Centre right political party

FG are a centre right party. There is simply no debate about that.

They prioritise strong economic activity as a tide to lift all boats. They want to lower the tax burden on the middle classes. They advocate strong personal responsibility and get behind enterprise and small business.

The strong Covid support measures weren't socialist in motivation, they were to protect small business and keep jobs open to get people back off the live register as soon as possible and back to work - and it worked.

Yes, the PDs were even further right, economically, in their time, but FG are a textbook example of a European centre right party of the Christian Democrat tradition.

FG are trying to get a 30% PAYE rate in. If it doesn't happen this budget, with all the economic trouble, it'll happen next.

The very definition of trying to reduce the burden on their own constituency, the professional and middle classes.

What would a centre right political party look like in Ireland?

List a few policies or areas you feel unrepresented on?

Law and order. There isn't a single party in Ireland committed to tackling the tide of thuggery and anti-social behaviour in the country. Closely linked to this is the size of our welfare state. All parties are now committed to keeping the welfare lifestyle an attractive option. Which in turn will mean more and more generations of white trash who think spending all day drinking, drugging, and breeding more and more feral toerag children is the only way to live. These feral children will of course grow up into yet more of the 100+ conviction adult toerags we're all dealing with now, amply aided and abetted by the free legal aid arm of the welfare state. And on and on the cycle goes. Any political party daring to raise these issues, never mind actually try and tackle them, would be instantly demonised by the media as extreme right/anti-poor people etc. If they had a good PR machine and a bit of money behind them though I think they might do well. There's a lot of fed up decent people out there who simply aren't being represented any more by parties falling over each other to be woker than thou, which is what brought us Trump and Brexit.

I always end up asking the same question in these threads and never once have I got an answer. Name a country that has enacted the policies that you wish for this country to follow. That way we can have a genuine debate about said policies without them being divorced from their effects.

OK, talkign economy purely - because that's the left-right scale. Authoritarion-Conservative-Liberal has nothing to do with left-right or the economy, that'sa social dimension. Let's set this straight so that we talk left-right.

Now, where does the bloody "very high marginal tax rate" myth in Ireland come from?

I've written about this on boards so many times, yet the myth so deeply ingrained that folks simply cannot comprehend the evidence.

Marginal tax rate doesn't matter, what matters is the effective taxation, now I'm talking income tax + social contrinutions + VAT.

There's many papers on this done by consultancy companies, I did my analysis based on one of these papers and clearly Ireland comes at the bottom of the EU league when you compare "average full time wage" country to country. In fact, Ireland comes at 3rd lowest after Malta and Cyprus (both tax havens and microstates). If you compare low earners and high earners the situation varies, but in no category is Ireland "very high" on the list.

If you think your "marginal tax" rate is very high here, I would like to see your face and hear the label you would apply to Belgian, Danish, Portuguese or German tax rates.

The question in Ireland is not about the rate but about the bang-for-the-buck, which is indeed poor. But if your government tax take is so low as is in Ireland you can't make miracles with the money you get. It's a race to the bottom situation with chronic underinvestment (in infrastructure and services). Of course one could argue that giving more money to governments with poor track record wouldn't improve much in terms of delivery, but that's a separate ideological discussion ("small state" etc).

What I agree with you is the capital tax rate, that's insanely high and discourages investment vs consumption (bad) or property investment (bad - fuels property bubbles).

I wouldn't call FG left at all, they are actually fairly pro-market and laissez-faire as it can get. The whole tax haven stuff and ultra low taxation of MNCs is pretty much as "right as you can get". The anomaly is in unequal and very disbalanced taxation of SMEs, MNCs, self-employed and employed. A truly centre-right or right or let's say economically liberal party would tax these various groups all the same with a low and probably flat rate.

Anyhow, FG is centre-right.

There is not "chronic underinvestment" in healthcare in Ireland.

There have been large increases in public spending, and large increases in staffing.

H/care exp is actually too high, relative to the age profile of our population.

The "bang for the buck is poor" - yes it is, but this is not due to a lack of expenditure.