You are not an Economy

Amirani · 01-01-2012 04:33PM

HellFireClub wrote: »

No, not sack them, not unless there is no actual job function there that they are needed to fill. There is a notion in our PS in Ireland that if you are not on 70K or 100K, then someone is making a mug of you. Anyone in the private sector on 40K-50K at the moment is extremely grateful. But you have this over arching mindset within the public sector that needs to be completely deconstructed, that if you are on 60K or 70K, (and you cannot be made redundant without your consent, as per the Croke Park Deal), that you are on shyte money.

I fully accept that economies operate on a cycle that is cyclical, but at the same time, borrowing tens of billions of Euro a year just to pay for deluded muppets who think that they cannot survive on less than 70K a year, tens of billions of Euro I might add, for current expenditure, which has to be repaid with interest, there is only one place you end up in when this is what you are at, and that is complete and utter state failure.

For what it's worth I agree with you. The public sector is a massive drain needs to be reformed. However, reforms are not as easy as many people profess them to be. The problem lies in democracy itself because as long as our representatives know we are a fickle bunch who'll react angrily to any reform, the more short-term their thinking will be.

HellFireClub · 01-01-2012 04:37PM

AudreyHepburn wrote: »

I have experienced that, I know what it is to not have a penny to my name.

But I also know that becoming bitter and hysterical and cynical over it will solve nothing.

We can all say that at some stage of our lives, we didn't have a cent, maybe just after finishing college or during those years, but that's normal and everyone experiences that.

It's a completely and entirely different thing to be in your early 40's and recently unemployed with a few children, (this isn't my situation I might add, I'm just making up an example here), and trying to make some sense out of that, and trying to work out how you are going to stop yourself and your family descending into a hopeless spiral of poverty and survival from week to week, and no moreso than if you were previously working and earning a salary, to find yourself some day, out of work and not a chance of near term employment.

shangri la · 01-01-2012 04:38PM

Mistakes were made.

The problem is its a different government same mistakes today.

Its not about blaming anybody, the horse has already bolted, its about getting enda to do whats best for Ireland TODAY.

shangri la · 01-01-2012 04:40PM

dxhound2005 wrote: »

The fat cat one third are probably the children of the pensioners and the parents of the other third. So win win situation all round.

we're not all from blackrock.

Amirani · 01-01-2012 04:41PM

shangri la wrote: »

Mistakes were made.

The problem is its a different government same mistakes today.

Its not about blaming anybody, the horse has already bolted, its about getting enda to do whats best for Ireland TODAY.

It's rearranging chairs on the Titanic. No fiscal measures that the Government takes can solve our debt problems. Even in the boom years we were running surpluses of at most a couple of billion. We owe over a hundred billion now.

Profiler · 01-01-2012 04:48PM

shangri la wrote: »

we're not all from blackrock.

precious few people in Ireland are from Blackrock (Dublin/Cork/Louth) own a 2nd house or ever owned a BMW...

Sheeps · 01-01-2012 04:48PM

InkSlinger67 wrote: »

Tell that to my kids!

-NASDAQ

I see what you were trying to achieve with this post, however NASDAQ is not an economy.

HellFireClub · 01-01-2012 04:50PM

The solution to all of this, I think, is local initiative. The debt burden is a political issue that needs to be repudicated. That's what is going to happen anyway at the end of the day, so leave them to it is my view.

The best thing that could happen this country is that a locally based voluntary organisation that would be committed to nothing other than local job creation, would be launched, and part of it's mandate would be to start up a banking network throughout the country, (more along the lines of a Credit Union but a special type of Credit Union, exclusively for small business start-ups), and the kicker here, would be that any person could buy shares by throwing in a tenner, twenty, fifty or a hundred quid, into this new national organisation for start-up businesses.

Take 100 Euro out of AIB and put it into this national fund, get experienced small business people behind it, start creating jobs locally, and businesses that get support from the "Credit Union" type fund, put money back into the fund.

How many buildings in every town are being used to store those E-Voting machines?!? 25 year leases tied into each building, how about we throw out the scrap E-Voting machines and use these buildings as local enterprise/job creation centres?!?

But the key to it working would be to keep the County Councils, the County Enterprise Boards, the government departments, completely and entirely out of the process and also make it as transparent as possible, by putting up all funds in and out, onto a website where transparency is maximised.

shangri la · 01-01-2012 05:24PM

Venture capitalists are not touching ireland outside pharma and green energy.

looksee · 01-01-2012 05:24PM

shangri la wrote: »

thats the minimum TDs salary before additional income for boards, travel, ect.

? You said:

Enda Kenny is not a strong enough leader and his party is made up of teachers who want to keep their cushy E90k+ jobs long enough to get a great pension.

dxhound2005 · 01-01-2012 05:26PM

HellFireClub wrote: »

The solution to all of this, I think, is local initiative. The debt burden is a political issue that needs to be repudicated. That's what is going to happen anyway at the end of the day, so leave them to it is my view.

The best thing that could happen this country is that a locally based voluntary organisation that would be committed to nothing other than local job creation, would be launched, and part of it's mandate would be to start up a banking network throughout the country, (more along the lines of a Credit Union but a special type of Credit Union, exclusively for small business start-ups), and the kicker here, would be that any person could buy shares by throwing in a tenner, twenty, fifty or a hundred quid, into this new national organisation for start-up businesses.

Take 100 Euro out of AIB and put it into this national fund, get experienced small business people behind it, start creating jobs locally, and businesses that get support from the "Credit Union" type fund, put money back into the fund.

How many buildings in every town are being used to store those E-Voting machines?!? 25 year leases tied into each building, how about we throw out the scrap E-Voting machines and use these buildings as local enterprise/job creation centres?!?

But the key to it working would be to keep the County Councils, the County Enterprise Boards, the government departments, completely and entirely out of the process and also make it as transparent as possible, by putting up all funds in and out, onto a website where transparency is maximised.

Here is the up to date on the voting machines, there are actually not many premises being used for storage.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/1229/1224309592118.html

What sort of business start ups would your voluntary bank fund? And would this not lead to job losses in existing businesses unless you can also create a completely new market for the start ups?

looksee · 01-01-2012 05:47PM

Yes, the economy is in a mess, and it has a lot to do with the wide boys that so many in the country kept voting in for all sorts of spurious reasons - tradition, the lollipops they kept offering when they were in trouble, people like the 'any means to an end' approach, people were making money out of the boom.

So now we have to cope with it. Those of us who reared families in the 70s know that we are not even close yet to the way some people lived in those years - including us and we had a teacher's salary coming in. With tax and the cost of living the way it was though there were no extras, no holidays (apart from a week camping in Ireland) nothing to spare and a juggle to keep the bank account in the black from week to week. So god knows how people on lesser incomes managed.

People of my parents' generation, and before, knew real poverty, though at least they were more in line with the rest of the world, poverty is relative.

It is hard for this young generation, they had it easy growing up, they got used to the idea that if you wanted a cd you could have it, new technology is a basic entitlement - there is a whole layer of stuff that has to be bought now that was not part of life in previous decades.

I heard a woman on the radio before Christmas saying that she was angry about the recession and she was not going to allow it to cause her children to suffer ('suffer'?) - they would get everything they wanted for Christmas. She didn't say where the money would come from, presumably she is now weeping over the credit card balance she has to deal with.

Its not fair, and its not easy, but we are stuck with it, and we will eventually come out the other side. And I very much doubt that any lessons will have been learned.

HellFireClub · 01-01-2012 05:50PM

dxhound2005 wrote: »

Here is the up to date on the voting machines, there are actually not many premises being used for storage.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/1229/1224309592118.html

What sort of business start ups would your voluntary bank fund? And would this not lead to job losses in existing businesses unless you can also create a completely new market for the start ups?

No, I started a business last year and I doubt if it caused job losses somewhere else in the economy. I don't want to discuss my own enterprise here or it's nature, only because it's a delicate new entity operating in a market with some very serious competition.

But that decision that I made, put me into a situation where I have a weekly wage and I can go out and spend a bit more, and that cash gets circulated around the domestic economy and can sustain more job local creation. When you have nearly 500,000 people surviving on the dole and 1,000 people a week leaving your economy, then I think it's obvious enough that money that is needed to circulate around the place, just isn't there to be spent.

I'm certainly not saying that I have all the answers, but I do think we need to stop listening to this excuse for a government and we need to start opposing the doctrine that is being extended to us by the government and the cockroaches in SIPTU and the ICTU.

We do need to organise and ultimately confront what is going on here, the unemployed, people in small businesses that have no representation at all, small business owners, these people make up the majority of the employed or recently employed in this state, yet it's the minority that are getting the say, through the Croke Park Agreement, which is simply ringfencing years of social partnership greed.

I'm not inherently "anti public sector", I fully appreciate the difficult job that some of them do, but they chose their professions as adults and the salaries that are in place now are simply not sustainable.

I'm not as much revolted by the salaries as I am by the working practices and the obstructionism and selfish greed in relation to change in the workplace. I've just read a thread on here where apparently a fingerprinting system that cost 18 million Euro to acquire, (which was bought to reduce fraud in the social welfare system), isn't being used because some branch of the CPSU has decided that it's membership will not cooperate with the introduction of this technology until a pay claim has been entertained, and they are also of the view that using this technology is "someone else's job".

There is no question but that such a dispicable undertaking in a recession, in the private sector, would result in job termination.

This is why people like myself dispise some public sector workers, this kind of belligerance and intrasigence, refusing to use badly needed technology to reduce fraud because you just have been conditioned by a union over the years to oppose and disregard change.

These workers, and others like them in the Passport Office, every one of them need to be sacked, make an example out of them, no golden handshakes, just a decision by the minister, either use the technology or go through the door with a P45 in your lamha and await your pension when you hit retirement age.

I fail to see why these kind of decisions become anymore complicated than that, either get with the script and get behind the national effort to try to fix this country, or else join the dole queues, where there are nearly half a million people who will very gladly do your job to a much higher standard than you are capable of, if you are refusing to engage with change and modern technology in this day and age.

EDIT: Story here: http://www.independent.ie/national-news/fingerprint-system-that-cost-euro20m-lying-idle-2439421.html

Doc Ruby · 01-01-2012 07:01PM

HellFireClub wrote: »

The best thing that could happen this country is that a locally based voluntary organisation that would be committed to nothing other than local job creation, would be launched, and part of it's mandate would be to start up a banking network throughout the country, (more along the lines of a Credit Union but a special type of Credit Union, exclusively for small business start-ups), and the kicker here, would be that any person could buy shares by throwing in a tenner, twenty, fifty or a hundred quid, into this new national organisation for start-up businesses.

See thats the kind of thinking we need.

dxhound2005 wrote: »

And would this not lead to job losses in existing businesses unless you can also create a completely new market for the start ups?

Thats not how the economy works, its not a zero sum game or a fixed pool. Instead what happens is jobs from new businesses create more jobs in a kind of domino effect.

Ideally what you want is either export or tourism businesses to bring in cash from outside the economy.

HellFireClub · 01-01-2012 07:25PM

Domo230 wrote: »

Isn't that what the 99 percent protest is all about?

http://www.occupydamestreet.org/

I don't know what this protest is trying to achieve, some notional protesting that mouths off about "take more tax off the rich", with downright clowns like Clare Daly and Richard Boyd Bullsh*t supporting it, what is that meant to achieve???

The "United Left Alliance" in this country, there's loads of comment and criticism coming from them but absolutely nothing by way of solutions to be heard out of them. The very same folks are anti business of any sort, they see small businesses that are struggling like never before and they don't have the maturity or the basic f*cking cop on to understand that small businesses are not like the Google's and the Microsoft organisations of the world.

tayto lover · 01-01-2012 07:40PM

HellFireClub wrote: »

No, not sack them, not unless there is no actual job function there that they are needed to fill. There is a notion in our PS in Ireland that if you are not on 70K or 100K, then someone is making a mug of you. Anyone in the private sector on 40K-50K at the moment is extremely grateful. But you have this over arching mindset within the public sector that needs to be completely deconstructed, that if you are on 60K or 70K, (and you cannot be made redundant without your consent, as per the Croke Park Deal), that you are on shyte money.

I fully accept that economies operate on a cycle that is cyclical, but at the same time, borrowing tens of billions of Euro a year just to pay for deluded muppets who think that they cannot survive on less than 70K a year, tens of billions of Euro I might add, for current expenditure, which has to be repaid with interest, there is only one place you end up in when this is what you are at, and that is complete and utter state failure.

I heard on Prime Time recently that 75% of the Public Sector Pensioners are on 30k or less. That is not great surely?

HellFireClub · 01-01-2012 07:46PM

tayto lover wrote: »

I heard on Prime Time recently that 75% of the Public Sector Pensioners are on 30k or less. That is not great surely?

I think 30K of a salary when you are retired is a very comfortable existance. You have no mortgage, you get free travel, all sorts of state benefits such as discounted ESB and phone lines. Such a generous pension in the private sector would cost you a fair whack of your salary a month when working.

There is also the small matter of a tax free lump sum on retirement, I think it's equals to 1.5 times your final salary, it could be more I don't know, but there is a very generous tax free lump sum on retirement, in addition to the 30K a year pension or whatever it is.

Again I think this is the problem in the public sector, folks turning their noses up at massive tax free lump sums and guaranteed index linked pensions, there are people out there who have to carry rent or a mortgage and possibly children and working expenses on less than 30K and they can get by...

You are not an Economy

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