Fiscal ruin of the Western world beckons

[katty]

more:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/5857074/Fiscal-ruin-of-the-Western-world-beckons.html

Fiscal ruin of the Western world beckons

For a glimpse of what awaits Britain, Europe, and America as budget deficits spiral to war-time levels, look at what is happening to the Irish welfare state.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 5:40PM BST 18 Jul 2009


Events have already forced Premier Brian Cowen to carry out the harshest assault yet seen on the public services of a modern Western state. He has passed two emergency budgets to stop the deficit soaring to 15pc of GDP. They have not been enough. The expert An Bord Snip report said last week that Dublin must cut deeper, or risk a disastrous debt compound trap.

A further 17,000 state jobs must go (equal to 1.25m in the US), though unemployment is already 12pc and heading for 16pc next year.

Britons will be poorer in coming decadesEducation must be cut 8pc. Scores of rural schools must close, and 6,900 teachers must go. "The attacks outlined in this report would represent an education disaster and light a short fuse on a social timebomb", said the Teachers Union of Ireland.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Rudimentary education as a luxury. That's sobering.

[juno jones]

2. Maybe Cowen should crack down on Irish pop stars who have offshored

their buisnesses and incomes while retaining huge estates in the country.

Bono, U2 and the Crisis of World Capitalism
The Emperors of Bombast
By EAMONN McCANN

http://www.counterpunch.org/mccann07142009.html

We should be used by now to the clanging contradictions of U2. It’s been noted here before that Bono’s castigation of the Irish Government for directing too small a proportion of its tax receipts to aid for the developing world was swiftly followed by the band transferring its business operation to the Netherlands to avoid paying tax to the Irish Government.

Now Larry Mullen has noticed “a new resentment of rich people in this country ... We have experienced where coming in and out of the country at certain times is made more difficult than it should be — not only for us, but for a lot of wealthy people ... The better-off (are) being sort of humiliated.”

So it isn’t the people writhing on trolleys in hospital corridors because wards have been closed on account of the economy or children learning arithmetic from the relative speed of rats scuttling across the classroom as a result of the education budget being slashed to bail out the bankers who are being humiliated in Ireland but....the better off.

The little drummer boy’s distress at the rich being reduced to tears by hard-faced officialdom was aroused by seeing billionaire tax-exile property developer Dermot Desmond being dissed at Dublin airport. “If this is what (the rich) experience, how can I fly the Irish flag and tell people ‘come to Ireland because it's great? ’... All those rich guys with all those balls (?), all those women that you see organising this and organising that, without them we'd be in a very, very different state.”

My heart just bleeds for the rich. I don't know where we would be with out charity balls and 'organising' this and that. The rich do so much for us and we are unworthy... :evilfrown: