It's a sign of the immaturity of the Irish electorate that they are so willing to be bribed with their own money.During the debate last night there were plenty of references to manifestos being fully costed by the Department of Finance, or whoever. Is there anywhere I can see these? I'd like to be able to compare parties by how much they would increase current expenditure, what they would spend on capital projects, what the cost of their tax cuts would be etc. I have no real sense of how much each party is planning to inflate the State but just get a feeling that they are all going to splurge roughly the same amount with marginally different ways of accumulating said splurge.
Who can I vote for that will increase spending the least and keep the tax base as broad as possible?
*Edit: OK, so the manifestos of the 3 big parties have costings at the end of them so this information is there. My bad! It's not presented in the same manner across the parties so I can't really compare them without more leg work than I'm willing to put in, but I can get a sense of each party's profligacy from these.
Cost of manifestos you say? I can imagine a Waterford Whispers headline:
Taoiseach defends using same printer as the OPW to print the FG manifesto at a cost of €450,000....
Right, so they're all planning to embark on very risky spending increases but FF/FG are less bad than SF* (and interestingly the exact same). I assume all the microparties would spend even more so I'm left with no option but to vote for FF/FG as the least worst - but still terrible - option. Grim.The parties spending plans
Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin all have serious questions to answer on their spending planshowtotaxandspendit.substack.com
Credit to Barra Roantree, TCD.
"As Cliff Taylor wrote in the Irish Times this week, a “real issue for the parties is how they would deal with this [loss of corporation tax revenues] and what parts of their programme would be lost if the resources available were less than expected. None have been clear on this.”
Judging from the tenor of the campaign to date, there is no reason to expect this to change by polling day next week."
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