Where is all the money going?

Here you go:

https://whereyourmoneygoes.gov.ie/en/

Waste is a massive factor

There was big furror about RTE because the figures were easy to quantify and the people are known and public figures.

But rte isnt a grain of sand in the money that this government wastes, the HSE doesnt even try and hide it anymore and we have all just sort of come to accept their incompetence.

Plenty of other gov departments waste tons of cash.

The majority of people in Ireland and Irish people are swimming in money and can't spent it quick enough. Look at the amount of concerts that are on and how quickly they sell out. Coldplay sold out 4 nights in cooked Park and could have doubled that if they wanted. They aren't all tourists coming over to see them.

The economy is built on multinationals that could move in a heartbeat. The agri and tourism sector are being damaged by government policies. The per capita average income is skewed by the highly paid. The lack of housing being built due to the last recession is compounded by the government flooding the country with people as a source of cheap labour and that is further compounded by lax controls on immigration followed by an amnesty (even for criminals) on those few that are rejected. The housing list numbers should be a source of major concern as there are far too many landing here with their hand out.

This will result in tensions as they compete with Irish people for housing. The young and educated are leaving for better opportunities abroad as owning a home is a pipe dream for many. I feel sorry for young people when I see high rents and high house prices. Then you have retirement homes being closed to house refugees, it’s a national disgrace how the government had managed to shaft both the old and the young.

Here a fine stat that sums this up. We spent nearly 80% more on Healthcare last year than we did in 2015.

How does that statement sum anything up? You’ve provided no context for it. It doesn’t mean anything or indicate anything without context. Do you mean people spent 80% more on healthcare, or the Government spent 80% more on healthcare since 2015? How is that figure determined? Are you accounting for costs rising in everything? How does it compare internationally?

As for the idea that our housing policy is in your evaluation ‘a disaster’, the figures would seem to disagree, with home ownership among the over 40’s being close to 80% in 2019 -

Close to 80 per cent of people over the age of 40 in Ireland own their home, according to the report published by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), yet barely a third of adults younger than 40 are homeowners.

Despite the housing shortage, surging rents and record levels of homelessness, homes were as affordable here as much of western Europe, the research showed.

Irish people were less likely to be paying as much as 30 per cent of their income to cover housing costs compared to the other countries surveyed, with about 15 per cent of people here paying that much. That compared to a fifth of people elsewhere.

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/07/20/ireland-has-one-of-lowest-rates-of-home-ownership-for-under-40s-esri-says/

That covers who’s voting for the current Government to maintain its policies in relation to housing - the 80% of homeowners who would rather not see the value of their assets fall should Government introduce a policy of building more affordable social housing at an enormous cost to the Exchequer.

With regard to healthcare, Government have introduced numerous initiatives at considerable investment (might explain where that 80% increase in healthcare spending comes from) in order to provide free GP cards for children under 6, increased medical card coverage (over 1m medical card holders in Ireland according to CSO) and increased spending on schemes like the Treatment Abroad scheme.

Education? Always the fun one 😁 Government has increased spending there too with extending numerous schemes to more schools to be included in the DEIS program, increased funding for a whole range of services including the free school transport scheme, to the tune of nearly half a billion euro in the last budget -

https://merrionstreet.ie/ministers_foley_and_madigan_announce_details_of_9_6_billion_education_funding_in_budget_2023.174872.shortcut.html

Yet private education is seeing something of an increase in popularity among parents with children of school-going age, with Sinn Fein and Labour promising to cut public funding for private schools should they get into Government -

https://extra.ie/2022/10/31/news/private-schools-huge-waiting-lists

All of the above might explain why you’re constantly hearing how well our economy is doing, in spite of the fact that you can still point to numerous issues within the Irish economy. When taken as a whole, the vast majority of people are not too concerned with the minority of people who are experiencing economic difficulties which you’re trying to extrapolate out to the population as a whole, asking the question where is all the money going, when if you were actually interested in where all the money is going, it’s not that difficult to find out where all the money is really going rather than assume the conclusions you have done in the absence of any credible evidence.

Where is the money going? Listen to the growing cacophony of lobbyists every day now demanding this, that and the other from the budget. When they get this, it's trousered and rinse/ repeat next year.

Let's look at the numbers.

Our household disposable income, which is probably the best measure of how well off we are, is not that high, or at least not as high as we might like.

[source]

From this chart, we're sightly above the Czech republic but behind supposedly basket case Brexit Britain. We're not too different from Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Lithuania etc in terms of how much we have to spend after deductions. And if we take into account high housing costs for those who are renting, we're probably a lot worse off sadly for those people.

Devide that by the population and look at the education and health facilities provided. Social protection covers a huge arena of benefits and supports. It all adds up. Of course there's bound to be waste and inefficiencies but services cost money.

Jesus Christ I hope they never see any type of power.

The country would be knackered.

It appears as though you’re just cherry picking examples and blowing them entirely out of proportion to try and support your grander claim that there is enormous amounts of public money being wasted while the Irish economy has not improved significantly in the last decade or two, which is why you’re hearing about how the Irish economy has improved over the last two decades.

Any idiot can point to examples of what are in their opinion a waste of public funds, while ignoring the obvious reality that the picture they’re trying to paint is not the same for everyone, and certainly it is not the same for the vast majority of people in Ireland who happen to own property which is their primary means of generating wealth, as opposed to being reliant on income from employment as an indicator of wealth.

I don’t expect that anyone who owns property is likely to vote for parties which have made it clear that they intend not only to reduce the value of wealth generating assets, but makes promises to increase public spending on social housing at enormous cost to the Exchequer. Homeowners don’t tend to look favourably on those sorts of initiatives. You claimed the current Government housing policy is a disaster, I’m simply pointing out the rationale behind it.

It’s as though you imagine only poor people vote or something, and they should vote Labour and Sinn Fein, ignoring the reality that the current parties in Government don’t just exist to serve poor people’s interests, they’re more interested in keeping the people who vote for them happy.

I suppose it depends on how you define living standards. The OECD chart I posted was the mean household disposable income also including social transfers, which I think gives a fair enough indication of how well off we are as a country. GDP per capita doesn't really work in Ireland due to the presence of multinationals running their profits through the country.

It is not the story we like to tell ourselves but there you are. If you were to stop people on the street and ask them if we have more or less disposable income than Brexit Britain, the overwhelming opinion would be that we have much more. How, after all, can a country that is not even in the EU have more household disposable income per capita than Ireland. But again, there you are. They have more than us.

Also I think most people would imagine that we have significantly more disposable income than Lithuania, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia etc. But we don't.

That is not to say that some people aren't doing very well here in Ireland. Some people are doing very well and fair play to them. But the same is true of these other countries.

At the same we are doing better than many countries just not as well as we like to tell ourselves.

Sorry I haven't had time to read the report in full. I think the difference might be the inclusion of things like housing costs in the disposable income figures that I posted. GNI probably doesn't take that into account.

How, after all, can a country that is not even in the EU have more household disposable income per capita than Ireland. But again, there you are. They have more than us.

Easily enough when they had a massive head start, and Ireland are only recently catching up. Then the UK went and shot themselves in the foot with Brexit, allowing everyone else to catch up!

It must be stressed that there are many different measures of an economy’s growth, and the Irish Central Statistics office has devised a measure called GNI* designed to strip out the effects of the activities of globalised companies in Ireland. Ireland has a GNI per capita, PPP adjusted, of $67k compared to the UK’s $45k or only about 50% higher than the UK. And if you look at disposable family income per capita, depending on the precise measure chosen, the two countries are broadly comparablewith Ireland only recently having caught up with the UK.

The other point to be borne in mind is that Ireland has only recently become a high income country and so the level of accumulated wealth is much lower than the UK. The UK has been a relatively wealthy country for a very long time and that position is only very gradually being eroded. The problem for many in the UK is that the income from wealth is very unequally distributed. Whereas Ireland’s GINI index (measure of inequality) is close to the European average, UK society is significantly more unequal.

https://sluggerotoole.com/2022/12/23/comparing-the-uk-and-irish-economies/#:~:text=Ireland%20has%20a%20GNI%20per,caught%20up%20with%20the%20UK.

I'm afraid, once again, the data on disposable household income does not support that. From the same source if we plot the number against year we get the chart below:

We can see that Ireland suffered during the financial crisis which is understandable but the gap has not significantly narrowed since Brexit. The gap is still greater than it was ten years ago.

Despite Brexit you are still better off in the UK in terms of disposable income than Ireland. I think this is contrary to what most people might like to believe.

I don’t think I am overestimating how concerned a lot of homeowners are with the market value of their property or properties. Their property is their greatest asset, and the means they have of generating wealth which they can pass on to their children, as opposed to your idea of your being ok with the value of your property decreasing if it meant your children would be able to afford property which would also decrease in value over time.

Not only is that not a sound economic investment, but economics isn’t so linear as that - the value of property falling wouldn’t necessarily mean that your children would then be able to afford it, certainly not without having the means to do so. Critical workers who can’t afford to live here aren’t much of an asset to the economy either, and there’s no fear of losing critical workers who can afford to live here, they’re the type of workers who Government are trying to encourage to stay and put down roots so that their children will continue to contribute to the economy.

It’s not any different if one is a landlord, or what some people like to call themselves - “accidental landlords”, after they inherited property which they imagined would make them a mint, only to see their plans hampered by increasing regulations in the private rental sector which is encouraging more of them to want to offload the property on some other sucker, to which Leo’s response is an attempt to suggest landlords ain’t the bad guys -

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/varadkar-hits-out-at-demonisation-of-landlords-1444245.html

As for the amount of examples you could present to demonstrate wastage of public funds, I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m aware there’s plenty of wastage, and there’s no need to compound that wastage by suggesting that Government should introduce policies which would only increase the numbers of ghost estates around the country, devalue the property market, and still there would be no guarantee your children, or anyone else’s children for that matter, would be able to afford to buy their own home. Your grandchildren however, would be stuck with the bill for that kind of poor policy implementation.