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How do you manage to spend €13billion in an afternoon, and accomplish almost nothing of note? The answer is to get elected to Dáil Eireann.
Irish politicians, as yesterday’s budget proved, are world leaders when it comes to spending money, and almost as good at telling everybody how it was spent: Taxpayers, for example, will be told that they are €800 better off as a result of the changes. But better off compared to when? If you applied the inflation of recent years to average salaries in 2020, you might well find that even with the extra cash in their back pockets, most voters have done no better than to stand still, in real terms. The tax package amounts to an enormous splosh of cash to keep most of us in the same relative income bracket as we were before.
And what of the spending? Extra billions here and there, distributed across the system, will not deliver smaller class sizes or shorter hospital waiting lists, for the simple reason that the problems in our public services are not related to funding, but capacity. The Government is unable to meaningfully tackle capacity issues because any capital building programme will be in direct conflict with the Government’s house and home building programme, which actually makes the public services issue worse: The more people we have, the more homes and public services we need. The more homes in a given area, the more need for schools and hospitals. Throwing money at the problems is vastly unlikely to solve any of them, given that the bottlenecks are to do with supply, not demand. It is not as if there are an army of unemployed builders twiddling their thumbs, just waiting for a few additional hundreds of millions to be allocated in a capital grant.
As a result, a majority of the Government’s new spending is not designed to solve any problems at all, but to make people feel better about them: Your schools will remain overcrowded, and short of teachers, but the schoolbooks will be free, because that’s an area where Government can spend money without really making any problem worse. You get a package to put more money into the pockets of landlords, but that spending is only needed because for years Government policy has sent landlords fleeing from the housing market: it is now trying to entice them back at a time when very few people are interested in buying second properties to rent.
Most of all, though, the budget sums up how Ireland is, and has always been, governed: Toss a little money at every problem, and hope that somehow the problems solve themselves. If you were looking for a big Government plan to fix the enormous cost overruns in health, then it wasn’t there. If you were looking for a comprehensive plan to fix housing, it wasn’t there. List any problem, and the solution was more money, and a sort of hope that the public might confuse spending for action.
The difficulty with governing a country in this way is that eventually a time comes when the money runs short. The budgetary projections announced yesterday actually project a reduction in Government tax revenue next year, which means that this was their big chance to use the surpluses of recent years to accomplish something meaningful. And voters should be left with a basic question:
After almost four years of this Government, what has it changed for the better in Ireland? After four years of record budget surpluses, do you feel like you live in a richer country? Do you feel like we have fewer problems now than we had before? Do you feel like the public finances have been put to work to improve your community? Do you feel like our people are happier, and more content?
If the answer to those questions is yes, then by all means, explain your views in the comments below.
But if your answer is no, then the bad news is that the opposition suffers from the same ailment as those in power: To listen to the speeches from across the Dáil floor yesterday, one might be forgiven for thinking that if only 15 or 20 billion, instead of 13 billion, had been spent, then we would transform into a land of milk and honey. If you were looking for substantive alternative approaches to governing the state, then you would not have found them.
This kind of governance has ruined the country before, and, given the chance, it will ruin it again. When politicians rely on spending money as the solution to all problems, very few problems will ever be solved. And when the money runs out, as it always does in the end, the only question that remains is which unfortunate set of unimaginative sods will be left holding the bag, and the blame.
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