Polling day example of upside-down thinking

A FRIEND has recently been offered a job as polling agent on election day, June 5. She doesn’t feel she should take it as she has a full-time job and can’t understand why such jobs are not offered to some of the growing army of the unemployed.

I agree – and the same should apply to the election count and to the Lisbon Treaty rerun in the autumn. This may be a trivial example but it is indicative of the upside-down thinking of the Government. We had tax breaks and “light” regulation which inflated the property and credit bubble. We’ve had the establishment of yet another bad bank when we need an uncontaminated good bank to get the economy off its knees.

But the worst example of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time is the Government’s attempt to deflate its way out of the economic mess it has created. One doesn’t have to be an expert to see this is economic madness.

Cutting investment and increasing taxes on the low-paid to bail out failed banks and developers is bound to increase unemployment, which will worsen the fiscal deficit.

At a cost of €20,000 in payments and lost tax per person, the 500,000 unemployment rate that the Government is rapidly accelerating us towards will cost €10 billion per year – more than five times the “savings” made by this year’s cuts. To any sensible person it is obvious we need to invest in future IT and sustainable projects like broadband, biofuels, wind, hydro, tidal, wave, geothermal and solar energy and a smart grid to integrate them efficiently and enable intelligent energy management for when fuel prices rise again.

You may ask where are the funds to come from? Well, the Government has already wasted more than €7bn in attempts to bail out the failed banks. It plans to hand over about €50bn more. Both ICTU and IBEC have called for a modest €1bn stimulus to slow the rapid slide towards 20% unemployment.

This is less than 2% of the taxpayers’ money that the Government plans to throw at the bad banks.

In 2007, the Government was advised not to over-inflate the bubble by promising more tax cuts. But it arrogantly dismissed those of us who tried to point out the bleeding obvious as “economic illiterates” and “loolas”. Please don’t make the same mistake again.

Ray Corcoran

Hollywell

Ballymun

Dublin 11