darkhorse wrote: » Transport Minister Leo Varadkar says a new scheme will allow people to help share the cost of repairing local roads – or do it themselves – from next year. I have been telling you what the truth is for the past several months, Bish. But, dont just take my word for it, as Leo is in government and must be in the know.
Bishop_Donal wrote: » I've never disagreed. People (collectively) need to pay more if we want to maintain services. It's almost inevitable that people need to see their local infrastructure fall apart before they will consent to pay more. There's one thing that's certainly sure, external parties simply will not continue to fund maintenance of local infrastructure. So pay up, or else get used to living without. It needs to happen somewhere to let everyone see the consequences. Then we might get some realism (and a "pissy little property tax'" as I have previously described it, will diminish in importance).
bgrizzley wrote: » We have the same if not less services since the start of the recession. our existing taxes have always paid for that level of service (and we've supplemented with private companies where they are lacking).
dvpower wrote: » And while they're at it if they could pass some legislation to make the weather better that would be just great.
dvpower wrote: » Our tax base has collapsed since the start of the recession. How could you expect to fund the same level of services with much less tax coming in?
bgrizzley wrote: » how did we manage before the boom? i dont remember any less services, more if anything.
Hijpo wrote: » I wouldnt like to be a chap from the revenue trying to get into a desperate mans house to price up his home in order to snatch and grab more money from him for the government, especially when the government have cut there ties with the citizens.
starbelgrade wrote: » Joe Duffy is a League of Ireland presenter on Premiership wages. It's the equivalent of a Sligo Rovers player being paid the wages of Wayne Rooney.
D_murph wrote: » I wont be opening the door to anyone I dont know or expect anyway so they can feck off if they come knocking here!!
dvpower wrote: » Rose tinted glasses.
Am Chile wrote: » [...]I think if they attempt to down this road-and send out people knocking on doors asking to inspect privately owned homes-someone is gonna get angry to the point and seriously hurt the person that they send out-if the blueshirt nazis choose to attempt to provoke people in this manner whoever ends up hurt [...]
dvpower wrote: » What is with you guys and your obsession with the Nazis !!!
tayto lover wrote: » Yes I forgot about that little 92k wage. That family must be at the pin of their collar to cope. i wonder are they paying dirt tax on the moxey she got from the same dept who purchaced a site from her in co.galway.
dvpower wrote: » Bailiffs are seizing property every week of the year and have been doing so for decades. What's this 'how would it work in real life' thing?
tayto lover wrote: » I hope this is the truth but somehow I smell a rat.http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/1209/labour-budget-fine-gael.html Would this crowd be so underhand as to tell the taxpayer one thing but do the sneaky deed? They have paid everything else and complied all along. I really hope they have grown a pair but something about this does not ring true. Rabbitte had a odd looking stare in his eye when he announced this on the News. Maybe i'm just a complete skeptic but then again what would have made me that way?
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions is to propose holding a series of major national demonstrations on February 9, 2013 in protest at the austerity programme imposed on Ireland by the European authorities and the failure to honour promises made on the alleviation of the country’s debt burden. The proposal to stage the series of national demonstrations will be put before the Executive Council of Congress for consideration at its next meeting, on Wednesday, December 12.The proposed demonstrations would be timed to coincide with EU Council of Ministers’ meetings and would happen in advance of the planned payment of €3.1 billion on the Anglo-Irish Promissory Note.Speaking in the course of a post-Budget briefing, Congress General Secretary David Begg said: “Perhaps the biggest single problem we face is the debt – the debt of private banks and speculators that was foisted onto the citizens of this country. That debt is a millstone and it is difficult to see how we can extract ourselves from this crisis without action on this key issue.“The proposal to stage the series of national demonstrations comes from the General Purposes Committee of Congress and will be put before the Executive Council at its next meeting. We hope to mobilise people all over the country – especially working families, who are bearing the brunt of this crisis. "There is no comfort in Ireland constantly being held up as the ‘best performer’ in the class at an EU level. We need to make a strong impression on the European leadership and our own government that we are sleepwalking to disaster, unless we change course. We have to put the issue of debt front and centre,” Mr Begg said. The proposal to the Congress Executive Council calls for demonstrations on Saturday, February 9, 2013 to be held in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Sligo, Limerick and Waterford.
bgrizzley wrote: » We have the same if not less services since the start of the recession. our existing taxes have always paid for that level of service (and we've supplemented with private companies where they are lacking). So why not just be honest and call this a bondholder tax/Croke-park-tax/whatever tax, cause it most certainly is not to maintain the services that we are already paying for...
Big Phil and his Big Lies So when it came to the roll out of the Hogan Home Tax it should have come as no surprise when ‘Big Phil’ starting telling big lies. Twelve months ago, in July 2011, Hogan outlined his plans for a new €100 home tax. In the intervening year the general public have been subjected to a sustained campaign of propaganda and disinformation emanating from the Kilkenny man and his Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. Barely a week has passed without some media outlet running a scare story relating to the new home tax and the consequences of non-payment. We have been told that local services will be slashed if we don’t pay. We have been told that we will end up being convicted and fined in court if we don’t pay. We have been told that we won’t be able to sell our houses if we don’t pay. We’ve been told that Hogan will be given access to our bank accounts if we don’t pay. We’ve been told that the home tax will be taken directly from our wages and our social welfare payments, if we don’t pay. We’ve been told that the home tax will be added to our utility bills, if we don’t pay. We’ve been told our local authorities will be deliberately under-funded as punishment for our non-payment. And the list goes on and on. In the run-up to the March 31st deadline for payment of the home tax, Hogan and his spin-doctors opened up a new front relating to the level of ‘compliance’ with his hated home tax. The objective was simple, to convince the general population that the boycott was not being widely supported. In the weeks running up to the deadline Hogan and the polished public relation officers of the Local Government Management Agency were never off the radio and television, providing regular updates on the numbers of homeowners who had registered and paid the tax. So confident were they of the capitulation of the population they assumed that these updates would create a form of herd mentality of compliance – that the sheep would all follow each other into the slaughterhouse. But in reality these regular updates did the direct opposite. As February faded into March is became apparent that the numbers paying up were falling far short of what the government had expected. By mid March a new lie had to be created and peddled. The vast majority of homeowners would, we were told, pay the home tax as part of ‘the late surge’. But in truth ‘the late surge’ was more like a ‘late trickle’ with less than 800,000 households out of 1,800,000 eligible households having paid the tax by April 1st. Hogan’s Democracy Having suffered such a humiliating defeat on March 31st, Hogan has now created his own bizarre form of democracy, complete with phoney counts and gerrymandering. Within Hogan’s democracy the rights and wrongs of the home tax are irrelevant – all that matters is the numbers that are ‘compliant’. Never one to give up on a bad idea easily, Hogan has even integrated his belief in the compliant herd mentality into his new democracy. The premise of Big Phil’s democracy is straight-forward – convince the sheep that a majority of the other sheep are now already in the slaughterhouse. Those sheep that remain outside of the slaughterhouse are to be considered anti-democratic sheep that will be threatened and punished until they go into the slaughterhouse. What awaits them once they are inside the slaughterhouse is not to be discussed under any circumstances. To get to his ‘majority’ Hogan has had to engage in wordplay that hasn’t been seen since Orwell’s 1984 and creative accounting that hasn’t been seen since Bertie Ahern appeared before the Mahon Tribunal. For Hogan the word ‘compliance’ now equates to ‘support’. Therefore, those who have become ‘compliant’ as a result of his lies and intimidation are now ‘supporters’ of the home tax. It is not clear if Hogan believes the same ‘compliance’ equals ‘support’ logic could be applied to bank clerks who hand over money to bank robbers or pensioners who surrender their life savings to home invaders! The next bit of counter-logic from Hogan requires people to accept that they should always do what the majority does and that a failure to do so is in some way anti-democratic. Therefore if 51 percent of households are ‘compliant’ it becomes undemocratic for the remaining 49 percent to refuse to pay the home tax. Again it is unclear if Hogan would extend this logic to the likes of the suffragettes, anti-slavery activists or the minority of Germans who actively opposed the Nazi Party; although given the roots of his own Blueshirts it is likely that he would. Having established the basic ground rules whereby ‘compliance’ equals ‘support’ and 51 percent ‘support’ equals a ‘democratic’ requirement for 100 percent ‘compliance’ Hogan had now only to deal with the small matter of the actual facts. Statistic, Statistics and Damned Lies Hogan’s debt collectors in the Local Government Management Agency claim that just 1.6 million housing units are eligible for the home tax but Central Statistic Office figures state that there are 1,994,885 housing units in the state. Of these an estimated 1.81 million are liable for registration (the remainder being made up of unoccupied units, social & voluntary housing etc). Understating the number of liable housing units by circa 200,000 allows the government to present an artificially high figure for the percentage of households that are ‘compliant’. Hogan then manages to shoehorn another tranche of homeowners into the ‘compliant/supportive’ category by requiring registration by homeowners before they can receive their waivers. At the start of June 17,167 such households were deemed to be ‘compliant’. In Hogan’s democracy these homeowners, many of whom live in uncompleted ghost estates, are deemed ‘compliant’ supporters of the home tax. The final manipulation that Hogan has used to achieve his ‘majority’ required an act of gerrymandering that would have made James Craig blush. Of the 915,408 properties that make up his ‘majority’ a whopping 226,568 are Non-Principal Private Residences (NPPR). These NPPR are housing units that are owned by people who own one or more properties, in addition to their home. Included in this cohort are 36 individuals who unbelievably own between 101 and 400 houses each; 165 individuals who own between 41 and 100 houses each and 1,544 individuals who owned between 11 and 40 houses each. Under Phil Hogan’s form of gerrymandering each of these property barons are be entitled to as many votes as they have properties. Measuring the number of ‘compliant’ properties as opposed to the number of ‘compliant’ property owners once again artificially inflates the figures in Hogan’s favour, allowing him to claim that a ‘majority’ of people now ‘support’ the home tax. When calculations are based on the number of ‘compliant’ property-owners as opposed to the number of ‘compliant’ properties Phil Hogan’s lies are clear for all to see. As of the start of June, 706,007 homeowners have registered for the home tax and 763,249 have not. In other words 52 percent of homeowners were boycotting the home tax at the start of last month. So much for Hogan’s clear majority! Boycott, Boycott, Boycott! When Phil Hogan crawled off his sun lounger and returned to Ireland from his all-expenses-paid trip to Brazil last month, he made it clear that he was ready to recommence battle with the boycotters of his hated home tax. His first salvo came in the form of threatening letters to those who have refused to pay the unjust tax. Thousands of these letters were delivered to homes across the state earlier this week. The Dublin government know that they are playing a high-stakes game when they threaten legal action against hundreds of thousands of people. They know that it is politically, legally and financially impossible to bring three-quarters of a million homeowners through the courts. But they are willing to play for such high stakes because they fear the potential of the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes (CAHWT) and the mass boycott that it has organised. Kenny, Gilmore and Hogan are willing to use lies, disinformation and threats to break the boycott because they know the history of Ireland. They know that boycotts have brought greater governments and political systems to their knees in the past and that they can do so again in the future. If the home tax boycott cannot be broken what chance have they of introducing their new property and water taxes? And what of the rest of their austerity programme? In the twelve months since Phil Hogan announced the introduction of the home tax he has repeatedly misread the mood of the people in general and of those boycotting the home tax in particular. For a full year he has persevered with the notion that he can force through this deeply unjust measure, regardless of the wishes of the people. He has placed undue importance on achieving a rate of 50 percent ‘compliance’, wrongly believing that this represents a tipping point that will cause the boycott to collapse. What Hogan does not seem to understand is the fact that people can think for themselves and act upon those thoughts. It seems to be beyond his comprehension that people might oppose injustice not because everyone else is doing it, but because it is simply the right thing to do. He believes that if he can convince people that a ‘majority’ have paid the tax then the rest will simply fall into line, like those sheep walking into the slaughterhouse. The reality, however, is very different. For hundreds of thousands of people the home tax was the straw that broke the camel’s back. They know that capitulation on the home tax will lead to new property and water taxes within the next few years, taxes which will drive hundreds of thousands of families into dire poverty. The people that Hogan so patronisingly regards as sheep know exactly what is at stake and they know exactly what goes on inside the Troika slaughterhouse that Fine Gael and Labour are so keen to get them into. In taking a stand against the home tax people are also taking a stand in defence of their schools, their hospitals, their jobs, their communities and their homes. The home tax has emerged as the battleground upon which the austerity programme, and the ideology that underpins it, will be fought. And the winner will take all. In less than six months time those who paid the home tax for 2012 will be expected to pay their tax for 2013. This will represent the first opportunity since March 31st for the boycott to actually grow. The challenge facing the CAHWT will be to convince large numbers of those who paid in 2012 to join the boycott in 2013 – something which the campaign is already gearing up to do. Boycott! Boycott! Boycott!
Ghandee wrote: » Would you not agree that some of the governments latest statements and laws, if not similar to nazism, at least resemble some form of a dictatorship?
Ghandee wrote: » Even the sentiments of some on these threads at the start sounded suspiciously familiar. I've definitely heard the old 'the rest will fall into line' thread before.
Vladimir Kurtains wrote: » What happens if politicians who resemble actual nazis emerge? What do we call them? Super nazis? Mega nazis?
Vladimir Kurtains wrote: » Has anyone else noticed that there's been a bit of inflation around the word "nazi"? I mean, it used to be the case that you needed a good dose of anti-semitism, a distaste for democracy and some serious territorial ambitions about your neighbouring countries to qualify for the moniker. Now any old right of centre plodder (and indeed left of centre, if you include Labour) gets to be called a nazi. What happens if politicians who resemble actual nazis emerge? What do we call them? Super nazis? Mega nazis?
bgrizzley wrote: » i suppose they are better than Blue-tinted-glasses...
Ghandee wrote: » Technically this is living in fear D_Murph (exactly what that want)
Open the door, be polite, when they identify themselves as revenue kindly tell them to clear off back to Germany, and tell Fraulein Merkel that you'll not party a roof tax.
If they don't leave, I believe laws were passed recently on how to deal with intruders on your own property. Reasonable force in my case will be a hurl and my dog....
