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hawkwing_lbI wanted to believe, once.
I understand the Catholic religion, sort of, in the awkward way of someone who's wandered around its social edges, its academic introductions, and its institutional appendages. It's about wanting to believe. To have a Providence that makes sense of disasters, that offers the comforting prospect of forgiveness for failures, transgressions, inadequacies.
When you view our politicians, it helps to understand that not only are most of them the scions of political families, privileged members of the Connected Classes, but that they were nearly all raised Catholic. Greedy little Catholic capitalists, who forget that theological, moral absolution is predicated upon true penitence.
They believe. They believe that the god of the markets will save their comfortable pensions and second homes. They believe the god of the markets will enable them to save their friends and party contributors from the consequences of their own folly, will enable them to save face before a Europe which is so deeply exposed to our banking debt that the ECB is loaning Ireland tens of billions of euro so that we can pay them back and save them from the consequences of their own poor judgement.
At this point, passing an austerity budget to "help" the situation is like flogging a dead horse to "help" it get moving. One cannot cut one's way to growth. (And if the government had not turned private banking debt into sovereign debt in the kind of short-term thinking at which they specialise, the country would not be in such a state.)
No. While we need to reintroduce very high levels of taxation among the highest earners, reduce the wages and pension entitlements of the highest paid twenty percent of civil servants (including politicians) by at least a quarter, increase the corporation tax by at least five percentage points, abolish any and all tax loopholes, and replace the Free Fees Iniative with a generous sliding scale of grants and entitlements for students (and I say that as a student), regressive taxation like water rates and increased VAT are Not Good Things.
In fact, they're pretty bad things. So is the flat-rate 1% levy.
Returning income taxation to pre-Ahern tax cut rates is, on the face of it, reasonably unobjectionable. Doing so while widening the lower end of the tax bands in order to catch more of the Struggling Classes in them?
Using the rhetoric of collective responsibility in order to justify harming people whose only crime was to believe politicians and financiers when these latter claimed that the economy could boom indefinitely and cheap debt was the best thing since sliced bread, whilst carefully exempting politicians' salaries, pensions, and expenses from scrutiny?
And mark you, it is harm. It's not merely an economical blight, a fresh diaspora: people will go hungry. The most vulnerable will lose the most, and pay the highest price in health and in happiness. In lives ruined and hopes destroyed.
It is wrong. It is immoral. It is an outrage.
And why is the nation permitting this? Why are the Opposition complacent, smug, cynical, spinelessly willing to be threatened and harried into acquiesing to the coming Budget without a fight? We have been lied to, manipulated, made fools of and seen our futures sold down the creek by a gaggle of perjurors and money launderers operating under false pretences. How is it that we can countenance this?
People are afraid. People still want to believe that things will turn out for the best, that this is only a temporary problem, that it can be fixed.
But this is not a situation that can be fixed with Hail Maries and crossed fingers. The root of this country's problems is the rot in its governing classes, that lack of public competence, shame, and sense of personal responsibility which is the hallmark of the Irish politician and his (rarely her) business associates, confidantes, and cronies.
When a limb succumbs to gangrene, the best option is amputation. When the whole body, root and trunk, is blighted?
But this is a fundamentally conservative nation. So there will be no radical solution to our long-standing problem.
Not, at least, unless Sinn Féin attains a controlling interest in the next Dáil, a prospect more likely now than it has heretofore been. It would be interesting to see how much their rhetoric of progress without violence is honest, and how much mere propaganda, if they had a coalition by the short hairs.
Honestly? There are many absolutely filthy ways the state of the country could go, and every one I think of is worse than the last.
I can't see any good outcomes. Only a bare few that fail of being completely terrible, and that not by much.
It's going to be a bad decade to be Irish.
I understand the Catholic religion, sort of, in the awkward way of someone who's wandered around its social edges, its academic introductions, and its institutional appendages. It's about wanting to believe. To have a Providence that makes sense of disasters, that offers the comforting prospect of forgiveness for failures, transgressions, inadequacies.
When you view our politicians, it helps to understand that not only are most of them the scions of political families, privileged members of the Connected Classes, but that they were nearly all raised Catholic. Greedy little Catholic capitalists, who forget that theological, moral absolution is predicated upon true penitence.
They believe. They believe that the god of the markets will save their comfortable pensions and second homes. They believe the god of the markets will enable them to save their friends and party contributors from the consequences of their own folly, will enable them to save face before a Europe which is so deeply exposed to our banking debt that the ECB is loaning Ireland tens of billions of euro so that we can pay them back and save them from the consequences of their own poor judgement.
At this point, passing an austerity budget to "help" the situation is like flogging a dead horse to "help" it get moving. One cannot cut one's way to growth. (And if the government had not turned private banking debt into sovereign debt in the kind of short-term thinking at which they specialise, the country would not be in such a state.)
No. While we need to reintroduce very high levels of taxation among the highest earners, reduce the wages and pension entitlements of the highest paid twenty percent of civil servants (including politicians) by at least a quarter, increase the corporation tax by at least five percentage points, abolish any and all tax loopholes, and replace the Free Fees Iniative with a generous sliding scale of grants and entitlements for students (and I say that as a student), regressive taxation like water rates and increased VAT are Not Good Things.
In fact, they're pretty bad things. So is the flat-rate 1% levy.
Returning income taxation to pre-Ahern tax cut rates is, on the face of it, reasonably unobjectionable. Doing so while widening the lower end of the tax bands in order to catch more of the Struggling Classes in them?
Using the rhetoric of collective responsibility in order to justify harming people whose only crime was to believe politicians and financiers when these latter claimed that the economy could boom indefinitely and cheap debt was the best thing since sliced bread, whilst carefully exempting politicians' salaries, pensions, and expenses from scrutiny?
And mark you, it is harm. It's not merely an economical blight, a fresh diaspora: people will go hungry. The most vulnerable will lose the most, and pay the highest price in health and in happiness. In lives ruined and hopes destroyed.
It is wrong. It is immoral. It is an outrage.
And why is the nation permitting this? Why are the Opposition complacent, smug, cynical, spinelessly willing to be threatened and harried into acquiesing to the coming Budget without a fight? We have been lied to, manipulated, made fools of and seen our futures sold down the creek by a gaggle of perjurors and money launderers operating under false pretences. How is it that we can countenance this?
People are afraid. People still want to believe that things will turn out for the best, that this is only a temporary problem, that it can be fixed.
But this is not a situation that can be fixed with Hail Maries and crossed fingers. The root of this country's problems is the rot in its governing classes, that lack of public competence, shame, and sense of personal responsibility which is the hallmark of the Irish politician and his (rarely her) business associates, confidantes, and cronies.
When a limb succumbs to gangrene, the best option is amputation. When the whole body, root and trunk, is blighted?
But this is a fundamentally conservative nation. So there will be no radical solution to our long-standing problem.
Not, at least, unless Sinn Féin attains a controlling interest in the next Dáil, a prospect more likely now than it has heretofore been. It would be interesting to see how much their rhetoric of progress without violence is honest, and how much mere propaganda, if they had a coalition by the short hairs.
Honestly? There are many absolutely filthy ways the state of the country could go, and every one I think of is worse than the last.
I can't see any good outcomes. Only a bare few that fail of being completely terrible, and that not by much.
It's going to be a bad decade to be Irish.
