund.......our public finances are basically predicated on record profit margins & current market positioning persisting at a handful of mega-cap companies.....some of those companies - Apple, Microsoft, Google - seem invincible but so too did Eastman Kodak in its day.

There's a deeply troubling operational leverage inherent in our economic model that could go in reverse very very quickly........I haven't seen the analysis but suspect a huge proportion of income tax receipts are also coming from SPY/QQQ company employees too......

Very dangerous stuff to do what we're doing with the public finances.....Ireland has infrastructure deficits, no doubt about it.....and money has to be thrown at this for sure...so no problem with one time capital expenditure...the spending commitments being directed on current and future expenditure is going to put future governments and future generations in a tight spot.

Maybe Pascal when he's IMF chief in the future can fly back for a couple of days to give us a dig out!

There is a major sense of pre-crash off this budget. Major increases in spending, opposition calling for even more, further narrowing of the tax base, and economic experts waved away with a hand. This time, instead of a credit fueled housing bubble we have a multinational tax take influenced by global changes in taxation rules and the quarterly sales performance of a handful of companies. iPhone 16 not selling well in China? There goes the deficit.

In terms of investing the money now - the economy is running at full tilt. "Lets build more of x" - where will the construction workers come from to complete what is already being built plus these new projects? Or will we just increase the cost of delivering roughly the same volume of concrete poured.

Stick the money into funds that appreciate and deploy it when the next major recession hits, keeping the likes of our construction sector in business rather than heading off to Australia like last time.

Hard to believe that the last time we did all this was only 15 years ago! Jack Chambers or his successor could well be on Prime Time in a few years reminding us that we all partied....

C_Pike said:

Stick the money into funds that appreciate and deploy it when the next major recession hits, keeping the likes of our construction sector in business rather than heading off to Australia like last time.

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Not disagreeing with your main points but, isn't that what the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (sovereign wealth/investment fund) is intended for?

C_Pike said:

There is a major sense of pre-crash off this budget. Major increases in spending, opposition calling for even more, further narrowing of the tax base, and economic experts waved away with a hand. This time, instead of a credit fueled housing bubble we have a multinational tax take influenced by global changes in taxation rules and the quarterly sales performance of a handful of companies. iPhone 16 not selling well in China? There goes the deficit.

In terms of investing the money now - the economy is running at full tilt. "Lets build more of x" - where will the construction workers come from to complete what is already being built plus these new projects? Or will we just increase the cost of delivering roughly the same volume of concrete poured.

Stick the money into funds that appreciate and deploy it when the next major recession hits, keeping the likes of our construction sector in business rather than heading off to Australia like last time.

Hard to believe that the last time we did all this was only 15 years ago! Jack Chambers or his successor could well be on Prime Time in a few years reminding us that we all partied....

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Fully agree. To be honest this time I think a lot of people can see it.

There is definitely a case of less and less for the money spent. I’m just not sure if we can not spend it and wait until a recession then get much better value.

It’s hard to underestimate just how little we did for the best part of 10 years and we weren’t starting from a place of strength. We were well behind on infrastructure. The stuff you see and the stuff you don’t.

Like investment time in is the key to good infrastructure. When we look at countries poorer than is with better infrastructure it’s usually the case that we are only better off for the last 20 years.

ClubMan said:

Not disagreeing with your main points but, isn't that what the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (sovereign wealth/investment fund) is intended for?

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Part of the money is going in - I believe the underlying deficit is €6bn after you strip out the money going to the SIF. Then there's arguments back and forth over what is "one off" spending - a lot of one off measures are starting to look very permanent. So if we hit the skids we look like we'll do what we did post 2008: Gut capital spending, because current spending is so far out over the skis.

cremeegg said:

'the Department’s estimate of corporation tax receipts that may be ‘windfall’ in nature' is as close as the paper gets to a definition of 'windfall'

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It’s completely circular. They are windfall because they are windfall.

It’s better to look at concentration by firm or sector.