@Sophrosyne, the old maxim that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it still holds true.
We need to manage our national finances more prudently.
- Thread starter Jazz1945
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Those guys are still in the hospitals though, I know of one hospital that employs their own grounds keepers but still need a private contractor to come in every week and do the "heavy work", . Of course those permanent jobs are allocated by nepotism not ability, one guys wife is a senior administrator
SF's magic money theme also risks backfiring since (hopefully) most voters are smart enough to know that the government has limited means to combat inflation. If I was SF I'd just keep talking about the housing crisis where FFG are responsible for one of the biggest policy failures in post-war Western Europe. On that count alone FFG deserve enteral political damnation.
Brendan Burgess
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They must not have read my article. The irresponsibility continues.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/4B3Q3KYLSBG6RFPS2TP3RUABUE.JPG)
www.irishtimes.com
Spending rules to be paused as Coalition plans big additional budget spend
Welfare increases and tax changes to significantly exceed planned €1.5bn
Why do you think that? Have you absolutely no idea what's going on in most of the rest of the developed world?
NoRegretsCoyote
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But look at how good the numbers are. January-April tax receipts were roaring ahead:
Spending was well down on last year with expenditure in line with plans:
Fiscal numbers for the first half of the year will be published today or tomorrow. Let's see what they say.
The cost of renting in Dublin in relation to incomes is vastly higher than in almost any other comparable city accross the developed world. I don't understand why there are still those who are trying to sugarcoat it.
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There are plenty of more expensive cites, especially when adjusted for purchasing power parity.
For example our per capita income, PPP adjusted, is $69,190. In Spain it's $42,250. Rent in Milan is about 30% lower in Milan. Therefore as a percentage of the average income, PPP adjusted, rents here are lower.
Things certainly aren't good here but anyone who thinks this is mainly down to government policies in the last 10 years is an idiot. The government certainly hasn't helped and HAPS is probably the main problem that is within their control but government policy isn't the main driver and no government policy can fix it in the short to medium term. Our housing problems are problems of success. People want to come here to work and live because it's a great country. Should we go back to the crazy left wing FF led governments of the 80's and end up with 50,000 people leaving each year?
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The government isn't even picking the low-hanging fruit. There are tens of thousands of unauthorized Airbnbs that could be pushed into the long-term rental sector but aren't. There is rampant dereliction & vacancy even in prime city locations and again nothing done about it. Same story with crazy HAP rents which crowd non-social welfare recipients out of the market and create perverse incentives for people not to seek work. Why is all this happening? Because the government's priority is to drive up property prices no matter how horrifying the social cost.
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Why is that their only priority? Please please don't come back with some crazy Shinner-bot conspiracy theory.
How many thousand and how could they force them into the long-term rental sector?
Dereliction rates have dropped in recent years but without a meaningful property tax there's not much that can be done about it and people are against higher property taxes, in fact the opposition want to abolish them (because they are populists, not socialists).
I agree. That is certainly one way in which the government has made things worse but the political lobby groups pretending to be homeless charities keep pushing for more of the same and our pseudo-left wing media champion their cause.
Because of the last crash, quantitative easing which has resulted in a massive increase in money supply, low bond rates which have cause a huge flow of capital into property, inept Public Servants and structures who can't get projects through, a totally inept construction sector which is grossly inefficient. We live in a democracy where the State has limited power and the government of the day is constrained by laws and precedent and can't rule by dictate. Yes, there's more they could do and there's certainly things they could do better but blaming them for the whole mess is silly and ill-though out.
It's not crazy Shinner conspiracy theory to argue that vested interests influence government policy and that a preponderance of influential vested interests wants high rather than low property prices. Regarding Airbnb, enforceable prohibition of short-term lets coupled with severe vacant property penalties would push most Airbnbs into the regular rental sector. I agree with your other points regarding construction sector inefficiency, bureaucratic incompetence & counterproductive social justice lobby groups. Sanctimonious media doesn't help either which simply doesn't question why someone who contributes nothing to society deserves 2000 euro HAP monthly while many full-time workers spend half their salary sharing mouldy bedrooms with strangers.
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The primary goal of any government is to stay in office. Sorting out the housing shortage would keep any government in office. Why would they not do it?
House prices and rent are vastly higher than they were a decade in most of the developed world. The primary driver of that is a massive increase in the money supply. That's not something that any Irish government can control.
Two main reasons:
1) More voters own property than are looking to buy or rent and politicians generally bet on voter selfishness (though that is changing as even middle class offspring are forced to emigrate for lack of housing).
2) To make a significant dent in the housing crisis Dublin requires thousands of 10-15 storey apartment blocks like they exist in cities across Europe. Counting on voter selfishness politicians are scared of nimby backlashes. This is aggravated by a constituency-based electoral system that makes them vulnerable to local pressure groups & lack of social shame felt by those pressure groups. Moreover, the electoral cycle is shorter than the planning & construction cycle, thus promoting short-termism.
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So why have the government introduced legislation to make it harder to object to planning applications as well as fast tracking the process?
We have plenty of space for medium density developments that don't require 10-15 stories but I do agree that we need far more apartments than houses.
Unfortunately the construction sector is even more incompetent and inefficient than the State and so they are unable to build them at a price the market will bear. They blame increasing costs of materials and labour but in the US 30% of what is delivered to a construction site ends up in Landfill. Given that the US is generally much more efficient than us that statistic is probably higher here. Construction is one of the most inefficient industries in the world. In the United States, where, since 1945, productivity in manufacturing, retail, and agriculture has grown by as much as 1,500 percent, productivity in construction has barely increased at all (). I can't see us being any better. In fact I'd bet that we are considerably worse if the laughably inept practices I see on construction sites are anything to by.
The bottom line is that builders are really really bad at their job and pass on that incompetence in cost to the consumer. Rather than addressing their own ineptitude they whinge and moan like little girls about costs going up. It's very hard for the government to fix that.
If the government really wanted to circumvent this they could bring in foreign contractors & work crews from places like Turkey and China (which in turn would be a wake-up call to their Irish counterparts). Other countries (esp. In the Middle East) have a lot of their infrastructure built that way.
No they couldn't. That's just ridiculous.
They could buy factory built homes from the mainland, the USA or even the UK but that would require a change in existing building standards and the unionised staff in the Department of the Environment couldn't be bothered doing that. Okay, in fairness, they probably don't have the skills or resources to do it either, just on the off chance they could be bothered.
I agree but that just illustrates my point. If the government & bureaucracy *really* wanted to drastically boost housing supply they could but they just don't want to. Where there's a will strong enough it can conquer any amount of resistance & incompetence.
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Not in a democracy.
Sophrosyne
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Summer Economic Statement 2022 is now available on gov.ie