The Cedar Lounge Revolution

ICTU AND SIPTU PRESIDENT SLAMS UNJUST AND UNCARING BUDGET December 9, 2009

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics.
30 comments

The President of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and General President of SIPTU has attacked Budget 2010 as ‘callous, unjust and uncaring’. In his response to the budget speech, Jack O’Connor said;

“Budget 2010 must rank as the most callous, unjust and uncaring budget introduced by any Minister for Finance since the 1930′s in this country.

It represents a merciless attack on working people and the most vulnerable in our community while the wealthy in our society escape virtually untouched.

The only substantive tax measure introduced is a carbon tax which is another unfair indirect tax which will unjustly penalise working people.

The sheer cynicism of this budget and the thinking behind it is evident by the reduction in unemployment assistance to people under 24 years of age. This is clearly designed to encourage our young people to leave the country.

We are once again exporting a generation of our youth – our hope for the future – while other countries are doing their best to keep them at home through employment protection, training and back to education schemes.

At the very least the Minister could have brought forward some innovative proposals to facilitate commercial State investment in the economy which would not have exacerbated the financial deficit.

The remarkable aspect of this budget is its absolute and complete reliance on the free market and pandering to the wealthy in this society.

This approach reflects precisely the outlook that wrecked our economy in the first place.”

For further details contact;
SIPTU General President; Jack O’Connor
SIPTU Head of Communications; Frank Connolly

That incontrovertible case for public sector pay cuts in the Budget… I’m convinced… I know you will be! December 9, 2009

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics.
16 comments

John O’Hagan is writing in the Irish Times yesterday in advance of today’s Budget. Public sector pay must be cut, so he says. Well, John has a day job as Professor of Economics at TCD. I’m sure he has facts at his fingertips, can dance across the keyboard with stats and data. No doubt we can rub our hands in glee at what awaits us in a tour de force of economic analysis that will convince even the doubters like myself as to the necessity, nay, the equity, nay, the logic, in implementing pay cuts.

So John. Over to you sir…

RARELY HAS there been such widespread agreement among independent commentators that the main way for tomorrow’s budget to deal with the fiscal requirement of a €1.3 billion decrease in the pay and pension bill is an across-the-board reduction in pay rates (and hence pensions) graduated according to income, with the higher-paid public servants taking the largest percentage decline.

Good stuff… so… John, what data are they using?

The public sector unions mobilised their forces to resist cuts in pay rates at all costs, with strikes called not in response to cuts in pay rates but in anticipation of such cuts. Unions, of course, act on behalf of their members, and must attempt to protect as much as possible their interests, including pay rates.
However, the Government is elected to represent all of the electorate, including taxpayers and the 80 per cent of employees not in the public sector.
The latter includes hundreds of thousands of people working in the retail, hospitality and building sectors, most of whom are not members of unions and work for relatively low rates of pay.

They do indeed! Those private sector employers, eh? Some really aren’t that generous in what they pay! I believe some are even lobbying to cut the minimum wage. But anyhow, we (or rather he) digress… on with the great work.

The Government must also protect the interests of the 400,000+ unemployed, hundreds of thousands of others on State welfare payments, and the tens of thousands left with no option but to emigrate in recent years.

Given the releases about how state benefits are to be cut this concern seems… well, I don’t know what it seems. But let’s not try to do the share your pain by proxy thing John. We’re here for the rich red meat of economic data. The good stuff. The stuff only a Professor of Economics in TCD can provide.

Public sector workers and their unions seek to protect four things – their pay, pensions, security of employment, and working practices. Let me deal with these in reverse order.
Reform of work practices was required long before the present crisis and has nothing directly to do with the pay issue. What is needed is a detailed, and timely, study of pay rates and work practices in the public sector in Ireland compared to those in the UK (the most relevant country from a competitiveness point of view) and some small EU states.

Yes, that would make sense, except… that doesn’t address the issue of data on pay rates…but that’s okay because he said he’d deal with pay last… except er … he apparently has decided he can’t wait!

We know pretty much already that pay rates in many areas of the public sector are some of the highest in the EU. Can it be demonstrated that such high pay rates, even after the planned “radical” reform, can be justified on efficiency grounds? The reform may be needed simply to keep pace with other countries.

No doubt… but… pardon my enthusiasm, no doubt it’s the coffee, tell me again what’s that data, and where’s the comparative data with other EU countries?

Besides, if one thing is clear, pay should be linked not to promised reforms but to outcomes. Reform is long overdue and needs to be verified before being linked to pay.
Public sector workers have extraordinary job security. Jobs have been lost in the public sector but these were contract jobs and non-replacement of retirees. There have been no compulsory redundancies in the public sector linked to the financial situation, in contrast to the tens of thousands of jobs lost outside the public sector. Such security implies a very significant pay premium in kind.

Indeed. Indeed it does. Unless, that is one opens a newspaper and Brian Lenihan is taken at his word that reforms in the future will do away with some measure of that security, but… erm … sorry to bother you, where’s the data on precisely how great this premium is?

In relation to pensions, the annual cost of purchasing similar pension entitlements in the private sector would be 27 per cent of annual salary in the case of a typical civil servant employed prior to 2004. The pension levy then was intended to address this inequity, not the pay inequity. It is a separate issue.

But he neglects to mention that for employees in a range of private sector employments there remain defined benefit pension schemes that are rather handsome. Fewer in number it is true than there were, and declining, but still extant according to the last figures I could find from the Pensions Board. Now some will say that they are closed to new entrants. And so apparently most of them are, or perhaps all – it’s difficult to parse that figure entirely. But then, so effectively are PS pensions given that there’s a recruitment embargo.

So one could posit that some private sector employees do have near enough that level of benefit. Is he arguing that in some manner of remedying an ‘inequity’ that they too should be stripped of them? After all, for people like myself stuck on the old state pension it seems pretty iniquitous that I spent twenty odd years knockin’ along on a wage considerably lower the the average industrial until quite literally a few short years ago, and have no pension while those well off so and so’s who landed the cushy numbers in GenerousCorp or wherever managed to get a DB pension that they can retire on… He doesn’t say, which makes his ‘equity’ argument seem a little thin. And he also then neglects to mention that private sector employers have palpably made no effort to ensure private sector pension schemes have universal provision (and let’s not even contemplate the economies of scale that a push by all employers across the private sector to ensure proper pension provision might entail – perhaps we’d see Defined Benefit schemes come back into vogue, because let’s remember, the reason they were cut was due to a move by those selling pension schemes to claw back money as profits, whatever they argue to the contrary about how uneconomic such schemes were).

And for me, as I say, muddling along without a pension because my employers at all stages in my career, public and private sector, were too tight-fisted to offer me one, I have to laugh – somewhat hollowly – at this share my pain by proxy approach. It does me no good at all, particularly given that the pensions industry in its submissions to government have referenced how they’re agin’ either a universal public pension scheme that would wipe away both current private and public provision or a universal private scheme regulated by the state in principle; and how they’re for rugged individualism and personal responsibility in principle for all except, presumably, themselves since those pensions companies offer pretty good perks – perhaps I should have tried to get a job with them way back when. In the absence of either of those former options I’d sooner that one sector in the society had half way decent pensions, and I’d sooner that because the OECD and IBEC and co. really wouldn’t have the PS having them because they’re explicitly nervous about the exemplary effect of same permeating across the PS/private sector barrier into the latter. And I’m not going to whinge about the fact when offered the opportunity to join the PS many years ago I didn’t take it (actually – for the record – I was also given the nod for the UK civil service. Now that was a most interesting interview where one character, in his forties, tight little moustache and nary a word uttered during the duration, was introduced as being Mr. X from ‘Security’. Still being a member of the WP at the time you can imagine my interest in why he was there. I’m sure in retrospect they were slightly pulling my leg… They gave me the job, but I was already in private sector employment earning… ah yes… very slightly more).

Anyhow, back to those pay disparities and the evidence for them…

This leaves pay and by corollary pension rates.
The case for cuts in rates of pay (and public sector pensions) is almost unanswerable on fiscal, competitiveness and equity grounds.

Now this… this is great! Now we’re going to see the silver bullet that will put ICTU out of our misery. Fire away Prof. John.

The price for public services is too high, especially compared to those in many other EU countries, hence placing an undue cost on taxpayers.

Yes, yes. But what data are you using to make this comparison? And by the way since when are wages the only component of the cost of public services? No chance that we might be paying a little over the odds to consultants and others? Because every day I look at a plastic unit in the corner of the office I share with others, the one which has a name that sort of rhymes with Floppy Bop Ear, and let me tell you the day I discovered how much that cost… well, having seen precisely the same model in the private sector for somewhat less… you’ll imagine my surprise.

The equity argument, though, carries most force in my opinion.

Well, given that there’s been no reference to any specific data to support the previous argument as regards price, no doubt it would.

When it appeared that public sector pay rates were below those in the private sector, there were calls by public sector unions, on equity grounds, to close the gap. Now that the reverse applies, the equity argument is largely ignored.

Not entirely. There are those who dispute that the gap has closed. I’m sure that they’re mistaken…But again, what data do you have to demonstrate your thesis?

We cannot be much more certain in any policy debate of the evidence: public sector wage rates are well above those outside the public sector.

Great. But again, precisely what evidence is there to support this contention? And which wages? On average? What about the gender issue whereby the public sector actually pays equal wages for equal work, something the private sector does not do. Or what about disparities between areas, such as the

Gardaí where there are no private sector equivalents?
This, allied to the enormous job security and pension benefits listed above, is why I think that the case for an average pay cut of 5 to 7 per cent (with up to 15-20 per cent for high earners, of which, to repeat, I am one, in the public sector) is compelling.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the overall thesis, but I’m simply curious about the data. Given that none has been proffered – bar none referenced assertions – it’s logically impossible to come to a conclusion.

What is more, overall prices have dropped by about 5 per cent, and hence such a reduction implies little if any decline in real average wage rates.

The CPI registers a 6 per cent drop, but 4 per cent of that is mortgage related. And given that mortgage rates are going back up again… sooner rather than later… Do I have to draw a diagram for his nibs? Perhaps I do. Perhaps I do.

The Government appears not to have capitulated to one of the strongest, and by far the largest, interest groups in the country, at the expense of the taxpayer and tens of thousands of trainee teachers, nurses, gardaí, civil servants, etc, who expect naturally to move in due course into permanent employment in the public sector.

I’m not convinced by that logic, I’ve got to say. Given that essentially all trainee Gardai, nurses and teachers will eventually find work in their chosen area (I mean how many are going to flunk once they’re seriously instream?) surely it makes sense for conditions to be as good as is possible rather than the opposite? So aren’t their future colleagues doing them a favour? Yes, it takes time to join, but that is true of almost any career where one moves from being trained/educated, to working in internships or contracts to ultimately longer contracts and/or permanent positions. That’s the pattern in the private sector, and – for teachers for one – it’s not radically different in the public sector. Indeed coming from the private sector that’s one thing I think is no harm as long as its not unreasonably protracted. It makes perfect sense that say a teacher or some other PS employee of that type would have as broad an experience as was possible before settling into a permanent position. Good for the individual, good for their charges, good for their colleagues and ultimately good for society.

The privileged insiders have not won out. Relatively, very high pay rates and pensions have been fought for, and understandably so from the perspective of public sector unions, but rejected by the Government. Reductions in pay rates, and hence public sector pensions, are the much better option in terms of equity, competitiveness and maintaining services levels. Security of employment remains intact.

I’m no more convinced by his ‘insider/outsider’ trope, particularly since if applied to a private sector employment, Guinness for example, or Intel, one would find that being on the ‘outside’, say as an intern, is no greater or lesser an injustice than being on the outside of as a trainee teacher. That’s how, what I term, reality works. That’s how private enterprise works. Some jobs you get, some you don’t. There are those in a job and there are those who aren’t. There are others in the half way house of short term contracts, or training or whatever. I’m on a contract myself. I make the best of it I can, and if that falls I try to get on with it. That’s also, by the way, why we have welfare states, to support those who can’t find work.

And btw on this particular issue, access to PS jobs has, prior to the embargo, been open, transparent and vastly less subjective than access to most private sector jobs.

O’Hagan might have cause to reflect on a deeper problem, whether the area he is in, third level, does anyone any justice by having excessive numbers of places in areas where there are insufficient jobs in the economy to support them. But then we might have to look at data. Raw data. We’d have to reference it though. That might be tricky. I don’t want to be unkind about the great man, but…whisper it… he’s not so great on referencing data sources… or even giving a few referenced figures.

Cuts in relative public sector pay and pension rates have to come, eventually, either under our own chosen direction or through the intervention of an outside agency. The Government, and indeed the main Opposition party, deserve credit for facing this reality now.

Ah, the old IMF trope. Kids be good, otherwise the IMF will be in the door, doing a sort of Changing Rooms in reverse, fucking everything up – pardon my French. Funny thing is the IMF itself doesn’t seem to believe that there are any hands knocking on the door demanding that they come in. Indeed it was quite explicit about that last week. Now, I’m not suggesting that in the absence of any reference to data. Indeed I can point people to the IT website where if they key in the words IMF they’ll come across the specific articles that quote IMF spokespeople saying precisely that last week.

What’s remarkable to me, reading this article is that in the course of it, O’Hagan references not one study, not one piece of academic work, nothing (my comment reminds me of the inscriptions on the Socialist Party of Ireland 1970s Congress document where someone later wrote in “Contains Not One Perspective!” – I sort of share the sentiment of the unknown comrade a good thirty years later). We must take it on trust that he, the Professor has done the back breaking research, gone up to the mountain and arrived back with the conclusions.

He truly is a creation, he need only look into his own heart to divine such matters.

It’s okay. He’s sure there’s incontrovertible evidence.

What is it?

He does not say.

Lord, we are not worthy. Let John the Economic Baptist only say the word and we’ll be less well paid. All of us. Public and private.

And meanwhile, what about the economy, John?

The private sector… So measured, so undemanding. December 8, 2009

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics.
31 comments

From last week…

Elsewhere, ISME said that companies in the private sector were extremely angry over the proposed plan and have warned they may withold taxes if it proceeeds.

“The ISME phone lines have been hopping, with members who are so outraged with the decision that they feel they have no option but to withhold taxes in a form of protest at the ongoing charade. At a time when Small businesses are shedding jobs and struggling to survive, the public sector, once again, are allowed off the hook by a weak kneed and lily-livered Government,” said the association’s chairwoman Eilis Quinlan

It’s amazing the limit the appeals to patriotism have. For example, I can think of little less patriotic than with-holding tax, whatever about others actions. But, ISME clearly think differently.

But, as I noted last week, there are those who are delighted that this has played. After all, slam the public sector while complaining as loudly as possible about the proposed leave measure… one which it has been suggested would have been more effective at raising funds from lower paid PS workers (because it wouldn’t be as difficult to impose as a politically risky higher percentage cut on their wages) and meanwhile float the idea of not paying taxes.

IBEC is a bit more measured, but not a whole lot. Danny McCoy in the Irish Times last Thursday was clear in his own head as to the bullet points he wanted to get across in an article…

Enterprise must be allowed get on with what it does best: creating jobs and wealth. It is vital that the budget does not stifle business by raising taxes; instead, the country needs an ambitious stimulus package to address the jobs crisis.

Hmmm… and who would provide such a stimulus package. It sure doesn’t look like the private sector, that behemoth, that leviathan of the modern age is stirring itself to do so.

But…

Budget 2010 must cut €4 billion from the public finances just to stabilise the deficit at 12 per cent of GDP. The international money markets will punish us severely if there is any softening by the Government of efforts to reduce expenditure.

Well, not punish McCoy I’d imagine. Not severely. But those in less fortunate circumstances. Yeah, they’re going to be punished anyhow through reduced service provision and lower benefits or wage cuts.

The correct approach is to place the greatest effort on reducing current spending rather than hiking tax rates or slashing productive capital expenditure. This leads to hard choices, but ones that cannot be dodged if we are serious about recovery.

You’ve got to love the ‘hard choices’ meme. Again, not so tough for McCoy. Indeed so easy that he doesn’t seem to have spent any time at all contemplating them… or alternatives. Indeed he immediately dismisses even the most cosmetic alternatives out of hand.

Now the suggestion is that the necessary savings in the public sector pay bill for 2010 could be achieved through mandatory unpaid leave, without impacting negatively on service provision. What is being proposed is less work for unchanged pay terms.

I genuinely don’t understand why this analysis got legs. Because if I work, as I do, on contract and this year I have 22 days holiday across a year, but next year I have an extra 12 days which I must take and which will be unpaid then I am losing money immediately. That isn’t ‘unchanged pay terms’. That seriously changed pay terms. That’s a cut in my income. A pay cut if you will. And no credit to the unions for going along with this charade.

McCoy might be on safer ground on the ‘service provision’ issue, except that since McCarthy we’ve been told that companies have had to cut their cloth according to their measure and the PS must follow suit.

He continues;

To restore our reputation, hard decisions are needed to regain competitiveness and make Ireland once again an attractive place to do business. Falling prices should make it easier to get our pay costs back in line with those of our competitors without a serious loss in living standards, and this needs to be reflected in pay expectations.
The price of a job is not arbitrary: it should be linked to the pay rates in those countries with which we compete. We now need to get back in line, particularly with economies in Europe. There is a choice between pay and jobs. It is time to put jobs first.

Well that’s a dubious analysis from the off. Falling prices might assist pay costs, and if all else were equal I’d be much less antagonistic to such measures. But… they have to fall against something, and as has been reiterated here, there’s no point in pretending that wage cuts and a limited number of price cuts will leave us in 2005 when we know that mortgage repayments and other costs are rising and already outstrip the levels found in 2005. 2004 wages, or worse and 1970s levels of debt burden is a combination that makes a mockery of such claims. Indeed only today I was talking to someone a lot closer to the political action who acknowledged that there was a recognition that this dicing with death in the political economy would necessitate some sort of measures on that front… it will be interesting to see if any are introduced in Budget 2010.

And if we’re linking pay rates to countries with which we compete I’d be intrigued as to his selection. Singapore? China? Estonia? Latvia?

And then, after the attack, cue the special pleading.

It not just our labour costs that need to be sustainable; it is also our tax base. Despite the view that high earners are not paying their share, the facts are somewhat different.
OECD data show that effective tax rates for high-income earners in Ireland are higher than those in many European countries, including Germany, France and the UK. A fact rarely acknowledged is that many lower-income earners pay either no or very little income tax. This is not a sustainable practice, and the tax net will have to be widened to include more people.

He’s not, as EWI noted over the weekend, the only one on that particular trip. Pat McArdle said something essentially the same in his column last Friday. Ah yes, the one where he trots out the Laffer curve as the legitimation of his stance. For McArdle…

The problem is not just high rates but, critically, the low levels at which they kick in. It is astonishing that a PAYE earner on a lowly €40,000 has a marginal rate of 51 per cent. Stranger still, the top 4 per cent pays half of all taxes. Claims by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions that there is a pot of money out there waiting to be taxed don’t wash.

Think about that a moment. What precisely is the link between his last sentence and the previous three? Is he suggesting that income tax is the only game in town? Hardly. He can only say that by ignoring (in that sentence) the Government’s own Commission on Taxation Report which while retaining the ‘low-tax economy’ model we have seen has been so effective in action in recent years argued for a considerable extension of the tax base. It’s not just about income tax. It really isn’t. And that means that it’s not about ‘pots’ of money, it’s about a process, not an event. Thing is that ideologically he doesn’t like that process.

But note also, as EWI suggested, the essential dishonesty in the nod to the ‘top 4 per cent pay[ing] half of all taxes’ when they may be earning more than 50% of the wealth.. [edit: this figure is too large, it appears to be somewhere over half that] And these snide little evasions and attempts to chip away at the very concept of progressive taxation are unworthy of this debate.

Funny thing is that McArdle doesn’t ignore the CoT Report later in his article, but he doesn’t bother to link it to the income tax area. It’s as if the two are distinct and entirely divisible. And he makes a most intriguing statement that:

The Commission on Taxation has produced a long list of tax expenditures it believes could be terminated or amended. The most controversial one has to do with pensions – it seems the commission did not properly evaluate the principle of relief on the way in, taxation on drawdown of pension. In any event, Minister for Social Affairs Mary Hanafin has indicated it will be several years before this nettle is grasped.

I’d love to know what he means about the CoT not ‘properly evaluating’ the principle of relief on the way in, taxation on the drawdown of the pension. Is he suggesting what I think he is – boilerplate stuff from the pensions industry about how such reliefs shouldn’t be reformed?

On the larger issue, McCoy is wrong about taxes… OECD data shows that only on income tax is that anywhere near true (in fact EU documentation indicates that we would need to raise income taxes at both standard and higher levels by at least a percentage if not more in order to arrive at the median figure for European taxes whether one compares it as art of GNI or GDP). And it’s far from an absolute truth. Because McCoy ignores the small but salient fact that in those countries he mentions the tax base is wider drawn from greater revenue streams. So in fact our putative ‘high earner’ in this country remains better off by some considerable degree to their counterparts in those states.

But here’s an oddity, which I’ll come back to later. Although as Michael Taft has noted we lead the field, almost in terms of indirect taxes (3rd under GNI, a mere 11th under GDP) there’s two significant areas where we fall short.

First up… social insurance. Unlike our EU-15 comrades we take in less than 5% as a percentage of GDP is tax revenue from social insurance whereas the EU 13 average is 12.8%. This isn’t a small thing. As Michael noted, in Germany social insurance does precisely what it says on the tin… it pays for social expenditure. Can we be surprised if our provision in those areas is so abysmal?

Meanwhile there’s local government. Or rather there isn’t. Not here. Not in this state. Whereas the EU-14 have an average of 5.4% as a percentage of GDP in local government taxation we’re languishing on 0.8%.

And given that in both social insurance and LGT we could expect to raise more from those high earners, as well as everyone else, it seems odd that McCoy wouldn’t mention that. But… McCoy isn’t really in the revenue raising game.

Because for him…

Additionally, it is crucial that the Government does not strangle enterprise with exorbitantly high marginal tax rates. High rates do not generate more revenue for the state. They reduce it.

Really? That’s not the experience across those countries that he seems so keen to compare us to in other contexts. But this off the cuff analysis is typical of the current discourse.

Still, another oddity is that the National Economic and Social Council, in October was absolutely adamant that in order to ‘fill the gap’ in public finances that there would have to be significant tax increases, albeit eschewing income taxes in favour of others, and that our ‘tax burden remains significantly below EU averages’.

What’s odd is that despite the NESC being a government think-tank that Report, like the CoT Report, have been quietly binned by those arguing there’s nothing there… nothing at all.

There are further contradictions… Note his approach to the private sector and the importance of retaining talent…

Increasing marginal tax rates has a very damaging impact on Ireland’s ability to compete internationally. Top companies here are struggling to attract and retain international talent.
Important export sectors, such as financial services, food and drink, ICT, pharmaceuticals and medical technology, are entirely dependant on skilled labour that can locate anywhere in the world.
One or two highly skilled people in a company may be the anchor that keeps a team of hundreds working in Ireland. If that one highly skilled person decides to leave, the rest go too.

But not a word about the increasing loss of human capital from the public sector. I guess that the ‘anchors’ there just don’t count. And note that attractive wages aren’t a factor there either.

And the special pleading is quite special…

As recommended by the Commission on Taxation, some increases in the tax burden are required to fund the high-quality public services that must be provided in an advanced economy. There is also scope to reduce a significant number of tax reliefs. However, a number of key reliefs should remain, as they encourage enterprise and support Ireland’s emerging smart economy.

I wonder what reliefs they might be? Pension relief perhaps, given the amount of noise being generated on that front….

He concludes…

The biggest challenge facing the country as we move into 2010 is getting people back to work. The Government needs to follow other major economies and put jobs at the heart of its economic strategy. The budget can address the unemployment crisis by reallocating the resources that the Government is already spending in the social welfare system to support people in employment.

Remember social insurance? Remember where we lie in the European field? McCoy wouldn’t approve of increased revenues from there either.

It should reduce employers’ PRSI for new jobs and introduce a targeted suite of measures to address youth unemployment.
We must face reality and trade our way out of this crisis. We will succeed if we support enterprise, spread the cost fairly and put jobs first. The Irish people are realists and are proud of how our country was transformed in a generation. We know the hard thing is the right thing to do – let’s not fudge it next week.

So in other words the hard thing is assisting business, protecting reliefs, stripping away taxation and so on. Nice.

I don’t blame McCoy for supporting the side that pays his wages. We all have jobs to do. But what I do find irritating is the litany of half-truths and evasions throughout the piece. And that makes me wonder as to the strength of his thesis.

To conclude, what of this letter from the Irish Times?

Madam, – €800 million saved during 2010 (maybe). Less than two weeks’ borrowing. May God and/or the International Monetary Fund help us. – Yours, etc,

And the €1.3bn sought by the government? A bit over three weeks. And the outcome of a 5% wage cut on the deficit? Minimal.

Seems to me we might be needing that help from God after all, or we need to go back and reconsider the problem in its entirety. That the problem will have increased following tomorrow’s work is beyond doubt. And no thanks at all to the McArdle’s and McCoy’s of this world who continue to assert, despite evidence to the contrary that there’s just one solution.

Worth thinking about as we see just how much their proscriptions are followed in the Budget.