Saturday 21 May 2011

Government determined to make working people pay

Believe it or not, the €70 billion we’re putting into insolvent banks is €38,000 for every person at work in the Irish economy. If we add €35 billion for NAMA, it’s €57,000 for every worker.

A worker on the average industrial wage will pay €260,000 in tax over a working lifetime. It would therefore take all the tax paid by more than 400,000 workers over their entire careers to pay for the bank bailout alone. Even if we’re wildly optimistic and assume that we’ll eventually get back half of the €105 billion; that still leaves 200,000 of us working our whole lives to save the euro and pay off the gambling debts of a private elite.

It simply cannot be done without reducing us to absolute poverty. The FG/Labour government is determined to make working people pay but we should shout ‘we can’t pay and we won’t pay’ – and call for a structured default now.

5 comments:

  1. I'm no economist but doesn't a default - structured or not - imply that it is our debt. As you say it commits the ordinary citizen to "pay off the gambling debts of a private elite.

    A default,structured or otherwise, merely acknowledges that it is our debt but that we are skint at the momemt, so let's do a deal!

    On the other hand we can tell this private elite of gamblers and speculators that it is not our debt and not our responsibility. They can take personal responsibility for their actions. They can pay it back or go bankrupt. In short, they can stuff it!

    Repudiate the Debt!

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  3. An orderly default is a deal of sorts. On a very basis level what you're doing is re-structuring the debt i.e. making a distiction between sovereign and private debt, highlighting those debts which are not, and never were, our debts to pay and those which are sovereign. Much of the private debt is held by hedge funds, for example, which are known to be extremely risky and subject to little or no regulation; these debts should never be re-paid, that's an aspect of capitalism those investors know full well.

    In actual fact with a structured default we would be telling a large portion of senior bondholders that they will not get their money - or at least a significant section of it - back. Apart from the fact that we do not owe these guys anything, another very important point is that we simply don't have the money to pay them, and we never will have it. I believe an essential aspect to all of this is a debt audit. If this was done we would get all information out on the table and people would realise who we are really bailing out. To quote the Icelandic finance minister: 'It is not possible, we do not have any money; we have fish, maybe we can give them fish?'.

    Sadly, we don't even have that to give them!!

    Séan an fiach anois!

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  4. And if the banks ever become profitable again, they will move back into private ownership...

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  5. I agree with everything you write.Now to move on from that Can someone please give me a detailed analysis on a structured default how it can be done

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