Posted on 04/14/2010 9:49:06 AM PDT by Graybeard58
Alex J. Pollock of the American Enterprise Institute had an excellent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal recently on how Ireland is dealing with its financial crisis, which is on a par with those of Greece, Portugal and Spain.
Ireland shares common fiscal and economic histories with the United States, and Connecticut for that matter. Tax cuts transformed Ireland from "the sick man of Europe" into an economic powerhouse. Unprecedented economic growth produced record government revenues, which politicians squandered on waste, creeping socialism, and supersized paychecks and benefits for its unionized government employees. As swiftly as Ireland's revenue streams flowed, however, its outflows ran even faster; before long, it was borrowing to pay for day-to-day expenses because the budget had become petrified by "fixed costs." When the recession hit, the runaway spending continued unabated, but government revenues plummeted, and deficits mounted perilously.
The strategy for dealing with similarly dire fiscal consequences of tax-borrow-and-spend government on this side of The Pond has been to ramp up deficit spending and government debt to prop up the public sector. Ireland, meanwhile, is attacking its spending problem by going after the spending.
Standing up to its own Big Public Labor, the Irish government imposed across-the-board pay cuts ranging from 5 percent to 15 percent, Mr. Pollock notes. Now a 10 percent reduction on $168,000 salaries is a goodly sum, but the employees still are left with a tidy $151,200 and still enjoy compensation that is "markedly superior to the private sector," as The Irish Times put it. And they still have jobs. Meanwhile, the overtaxed folks in the private sector were spared another taste of the taxpaying lash, and the government will save $5.3 billion through 2013. Last week, the government and the unions also agreed to a four-year pay freeze.
"This looks like a very sensible plan for nonmilitary government employees," Mr. Pollock wrote. "Ireland has already worked out the plan. All the United States has to do is implement it." Are you paying attention, President Obama and Gov. M. Jodi Rell?
Ping to a Republican-American Editorial.
If you want on or off this list, let me know.
No strangers to famine, they have taken a prudent step.
Maybe we can emigrate back to Ireland if the USA goes down.
This is what a sensible government does. Sadly, our government is not the slightest bit sensible.
My Island ping
Makes sense to me.
Instead of reducing pay scales, our state governments use layoffs (policemen and firemen, first!) to justify tax increases to pay for all the featherbedding that accumulated during the boom years.
The big problem with this is our biggest consumers are citizens by design: think SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and straight old Welfare. Add in unemployment and you round out the big expenses. Better to cut several Cabinets and Agencies altogether: think Ed Dept, EPA, Commerce, H&HS for starters. Throw NPR in just to watch them whine incessantly.
“I’m pretty sure I’ll be fine, but the rest of you are fooked,” is about as appropriate as his charming character.
Things are 180 degrees different now with this unctious, slimeball, lying, Marxist, foreign-born poser in the Oval Office. If he gets re-elected, we are so screwed. We're halfway to screwed now.
It also helped that they got rid of the chip on their shoulder that they had for centuries, and urbanization lead to the death of the “superstitious, priestly-ridden people” that had identified Ireland in the past.
I’ve thought about it...
Waterbury has a fairly large population of people with an Irish ethnic heritage and this editorial makes a very valid point, using modern-day Ireland as an example of how a quasi-socialist government deals with severe budget deficits and other symptoms of socialism that invariably arise when common sense is replaced with 'empathy' and governmental expansion runs amok.
That neither the federal or Connecticut state government will pay the slightest attention to what the government of Ireland is doing is pretty much guaranteed. This is because things haven't gotten bad enough - yet. They will, and I don't look forward to that, but until people wake up, as they are now starting to, socialism-as-usual will be the order of the day in Washington, D.C. as well as the state house in Hartford.
The Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland provided that children born on the island of Ireland to parents who were both non-nationals would no longer have a constitutional right to citizenship of the Republic of Ireland. It was effected by the Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution Act, 2004, which was approved by referendum on 11 June 2004 and signed into law on the 24 June of the same year.
It partially reversed changes that had previously been made to the constitution as part of the Belfast Agreement of 1998.
Ireland does indeed get it right!
You have to be a fecking Italian. LOL
But the Irish did save civilization.
We are all in gratitude to the Irish monks.
Thanks for the ping Graybeard.
“”Ireland has already worked out the plan. All the United States has to do is implement it.” Are you paying attention, President Obama and Gov. M. Jodi Rell?”
It’s almost as though the Waterbury Republican Editorial staff think Obama really wants to do what’s good for this country. Wondering if we should let them in on the secret.
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