how to get out of this mess

if you could give advice to the government what would you give to help get us out of this mess that we are all in

hipster wrote:if you could give advice to the government what would you give to help get us out of this mess that we are all in

Get the banks to give the builders loads of money...

Start at the basics and get communities working together.

1. Cut the minimum wage to 5 an hour to increase competivness and reduce costs in the service sector hence increasing demand
2. Reduce social welfare by 25% as costs and services will be lower after point 1
3. do away with public sector gauranteed pensions and insted fund these at say 12.5% of salary as a fixed contribution
4. Introduce a huge capital expenditure package to stimulate the construction sector including bulding an outer ring road M50+ that links the M1 to the N11 through the M2 M3 M4 and M7 say 20 miles outside the M50 Drogheda/Slane/Navan/Kilcock etc
and reopen rail lines on the N2 and N3 corridors

5. create 50,000 R&D smart economy student places in the universities in science and IT pharma /energy development and link this to post grad 2 year placements with multinationals on a subsidised basis - ie make Ireland the most attractive place to establish development centres for overseas companies

OMAR wrote:1. Cut the minimum wage to 5 an hour to increase competivness and reduce costs in the service sector hence increasing demand
2. Reduce social welfare by 25% as costs and services will be lower after point 1
3. do away with public sector gauranteed pensions and insted fund these at say 12.5% of salary as a fixed contribution
4. Introduce a huge capital expenditure package to stimulate the construction sector including bulding an outer ring road M50+ that links the M1 to the N11 through the M2 M3 M4 and M7 say 20 miles outside the M50 Drogheda/Slane/Navan/Kilcock etc
and reopen rail lines on the N2 and N3 corridors

5. create 50,000 R&D smart economy student places in the universities in science and IT pharma /energy development and link this to post grad 2 year placements with multinationals on a subsidised basis - ie make Ireland the most attractive place to establish development centres for overseas companies

Correction.
3. Public service already pay on average 13% of salary towards pension
1. Cut mininum wages to zero as that was the cause of all our problems

Now to add to your suggestions.

Give Billions more to Anglo

Make sure that those who owe millions get all the contracts listed, which most likely be the case.
Seriously
Before any thing is done, Anglo should be shut and hard luck to the gamblers who might loose a couple of bob.Clean up the private sector which was the Real reason for our woes.
Have a general election.
This will give confidence to people and then they can dig in together to move this country forward.There is no confidence out there in our politicians, financial institutions or professional bodies. So clean them up.

The root of the problem lies within capitalism and the myth that the americas and britains are financially sound enough to tie us over, because when the **** hits the fan for them we are the ones who suffer as we are in their debt!

Read my post before attacking it

I said the Govt should contribute 12.5% towards Public sector pensions not the employee (their contribution should be whatever the wish as the they get it back in any case) - at least the cost becomes finite rather than the taxpayer becoming exposed to investment market risk

The reason why the government has to bail out the banks is that the banks lent more money than the assets they lent against are worth.

The assets of the bank are the loans it has given out
The liabilities of a bank are the bonds and deposits it has received
The excess of assets over liabilities is the capital
The shareholders own the capital
If the assets reduce in value the capital reduces in the case of Anglo or Irish nationwide this becomes nil and the shareholders are left with Nil
The next person to get hit is the deposit holders or the people who have put theur savings in the bank
The government stepped in to gaurantee the banks to protect the savers. If they did not do this you get a run on a bank which spreads across all the banks and leaves us without an economy as we end back with a barter system.

The govt are not bailing out the banks
They are not bailing out the borrowers who still owe the money
They are not bailing out the shareholders who have lost everything
They are bailing out the depositholders - The only legitimate criticisim is that by protecting the depositholders they also protected instituitonal investors who had bought corporate bonds.

Its tabloid and union spinddoctoring that we are bailing out the greedyfat cat bankers.
but I suppose there always has to be a bad guy

How is the government not bailing out the banks?

Surely investing tax payers money in them and taking on their "toxic" debt is bailing out the banks?

Why do this? Why should the minimum wage be cut? The people on it already are being treated badly enough without cutting their earnings!

North Side Gael wrote:How is the government not bailing out the banks?

Surely investing tax payers money in them and taking on their "toxic" debt is bailing out the banks?

thought I had explained above but if not
If the bank has no money who gives the savers back their money ?



Why do this? Why should the minimum wage be cut? The people on it already are being treated badly enough without cutting their earnings!

The reason why people are badly off is that we are one of the most expensive countries in the world for services - Restaurants are dear, Hairdressers are dear, shops are dear all because the cost of labour is higher than Europe. The cost of labour is high because we need to pay people high wages because the cost of living is high.
One leads to the other. If we cut everything things become more affordable and the standard of living is the same. But our exports become more competitive and jobs are created.

OMAR wrote:

North Side Gael wrote:How is the government not bailing out the banks?

Surely investing tax payers money in them and taking on their "toxic" debt is bailing out the banks?

thought I had explained above but if not
If the bank has no money who gives the savers back their money ?



Why do this? Why should the minimum wage be cut? The people on it already are being treated badly enough without cutting their earnings!

The reason why people are badly off is that we are one of the most expensive countries in the world for services - Restaurants are dear, Hairdressers are dear, shops are dear all because the cost of labour is higher than Europe. The cost of labour is high because we need to pay people high wages because the cost of living is high.
One leads to the other. If we cut everything things become more affordable and the standard of living is the same. But our exports become more competitive and jobs are created.

Most small business operators have stated that is the high rents that is their biggest problem and, you know who creates that situation, not wages. €8.75 per hour a high wage? Also hard luck to all those who invested in Anglo. Who would bail out someone who invested in some Nigerian prince , say called Seanie, scam?. Same story with Anglo, too many unanswered questions about it.

I'll try again

To my knowledge the equity shareholders in Anglo have not received anything for their investment -

If the government had not pumped money into the banks do you feel that the two million deposit account holders or basically anyone who does is not overdrawn should have suffered a loss ?

5. create 50,000 R&D smart economy student places in the
universities in science and IT pharma /energy development and link this
to post grad 2 year placements with multinationals on a subsidised
basis - ie make Ireland the most attractive place to establish
development centres for overseas companies.....

I'm doing a 2 year post grad myself and found it next to impossible to find a company to do course projects with for free i may add as did my whole class.... Found that the university did not help with postgrad placement, there was no agencies and also companies didn't want to take on postgrads for free which i couldn't understand.

I entered a proposal in your country your call incorporating some of these problems.

OMAR wrote:1. Cut the minimum wage to 5 an hour to increase competivness and reduce costs in the service sector hence increasing demand
2. Reduce social welfare by 25% as costs and services will be lower after point 1

Idiotic ideas there Omar ......Stamp on the most impoverished sector and maybe they will all emigrate or die.
Would your novel plan not be brought to a quicker conclusion by killing off Social Welfare recipients and following that up with the extermination of all on the minimum wage. You could then go ahead with the infrastructural plan....

In the brief history of this forum I have never read a more inhuman post...For shame...

Boxtyeater

I take exception to points made about inhumanity when you clearly failed to either read or understand my point.

IF we reduce the cost of living by 25%
If we reduce Social welfare by 25%
IF we reduce wages by 25%

Please tell me who is worse off or donwtrodden

I do appreciate that there are costs that cannot adjust to labour and property prices
e.g Oil which are outside the control of This country but I am talking at a simplified level.

All that happens is that we become more competitive create more jobs and providing better quality properly staffed service in the services sector becomes more affordable to everyones benefit icnluding the unemloyed and lower paid.
Do people running backstreet cafes in Spain who charge 90 cents for a beer and 50 cents for a coffee and who earn 5 euro an hour have a poorer lifestyle than people on min wage in a dublin shopping centre ?



Real Kerry Fan

high rents are only a factor if you have a long term lease - With interest rates at 1% and property values down 40% rental yeilds will adjust which means rents will adjust the renter has the power and should use it. I have noticed in Cavan town latelly that almost every week a shop is closing and opeing again around the corner. That is people putting pressure on landords and rental rates

Introduce a tax system which seriously taxes the rich, and this will pay for the rest to have some money as well to boost the economy. All economists know that you need to spend your way out of a recession. Rooseveltd called it the "New Deal" back in the 1930s.It just needs a better distribution of wealt.

I expect most people could survive on say 50 million a year, net, so why do some need more?

However, you need to collect the tax.

Over the years, globally, we have had capitalism. communism, socialism, autocracy, monarchy, theocracy, tyranny and any other ism you can think of! With all the academia in the world no-one can (or are willing) come up with some system that means that people everywhere can live with some form of comfort.

We have 4.2 million people here (Texas has almost 25 million! oh and Wal-Mart employ 2.1 million) We have a young and very educated population. We have skilled people. We have industrious people and people with great ingenuity. If we take Ireland inc as a company, complete with our natural resources and the ability of our workforce - surely it is not a big ask to work out a strategy whereby we maximise our strengths and build on them. We have tremendous potential here - we are not even tapping into a portion of it in large areas.

We also have a huge amount of economists here - who seem to know everything - after it happens! Can we not forget all the isms etc and look at the particular picture here - and globally it is small. Lets look at our income and our potential income. Lets maximise that. Lets look at our expenditure - carefully.

We need to rid ourselves of the need to make 200% profit. We have 32,000 square miles of beauty, 4.2 million people with great potential - its not rocket science and is actually very manageable if you think about it .... There is no reason why this little island should not be chugging along nicely ... and immune to global collapses and the like. Lessons to learn.

I agree Jayo what we need is some realism combined with Optimism and develop a new brand of Irishism

OMAR wrote:I agree Jayo what we need is some realism combined with Optimism and develop a new brand of Irishism

Pre celtic tiger irishism would be nice to go back to...