What have we come to

Idbatterim wrote: »

Agree about the lattes and wasterful expenditure, you have to sacrifice during the saving process. My brother just bought a house and the mortgage is significantly lower than the market rent on a virtually identical house!

The cost of buying a home is outstripping people's abilities to pay for it.

It has nothing to do with lattes.

Too many people aren't even getting a sniff of the housing ladder, regardless of what "sacrifices" they're willing to make.

Tony EH wrote: »

The cost of buying a home is outstripping people's abilities to pay for it.

It has nothing to do with lattes.

Too many people aren't even getting a sniff of the housing ladder, regardless of what "sacrifices" they're willing to make.

yes, also true. depends on your circumtance, some can do it by cutting out wasterful expenditure, others are you say, could live on bread and water for years and it wouldnt be enough

Cupatae wrote: »

Except now the sacrifice to get a house is a pint of blood and your first born, you d be dropping alot more than 7 quid Netflix and one holiday a year to afford a house or even rent these days

It's simple the vast amount of people on average jobs with a kid car and basic necessities financially will never be able to afford a house .

You see the problem yet ?

I know you're being a little facetious here. But, this is true in some cases. Some people, despite being in jobs, are forgoing having kids because they cannot afford them.

blanch152 wrote: »

Anyone who has ever bought a house faced a drop in living standards as they sacrified to buy a home.

What is different is that the current generation want to keep the holidays, the Netflix subscription, the latte in the mornings etc.

I'm not talking about people who are saving to buy a house, I'm talking about people who are renting long term and have seen their living standards decline substantially over ten years due to rents increasing orders of magnitude faster than wage inflation. You cannot ignore this issue or dismiss it as a non-issue by pivoting to separate issues such as issues surrounding saving to buy a home, which is obviously a related situation but in no way the same thing.

Let me try and spell it out a little more clearly: Somebody renting an apartment in Dublin since 2011 most likely has far less disposable income now than they did then, even if for instance they've moved from a part time college job to a full time career, because - and this is the key factor you're ignoring in my posts - the cost of renting has increased extremely rapidly while wages have not, and the overall cost of living is higher due to increased utility costs, increased public transport fairs, more stealth taxes, etc etc etc. That is a simple fact, and that is what's causing so much anger among young people who predominantly rent and were college-aged during the worst years of the recession. The expectation that starting a full time job would bring an increase in living standards has simply not turned out to be true because of the rampant stagflation in the Irish economy, of which the cost of renting is one gigantic contributory factor.

Other factors contributing to an increased cost of living relative to take-home pay are obviously also at fault, but the central fact here is that the laissez-faire neoliberalism employed by Fine Gael is seem as a directly contributing factor to the stagflation issue, their refusal to take literally any action at all (building more social housing, proper rent controls, tackling the insurance industry, capping personal injury claims, changing liability law so that self-inflicted accidents are not the responsibility of business owners, etc etc etc) to deal with the cost of living being a secondary and equally infuriating factor. On these issues, FG have either point blank refused to consider left wing policy options or else, in the case of insurance and liability, have blustered, ranted and talked about it ad nauseum without actually doing anything to change the relevant legislation.

None of your rebuttals are addressing the simple fact that the cost of living is increasing faster than average wages over time. This is the single greatest cause of discontent among young people, and FG have spent ten years in office refusing point blank to do anything about it or acknowledge it as a problem requiring any form of government intervention.

Are you denying that stagflation is an issue in the Irish economy or are you simply suggesting that young people should "put up and shut up" and continue voting for political parties which are intent on fiddling while Rome burns when it comes to this very acute and very specific issue?

Tony EH wrote: »

It's the issue right now for far too many people.

They haven't a hope of scraping together the money for a deposit and far too much of their wage goes on renting some overpriced fleece of "accommodation".

Someone who thinks that it's all being flittered away on lattes, etc, isn't remotely living on the same planet.

Into the bargain, if younger folk are spending their money on lattes, it has more to do with the realisation that even if they save every penny they can and live life like a hermit, they'll STILL never get on the housing ladder.

The flittering away on lattes comment reminds me of the let them eat cake comment.just as detached from reality.

Tony EH wrote: »

The cost of buying a home is outstripping people's abilities to pay for it.

It has nothing to do with lattes.

Too many people aren't even getting a sniff of the housing ladder, regardless of what "sacrifices" they're willing to make.

smurgen wrote: »

The flittering away on lattes comment reminds me of the let them eat cake comment.just as detached from reality.

Bowie wrote: »

That's what happened. Victim blaming, as the numbers of victims grew...and then voted.

These three comments sum it up fairly well - "let them eat cake" was swiftly followed by revolution, and that is exactly what happened at the ballot box a week and a half ago. The idiocy of those who doing well out of the current intentionally exploitative paradigm in assuming its vicitms wouldn't fight back is astounding, and their attempts to shame us into regretting or apologising for that choice is honestly somewhere between hilarious and genuinely disturbing. That anyone could be this far removed from the lived experience of their fellow country men and women is something which should frighten anyone who believes in any form of social unity.

Shefwedfan wrote: »

Yeah the poor people, plenty of time crying on the internet mind you

Like that is going to get them a house

^
I rest my case.

smurgen wrote: »

Bear in mind we're also working longer hours than previous generations ever did and commuting further than previous generations ever did and pretty soon the rising costs and stagnant wages are going to make for an angry angry electorate.

We're already there IMO. The election results speak for themselves. A better prepared and better organised left will run the table if there's another election within the next few months, and if not, unless whatever government emerges actually tackles stagflation and the cost of living over its five year term, there'll be a whole extra generation of young Irish people who've graduated from college during that term in office, found themselves also locked out of any kind of housing security and facing ever dwindling qualities of life as a result of stagflation, and joining the revolt against establishment politics.

As I said over the page, it's astonishing that our political parties are so stubbornly blind to all this, even after getting hammered in an election. Where's their sense of self-preservation? You'd expect even a politician completely devoid of empathy or morality to at least care about their own re-election prospects, but the mantra of "the electorate are too stupid or ignorant to understand how good we've been in office" from FG suggests that they truly haven't got a clue what's facing them a few years down the line if the crises we're discussing here aren't addressed yesterday.

It's genuinely perplexing and I'm honestly struggling to understand it. FG under Enda Kenny was absolutely horrendous at PR and relating to the electorate's mood, but if you'd told me that a few years later that FG's communications game would actually have gotten worse under Leo's leadership (The Leodership, as it will henceforth be known) I'd have laughed and denied that it could get much worse.

I've actually been saying since the election that I reckon the arrogant communication coming from the likes of Eoghan Murphy and Leo Varadkar was a much a factor in angering young people as was the actual policies pursued by their government. Arrogant "let them eat cake" style comments like we've seen over the last few pages from Blanch and other posters were coming directly from the mouths of the country's Leodership, thinly veiled though they might have been. Who's advising these people on how to sell their platform to an electorate which is increasingly finding themselves worse and worse off financially since the so-called "recovery" got underway? Or are they genuinely unaware that this is happening to hundreds of thousands of Irish people?