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Off Topic Thread 3.0

Zzippy

All things non-rugby related here.

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irishbucsfan

Why awec

[Deleted User]

irishbucsfan wrote: »

Why awec

He's just saying what we were all thinking.

Stheno

Interested Observer wrote: »

He's just saying what we were all thinking.

No. No he's not

Erik Shin

Stheno wrote: »

No. No he's not

Well......ahem!

Rigor Mortis

awec wrote: »

If one of them brings someone home for the ride you'll be close enough to smell the action. :eek: :pac:

Worse than that, you would probably end up in the spatter zone

Stheno

Rigor Mortis wrote: »

Worse than that, you would probably end up in the spatter zone

Jaysus

Rigor Mortis

Stheno wrote: »

Jaysus

Yep. You'd go to bed wearing a poncho.

Erik Shin

"Free shïte on the chest for everyone in the audience" !!

CatFromHue

Teferi wrote: »

A very large part of the British population is terminally thick tbh. They consistently vote against their own interests. Living in England has been eye opening.

Are they any different than the Irish voters?

What have we learned from going broke? Nothing, it was all the bank's fault, they ruined the country.....:rolleyes:

irishbucsfan

CatFromHue wrote: »

Are they any different than the Irish voters?

What have we learned from going broke? Nothing, it was all the bank's fault, they ruined the country.....:rolleyes:

Well the ECB have learned how to operate as a proper central bank and we got rid of Trichet. So, a great deal. The average person on the street didn't learn that but if every person needs to be an expert in fiscal policy for our political system to work then we're all screwed.

[Deleted User]

CatFromHue wrote: »

Are they any different than the Irish voters?

What have we learned from going broke? Nothing, it was all the bank's fault, they ruined the country.....:rolleyes:

irishbucsfan wrote: »

Well the ECB have learned how to operate as a proper central bank and we got rid of Trichet. So, a great deal. The average person on the street didn't learn that but if every person needs to be an expert in fiscal policy for our political system to work then we're all screwed.

Every time I see an advert for a loan for a holiday a small part of me dies.

Regulators are by all accounts doing their jobs these days and have been properly equipped since 2011 or so.

It was commercial lending that broke the country in those last 3 years leading to the crash. That will never happen again.

Personal lending is getting silly again, and while the lenders are playing by the rules, people are still f**king incredibly stupid when it comes to taking on debt. Personal debt will never bankrupt the country as it's small fries for the larger institutions, but it's still sickening to see how blind people are when the money is "paid back later".

I personally think before you can borrow more than €1000 you should be forced to take a basic logic test, maths test and have someone show you what the amount of money you are borrowing looks like when stacked up in €5 bills.

molloyjh

Smart people are still well capable of being stupid though.

Sure didn't we have our own mini-Brexit anyway with Lisbon. A couple of dodgy groups lied through their teeth about something related to the EU and enough of us voted against it that we rejected it. Can we really take the high ground when we've made similar mistakes in the recent past?

[Deleted User]

nope, a key tenant of democracy is an informed demos.

It is an inherent weakness, and why we have representative and not direct democracy in the main.

Unless we can properly educate and inform all of the electorate to the standard required to allow them to make a fully considered decision, we must bear the risk (and indeed costs) of extraordinarily sub-optimal decision making.

molloyjh

Deleted User wrote: »

nope, a key tenant of democracy is an informed demos.

It is an inherent weakness, and why we have representative and not direct democracy in the main.

Unless we can properly educate and inform all of the electorate to the standard required to allow them to make a fully considered decision, we must bear the risk (and indeed costs) of extraordinarily sub-optimal decision making.

I do think there's more can be done to address campaigns based on misinformation and blatant lies from a legislative perspective. We should be able to identify and ban things that are false, like the "Lisbon halves our voting weight" line. It was a complete lie and could be proved to be such. Therefore it should never have been allowed to be used. There's always going to be the opinion pieces, but if we have a system that facilitates people being actively lied to like that then that just makes matters worse than they need to be.

thomond2006

Politics should be taught in schools. CSPE doesn't count for much.

Neil3030

CatFromHue wrote: »

Are they any different than the Irish voters?

What have we learned from going broke? Nothing, it was all the bank's fault, they ruined the country.....:rolleyes:

But in the Irish case that means what, that we might vote back in Fianna Fail? Or that some of us might eagerly return to shackling ourselves with high levels of personal debt? Are these flaws really in the same stratosphere as voting for Brexit?

But to answer your question, yes I do think British voters are different to Irish voters in at least one important way. Take a look at the background of MPs in the UK - the overwhelming majority went to top fee-paying secondary schools, and then on to University in a Russell Group institution like Oxford or Cambridge. The main parties also have a deliberate system of tactically deploying MPs to constituencies all around the country - usually to test the water early in their career in an opposition safe seat, after which they might get to compete in a marginal, and then later on in life they might get a cushy safe seat.

So for a vast majority of British voters, they spend their entire lives voting for candidates from completely different parts of the country and with whom they have absolutely zero socio-economic common ground. This can't but have created a massive disconnect between voters and their MPs, and as living standards continued to drop for working class Britons, this disconnect very quickly turned to antipathy towards "the establishment". All that was needed was for a conniving "everyman" to arrive, promise to represent them, to make everything better, and to be their voice. Enter Nigel Farage, one thing led to another and they voted themselves out of the EU.

In Ireland, the situation is very different, as the "everyman" is nowhere near the same novelty to us. First, politicians largely represent their home constituencies, though there are exceptions (Conor and Brian Lenihan). Secondly, while a lot of TDs come from political families, they are fairly widely spread in terms of their backgrounds - many went to public schools, community colleges, IT colleges, etc. Third, the CAO points system at least partly protects us from the same educational elitism as you see in the UK.

Irish voters have therefore seen the "everyman" their entire lives, and have seen it work, and have seen it fail. Yes, there are pockets of the country where it still seems to be effective for Independents (Kerry South, Tipperary North) or for more organised anti-establishment groups like SF or AAA (mostly in working class Dublin), but nowhere near the same widespread effectiveness you saw with UKIP's Brexit campaigning in the UK.

In other words, by suffering or observing local cute-hoors our entire voting lives, I'd be hopeful that Irish voters, at least in terms of majority electoral decision making, are fairly well insulated from the effects of everyman populism, and I really doubt that we'll see such drastic anti-establishment electoral decisions here like that made by the UK (or indeed, by the USA).

CatFromHue

Deleted User wrote: »

Every time I see an advert for a loan for a holiday a small part of me dies.

Regulators are by all accounts doing their jobs these days and have been properly equipped since 2011 or so.

It was commercial lending that broke the country in those last 3 years leading to the crash. That will never happen again.

Personal lending is getting silly again, and while the lenders are playing by the rules, people are still f**king incredibly stupid when it comes to taking on debt. Personal debt will never bankrupt the country as it's small fries for the larger institutions, but it's still sickening to see how blind people are when the money is "paid back later".

I personally think before you can borrow more than €1000 you should be forced to take a basic logic test, maths test and have someone show you what the amount of money you are borrowing looks like when stacked up in €5 bills.

That's the thing, the banks were only 1 part of the problem. The govt at the time increased public spending on the back of the construction bubble so when the arse fell out of construction/property we were left with a way more money being spent by the govt compared to the money coming in.

Over time the govts had made our tax base very narrow so that when there was a downturn we'd no real tax money coming.

The bank bailout just finished off an already sinking ship. We probably would have needed a bailout without any money going to the banks.

You very rarely hear people giving out about our tax base or the increase in public spending that happened in the boom years. You do hear people just blaming the banks full stop.

irishbucsfan

The "public spending orgy" line is so tiresome. It was a great way to make everyone feel guilty and accept imbecilic cuts so that we could nationalise a massive amount of private debt that originated in French, English, Dutch and German banks. This was pointed out quite clearly by the IMF when they attempted to talk the EU and our government out of the disastrous rounds of austerity they managed to convince themselves that the PIGS needed to undergo, only to completely reverse course when Trichet was disposed of. A huge amount of longterm damage done to our economy that should have been avoided.

[Deleted User]

irishbucsfan wrote: »

The "public spending orgy" line is so tiresome. It was a great way to make everyone feel guilty and accept imbecilic cuts so that we could nationalise a massive amount of private debt that originated in French, English, Dutch and German banks. This was pointed out quite clearly by the IMF when they attempted to talk the EU and our government out of the disastrous rounds of austerity they managed to convince themselves that the PIGS needed to undergo, only to completely reverse course when Trichet was disposed of. A huge amount of longterm damage done to our economy that should have been avoided.

ireland-government-budget-value.png?s=irelandgovbudval&v=201708181446v&d1=20000826&d2=20170826&type=column

.

Total cost of bailout is nowhere near our deficit figures.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/cost-of-bailout-falls-to-40bn-from-initial-64bn-30482757.html

ireland-government-debt.png?s=irelandgovdeb&v=201707031822v&d1=20040826&d2=20170826

ireland-government-debt.png?s=irelandgovdeb&v=201707031822v&d1=20040826&d2=20170826

irishbucsfan

Deleted User wrote: »

.

Total cost of bailout is nowhere near our deficit figures.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/cost-of-bailout-falls-to-40bn-from-initial-64bn-30482757.html

It would never be the same of our deficit figure?

But our deficit was massively inflated by our government's (under heavy direction from Ecofin and their obsession with Reinhardt-Rogoff) attempts at fiscal policy. The debt never should have been nationalised by our government, but the absolutely daft attempts at "expansionary retraction" are easy to look back at now as completely foolish.

CatFromHue

I didn't say an orgy, I said public spending increases.

The public spending increases roughly 50m from 2000 to 2006. That's roughly a 50% increases on the 2000 numbers.

[Deleted User]

irishbucsfan wrote: »

It would never be the same of our deficit figure?

It pales in significance to the overspending that was happening. We posted a 30% Deficit in one year.

Even if we accept your premise that the bailout was foisted upon us (I don't), it has nothing to do with our resultant requirement to cut public spending, given the utterly the enormous drop in government revenues in the following years.

irishbucsfan wrote: »

But our deficit was massively inflated by our government's (under heavy direction from Ecofin and their obsession with Reinhardt-Rogoff) attempts at fiscal policy. The debt never should have been nationalised by our government, but the absolutely daft attempts at "expansionary retraction" are easy to look back at now as completely foolish.

No, our deficit was inflated by our inability to continue to milk the property industry for enormous cash after the crash. Quelle Surprise.

ireland-government-revenues.png?s=irelandgovrev&v=201708181447v&d1=20040826&d2=20170826&type=column

ireland-government-revenues.png?s=irelandgovrev&v=201708181447v&d1=20040826&d2=20170826&type=column

If the Government hadn't cut spending, deficits such as 30% would have had no choice but to continue....

irishbucsfan

Deleted User wrote: »

It pales in significance to the overspending that was happening. We posted a 30% Deficit in one year.

But that figure didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened during the crisis.

The contruction sector was problematic, it was pumped full of credit that was made possible by one of the greatest moral hazard trades in banking history. But unless you believe every single person in Ireland was a builder in 2006, then its very obvious that the impact of the collapse of that industry was massively inflated by the mismanagement of it by the EU. Specifically Trichet's unwillingness to do absolutely anything. If the ECB had implemented sensible policies in 2007 rather than in 2011/2012 then that deficit would never have been that big. Unfortunately not only did they fail in their most basic function and not implement LTROs and establish OMT at the outset of the crisis, Trichet specifically said they would never do it.

[Deleted User]

The EU did not require the Irish Government of the Noughties to move our tax base from the electorate and corporations and consumption and instead position an enormous chunk of it's revenue stream directly on top of a construction and property industry.

They did not enforce the removal of thousands from tax nets, reductions in revenue streams from stable and non-cyclical sources and require the Government to depend enormously on a single element of its economy for the ability to fund itself.

We did that. Ireland. With every vote, with every budget. The stage was set far before 2007. Year upon year of eroding our ability to not suck on the teat of a bubbling industry.

Amazingly, when that industry collapsed, and the government's revenues also disappeared, we were ****ed.

irishbucsfan

CatFromHue wrote: »

I didn't say an orgy, I said public spending increases.

The public spending increases roughly 50m from 2000 to 2006. That's roughly a 50% increases on the 2000 numbers.

Yes, I know. And I'm saying that to claim this was at the root of the crisis in Ireland is incorrect. Even if we allow a conceit that expenditure was responsible, it still stems from a mismanagement of European banking institutions rather than cavalier governance, i.e. the government's budget was balanced and they were operating in an environment where everyone across Europe mistakenly believed the ECB would behave like an actual central bank.

Erik Shin

Watch the football and leave the graphs alone for a while lads .... we'll still be in debt after Kerry hammer Mayo!

irishbucsfan

Deleted User wrote: »

The EU did not require the Irish Government of the Noughties to move our tax base from the electorate and corporations and consumption and instead position an enormous chunk of it's revenue stream directly on top of a construction and property industry.

They did not enforce the removal of thousands from tax nets, reductions in revenue streams from stable and non-cyclical sources and require the Government to depend enormously on a single element of its economy for the ability to fund itself.

We did that. It actually had happened long before 2007. Year upon year of eroding our ability to not suck on the teat of a bubbling industry.

Amazingly, when that industry collapsed, and the government's revenues also disappeared, we were ****ed.

Actually to be absolutely clear the EU does heavily influence our government's fiscal policy due the Stability and Growth Pact. Of course they didn't tell us how to achieve the targets, but they certainly pushed us towards chasing growth. Effectively, noone should be in deficit and noone should be in surplus. I think its around 2% deficit and 4% surplus these days, although who knows (I remember it being uneven as the obvious fallacy of composition it causes was being mocked by Varoufakis fairly recently).

Although I think it should be made clear that I don't think this is the fault of the EU itself. Rather the likes of Osbourne, Schauble and Dijsselbloem who had been leading these policies at ecofin. Not EU men themselves, the finance ministers across Europe (not that I'm trying to say Cowen/Lenihan were much different, just far less influential).

mfceiling

Forget Mayweather and McGregor....I want to see IBF and Emmet go all in on a graph/table/pie chart on the economic woes of a nation!!

Buer

mfceiling wrote:

Forget Mayweather and McGregor....I want to see IBF and Emmet go all in on a graph/table/pie chart on the economic woes of a nation!!

The fight at 5am or graph wars...which would be harder to stay awake through?

[Deleted User]

irishbucsfan wrote: »

Actually to be absolutely clear the EU does heavily influence our government's fiscal policy due the Stability and Growth Pact. Of course they didn't tell us how to achieve the targets, but they certainly pushed us towards chasing growth. Effectively, noone should be in deficit and noone should be in surplus. I think its around 2% deficit and 4% surplus these days, although who knows.

Are you trying to shift the goalposts here? The EU did not tell us to do any of what I have described above. All of which directly led us to the situation that we saw post GFC.

The problem with Ireland in the Noughties wasn't about the value our budget figure (which is something that the S&GP could have had an issue with - otherwise totally irrelevant to this discussion) but how that figure was structured. We eroded our ability to deal with any other paradigm other than a continuous property bubble, and shock horror, when that bubble was burst, we had no options left but to chop back spending to try to bring the deficit under control.

irishbucsfan wrote: »

Although I think it should be made clear that I don't think this is the fault of the EU itself. Rather the likes of Osbourne, Schauble and Dijsselbloem who had been leading these policies at ecofin. Not EU men themselves, the finance ministers across Europe (not that I'm trying to say Cowen/Lenihan were much different, just far less influential).

Again, none of those men, not one, had any power whatsoever when it came to changing the shape of Ireland's tax policy. The policy which fundamentally hoisted the Government's ability to finance the state onto the back of the building industry.

We did. Ireland made that decision. The premise that we are we were are due to the EU is fundamentally flawed simply by that alone. The banking bailout costs are not the largest contributor to our enormous debt figure, we are.