Budget that punishes plain folk for greed of bankers
Date Published: {J}
Well, how much did they get from you? If you're in the public sector, you must feel like the sacrificial lamb. If you're young and unemployed, just skewered.
By 'they', I don't mean the government. Sure politicians bear some of the responsibility, and in fairness they have taken a little of the pain (though ironically, the same pay cut falls on those who opposed their policies).
But a far greater share of the blame lies with the people who owned and ran the government. I mean the property developers, the consultants and lawyers, the financial sector, the banks. Most of all, the banks. For the last decade, Ireland has been run almost entirely for the benefit of these people. They farmed us.
But you can't just blame the bankers, can you? We were all involved. They may have bought the politicians, but we still voted for those politicians. (Well OK I didn't, but a majority of us did.) We took the too-easy loans and invested in overpriced property. (Well OK I didn't, but a lot of us did.) We grew richer because of the boom. (Well OK I didn't, but a proportion of us did.) We were all to some degree complicit in this. We deserve some small share of the punishment.
Mirthless laughter. Who do you think suffered most in this budget – the people who most benefitted from the property bubble? Quite the opposite of course. Do you think you'll ever see a former bank executive queuing for the new reduced dole (or I suppose you should call it the 'Seat-on-a-board Seeker's Allowance')? It is of course the people already finding it hard to survive who are bearing the brunt of this. The ones on low incomes, who depend on benefits, who struggle to get by. Ranks now being swelled by those ruining themselves to repay the banks for houses that aren't worth what they borrowed. In other words, the great majority of us are going to suffer. The ones who won't suffer – who indeed are being rewarded – are those who brought this on us.
Remember it was only three years ago that AIB was making profits of €1.2 million, per hour. An insane amount of money, a sizeable portion of which they shared out as dividends and bonuses, rewarding themselves for their own utterly irresponsible, purposefully short-sighted behaviour. And yet somehow no arrests have been made. Quite the contrary – with NAMA we are saving them from the natural consequences of their greed. We're protecting their profitability, we are actually rewarding them for their selfish and thoughtless actions. Every cut that you felt on Wednesday, every increase in expense and reduction in benefit, is to pay for their spree, their massive self-indulgence. Do you really believe they are not laughing at us?
A harsh budget, but one that utterly fails to go to the root of the problem.
Nationalise the banks. Firetheir executives. Confiscate their pensions.