[Jernal]

Originally Posted by Genghiz Cohen

I am entirely on the fence on this one.

The treaty seems like more rules, but rules didn't help Spain. Some TV man said they stayed within the current EU rules and are now screwed, but Germany didn't and are OK.
So I'm thinking, what good are rules that don't help?

Explain it to me like I'm a 10 year old, please.

Vote yes to get a lollipop for yourself and daddy to keep his job.

[Genghiz Cohen]

Originally Posted by Jernal

Vote yes to get a lollipop for yourself and daddy to keep his job.

YAY!

[robindch]

Originally Posted by Genghiz Cohen

what good are rules that don't help?

The main aim of the Stability Treaty is to ensure that messes like Greece don't happen again, firstly by ramping up the monitoring of budgets (the Greek Department of Finance manipulated stats for years, effectively scamming the EU and the private finance markets) and secondly, by ensuring that governments which overspend are contractually and publicly obliged to reduce spending and/or increase taxation, if they do take on excessive debt.

The Treaty is much less applicable to Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, for the following reasons: Italy has a high budget deficit and national debt, but it's considered (mostly) able to repay this given reasonable economic conditions. Spain's government stuck to the EU targets pretty much faultlessly, but the amount of private credit (delivered via banks) became unsustainable, much as it did in Ireland and Portugal. Property crashes in these three countries wiped billions off the present value of private credit, and governments were forced to step in to avoid a general financial meltdown (bear in mind here the global meltdown that happened when Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers crashed in the US; people seem to forget this disappointingly persistently).

So in short, the Stability Treaty won't do much to or for Ireland one way or the other since the Irish government has generally stuck to the terms and conditions it lays out anyway. That said, the Irish tax base was heavily dependent on the property sector, so once that went down the pan, so did amount of tax collected by the Irish state; hence the current €20 billion difference between income and expenditure and the governments less-than-successful attempts to widen the tax base. There's also a persuasive argument that the general terms and conditions contained within the Treaty should be governed by primary legislation enacted within the Dail, and not by the Constitution which is difficult to change.

What the Stability Treaty doesn't do, and what Central Bank Governer Patrick Honohan called for yesterday, is (a) to regulate the private credit market -- aka the banks -- to enforce prudent lending policies and (b) to consider setting up a pan-European banking agency which will step in, at the EU level, to stabilize shaky banks, rather than leaving them become the responsibility of the state (as happened/is happening in Ireland, Spain and Portugal with catastrophic results).

If the Stability Treaty enacted such an EU-wide institution, people would be start-raving insane to vote against it. As it stands, and with its general inapplicability to Ireland and its missed opportunities, I'm about 60% in favour of the Treaty, so I'll probably be voting yes if I remember to.

[Zamboni]

Originally Posted by Genghiz Cohen

YAY!

It won't really matter whether you vote yes or no.
Either way the credit cards are being cut up and the kids are not getting lollipops.

[Penn]

Originally Posted by robindch

bear in mind here the global meltdown that happened when Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers crashed in the US; people seem to forget this disappointingly persistently

"When America sneezes, Europe catches the cold"

^^^ One of the only things I remember from Business Studies class

[robindch]

Originally Posted by Penn

"When America sneezes, Europe catches the cold"

It wasn't only America sneezing. Rather, the world's entire banking system went into respiratory arrest, causing the Federal Reserve to step in and bail out the whole system with an eye-watering series of secret, undeclared and unvoted guarantees etc totalling over seven trillion dollars, around 50% of the USA's GDP:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-1...in-income.html

This money was lent/guaranteed/etc to banks worldwide, including around €8 billion lent to BOI and AIB, and subsequently repaid.

I believe that this colossal bailout is the main reason that governments worldwide are scared white and shitless about collapsing banks, whether they're German, French or elsewhere's, and to be honest, I think they should be a bit more open about it.

[Buttonftw]

Originally Posted by Tin Foil Hat

I have a much more realistic theory. If we had never signed up to the Euro, if we had never allowed our interest rates to be set for the benefits of the larger economies we would not now be bankrupt.

Monetary policy isn't the only way to restrain spending etc., what the hell makes anyone think that if we could have set our own interest rates we wouldn't have done the same thing? Would it be the increases of government spending of ~10% while inflation was already hitting 5%? Oh wait, the central bank is independent and impartial right?

[recedite]

Originally Posted by Zamboni

I say vote no.
Abdicate the liability for private bank debt.
Close the budget deficit immediately.

Good plan if we hadn't adopted the Euro, but too late now either way as the debts have already been transferred onto the State.

Originally Posted by robindch

What the Stability Treaty doesn't do, and what Central Bank Governer Patrick Honohan called for yesterday, is (a) to regulate the private credit market -- aka the banks -- to enforce prudent lending policies and (b) to consider setting up a pan-European banking agency which will step in, at the EU level, to stabilize shaky banks, rather than leaving them become the responsibility of the state (as happened/is happening in Ireland, Spain and Portugal with catastrophic results).

Also a good plan, as it would shift responsibility for bad banks onto the entire eurozone, and share it out evenly. Which would be fair because the ECB is effectively dictating the rules for banking, and telling us to pay off the bondholders etc. But the Germans will never agree to sharing responsibility for debts unless we sign up for this treaty first (and maybe some other treaties still to come)
The problem is, we have fallen between two stools.
So we go along with it. Or else leave the Euro and do an Iceland. But I wouldn't trust our gombeens to pull that one off successfully.

Banks, IMO are a lot like religions. Their products (credit and creditworthiness) depend on the buyer having faith. If you lose faith in the creditworthiness, the credit is worthless. If you buy into it, they will slowly syphon off your sweat as their profit.

[marienbad]

As far as I can see , it makes little difference to the bigger picture if we vote yes or no- it is happening anyway as it is an opt out mechanism. The days of us holding up the Euro-train would appear to be over.

We have voted yes to every other vote - all of them more important that this one - so it is a bit late to be throwing the toys out of the pram .

Vote yes and let the cheap(er) money continue to be available- vote no and face what ? No one really knows .

In any case the French and the Dutch might wreck it anyway and we will avoid being labelled as the villains - pragmatism rules ok.

[jojo86]

My stance is based from the viewpoint that when all these "good times" were happening my family and I saw none and struggled. My parents worked their asses off so we could be educated and have good opportunities. There was no boom for us. So as far as I can see money was wasted by the government but if we need to sign something to essentially hand X amount of power over to Germany in order to try keep our government from wasting money than there are way bigger problems here and this "band aid" isn't going to be enough.
Look, we took on the Euro and now everyone is bitching and moaning over it, so all I see when I look in my crystal ball of sh*t repeating itself is that if this gets a yes vote in a couple of years everyone is going be bitching and moaning all over again and then we'll be stuck.
Yes or No, eventually we'll be out of recession and in about another 15-20 years we'll be back in recession again. Fact. History repeats itself and politicians will always be idiots who love the sound of their own voice, have no cop on and get the job because of who they no/are,they will always be corrupt.
I for one despise the governments use of scare tactics and false promises they can not guarantee with the Yes campaign. The No campaigners come across as EEJITS and there is zero balance of intellectual argument or debate. The government are a shower of absolute fools and to be honest don't deserve a Yes or a No, it'd be great if everyone could just protest by not voting at all-not one single vote. But we can't so I say No.
Again just my own personal crazy opinions.

[ninja900]

Originally Posted by jojo86

Yes or No, eventually we'll be out of recession and in about another 15-20 years we'll be back in recession again. Fact. History repeats itself and politicians will always be idiots who love the sound of their own voice, have no cop on and get the job because of who they no/are,they will always be corrupt.

So vote for a better class of politician. Stop voting FF/lefty loony for a start.

The No campaigners come across as EEJITS and there is zero balance of intellectual argument or debate.

That is because they are eejits!

The government are a shower of absolute fools and to be honest don't deserve a Yes or a No, it'd be great if everyone could just protest by not voting at all-not one single vote. But we can't so I say No.
Again just my own personal crazy opinions.

So what would you rather the government do, given the options realistically available to this country?

[ShooterSF]

The thing is this has all played out in a sickeningly obvious way and it's damn well insulting. Govt. supports it obviously as they had a hand in it and go on to put up scaremongering vague bollox posters like the reworded yes to jobs one, "a working Ireland" eh? Then the usual fight everything alliance comes out shouting for a no vote and trying to scare us as well with crap. Austerity isn't working and the only solution you see is no austerity? You don't see the possibility that it's not enough yet? Do you think people are dumb enough not to see that flaw in your logic?

Then the what's in it for me brigade start to crawl out from the wood work as farmers voice their "concerns" they will need "reassured". I'm sure the Unions will need "reassuring" too.

So sick of it and so sick of the party line that politicians can hide behind so they don't have to offer their own views. Had you asked me before this vote how each side would lay out their cards I'd have nailed everyone of them without reading a word of what was being proposed with maybe the exception of FF because of them being in an all new situation. Not that big posters with "TA" wrote on them are any more (or sadly any less) informative.

**** this ****, **** stupid waste of money posters and **** you swear filter too.

[jank]

Originally Posted by Jernal

The regulars round these parts tend to be rational and less swayed by emotional chagrin and irrelevant political strawmen.

Thats what everyone "thinks", yet I think A+A people would be very socalist in their views, which is not rational at all.

[pH]

The government are a shower of absolute fools and to be honest don't deserve a Yes or a No, it'd be great if everyone could just protest by not voting at all-not one single vote. But we can't so I say No.
Again just my own personal crazy opinions.

The time to voice your dissatisfaction with the government and political system is in a general election. This is a relatively simple treaty that constrains the amount future governments of Ireland can borrow and spend - vote for or against it on that basis and that basis alone.

There is a rational argument to be made that Ireland should be free to borrow and spend as much as our elected politicians of the day want - if that is your view then by all means vote NO for those reasons.

[Banbh]

Voting No because you oppose the government (or more correctly the financial cartel who are backing this) makes sense to me.

I'm voting No to Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Labrador Party, Denis O'Brien, Lord Reilly, the RTE clique, IBEC etc. In this I am on side with my trade union, assorted left politicians, Sinn Fein, Eamon Dunphy, Vincent Brown, Fintan O'Toole, my family, friends, neighbours and anybody that has seen through the policy that the only way Ireland can progress is by begging.