Are there some things that just shouldn't be cut?

brianthebard

In a crisis situation like the present one, when huge adjustments have to be made to spending plans and everyone is going to take a hit, are there ever sectors that shouldn't be taken from, or if so, minimally?
For me education and health are two things the government should never be skimping on. I don't think the short term benefit outweighs the compromised services that will be continued for decades when cuts are made to these sectors. Far better to add another 1 or 2% on income tax or something else in order to make up the money you would otherwise take from education. obviously that figure is just an example, I know the government needs a lot more than a 2% increase would bring, but what are people's opinions on the above?

nesf

I don't think it makes sense to ring fence entire Departments and say there should be no cuts in Education or Health. Individual parts of these Departments are essential but there is always areas within these Departments that can be cut down and situations like this should be.

There is never enough money to go around. People just need to accept this.

Dannyboy83

nesf wrote: »

I don't think it makes sense to ring fence entire Departments and say there should be no cuts in Education or Health. Individual parts of these Departments are essential but there is always areas within these Departments that can be cut down and situations like this should be.

There is never enough money to go around. People just need to accept this.

I think they do, in general, accept it.
But its a bitter pill to swallow when their leaders are still using government jets and staying in Miami hotel rooms, i.e. not keeping their end of the bargain/ no sign of reform

Time Magazine

There is a stupid amount of waste in the HSE. Waste in HSE is no better than waste in the Dept of Agriculture. We can't afford to give a crap about class sizes.

Are there some things that shouldn't be cut? Yes. But there are far fewer of these things than people want to believe.

Fluffybums

The Economist wrote: »

There is a stupid amount of waste in the HSE. Waste in HSE is no better than waste in the Dept of Agriculture. We can't afford to give a crap about class sizes.

Are there some things that shouldn't be cut? Yes. But there are far fewer of these things than people want to believe.

Ther is an amazing amount of waste in the civil service - it would make sense to deal with this from the very top, ie ministers, junior ministers, senior civil servants, and work down. I suspect that trimming in these areas might save enough money to stop the closing of wards.
It is abosolutely ludicrase, for example, that so much money is wasted in education hiring porta cabins. This should be negotiated by the Dept, may be by asking for tenders, the economy of scale would be significant. A single school board does not have the ability to negotiate a discount. There are probably numerous other examples where waste can be cut.

x in the city

Are they still storing the Y2K clock and the e voting machine at a tax payers cost (of a few million a year probably..) ?

Permabear

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Fluffybums

donegalfella wrote: »

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Donegal on a similar vein, have you read "Dumbing down our kids" not sure of the author. A salutary warning about polical correctness in education.
In general, we need to continue spending in education - it is investment in the future of the country - however, this should not be done blindly. Spending a fortune to educate 50% or more of the population to third level only to have them graduate assuming they are experts and too good to do the routine tasks by which they learn their trade, but unable to work out how to prepare a simple 10% w/v solution or construct a sentence, never mind a paragraph (my experience in the UK).

Tech3

The quicker we cut our oversized public sector the better. I think college fees are one of the serious cuts in the budget in terms of severity.

Darragh29

tech2 wrote: »

The quicker we cut our oversized public sector the better. I think college fees are one of the serious cuts in the budget in terms of severity.

I reckon the real cut that is going to send people over the edge will be the cut in social welfare payments. Going by Mary Hanifin's comments yesterday, I'd say the dole and also child benefit is in for a ravaging on the 7th April.

On the 3rd level fee's, I remember when I was in college, 120 students might start a course in 1st year and maybe 20 graduates come out the other end of the system in 4th year, with 80-100 dropping out in years 1,2 and 3. Every year that students studied for, and then dropped out, this costs the state a years tuition fee that is simply wasted. If someone does 3 years of a 4 year degree course, and then drops out, the state has paid the 3rd level instuitution 3 years of fees and they don't have a graduate at the end of it and are out of pocket by over 10K if not a lot more. This is crazy I think, this was just one course, multiply those losses by courses up and down the country and the whole thing starts looking like a money burning exercise!

I think you should get your fee's refunded or partially refunded when you finish the course. This free fee's deal across the board with no strings attached I think is rediculous.

Permabear

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brianthebard

The Economist wrote: »

There is a stupid amount of waste in the HSE. Waste in HSE is no better than waste in the Dept of Agriculture. We can't afford to give a crap about class sizes.

Are there some things that shouldn't be cut? Yes. But there are far fewer of these things than people want to believe.

I'm not saying that waste shouldn't be dealt with, on the contrary, its obviously the best way of making up the money because in the long run we should have a more streamlined efficient system. I can't believe anyone with an education could claim we can't give a crap about class sizes, the bigger the classes get the harder it is for teachers to deal with all their students, the more people are going to fall through the cracks, difficulties aren't going to get picked up, people are going to leave school with a sub par education. How is that going to be in the state or economies benefit in the short, medium or long term?

DF nowhere have I suggested they throw money at the education or health sectors, just not take money from it.

DJDC

That's the problem. Third-level education has become an effort to remediate endemic problems at secondary level. Students who have no inherent educational aspirations or interests go on to third level because they imbibe the message that everybody should go on to third level. For many, their experience turns into three or four feel-good years of partying, drinking, half-hearted lecture attendance, and the occasional flick through a book. If the student is lucky, an eventual graduation will ensue. But standards have become so watered down that a bog-standard B.A. can be valued neither for the intrinsic experience of learning and discovery that went into attaining it, nor for its value as a credential. Nobody benefits from this bankrupt system, but certainly a lot of money is wasted to sustain it.

An obvious result of this both in Ireland and the UK has been a massive rise in unemployment amongst "graduates". The fact is that the top 10% of 18 year olds who always would have went to university still have a great chance of a graduate job because they generally have results to go to traditional universities like LSE,durham,TCD,oxbridge,edinburgh,UCD,UCC,manchester etc. However the other 40% are finding it very difficult to get graduate jobs after they qualify and a lot end up in very average admin/hands-on jobs that would have been described as non-graduates roles 10 years ago. Its a farce that you have people going on to 3rd level barely scraping passes in ordinary level maths and english.

It was always going to happen if you thing about it. Capitalist economies simply dont need or want 50% of its population in graduate level jobs.

The_Minister

brianthebard wrote: »

I can't believe anyone with an education could claim we can't give a crap about class sizes, the bigger the classes get the harder it is for teachers to deal with all their students, the more people are going to fall through the cracks, difficulties aren't going to get picked up, people are going to leave school with a sub par education.

I was educated (in primary school) in a class of 32.
I turned out just grand.

Large class sizes only have a large negative effect where the students in question are already struggling, most people who had large class sizes turned out grand. I would argue that recent drops in the standard of educational attainment probably have other causes.

brianthebard

The_Minister wrote: »

I was educated (in primary school) in a class of 32.
I turned out just grand.

Large class sizes only have a large negative effect where the students in question are already struggling, most people who had large class sizes turned out grand. I would argue that recent drops in the standard of educational attainment probably have other causes.

None of that goes against what I said?

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Alcatel

When it comes time for any cuts, all cuts will have somebody rolling up and announcing "This CANNOT be cut!" And they will give reasonable sounding reasons why it shouldn't be. At the end of the day, government spending touches us all; and some cuts, say 1MEUR here that looks like a piddle in the ocean to you and me but makes the world of a difference to 60 people (0.0014% of the population) who can make a good case and get some media attention.

Cuts are harsh. Cuts are bad. But if we can't afford to pay for the service, it doesn't really matter if it means that some people will be left at an educational disadvantage or some others will end up dying in a hospital that can't treat their needs... If there's no money, there can be no service. And it's better to make the cuts ourselves now than let it get even worse and have someone else make them for us in a far more dire way.

I don't like cuts. But to say "Don't touch Education or Health or Welfare!" is to say, don't cut 90% of our national budget.

I do agree that public sector reform could save us a lot of money (having a spouse in the public sector, one of her distant colleagues is paid 70k and can't attach a file to an email, takes two hour lunches, will never be fired... you know the stereotype...); but ultimately we need to make hard cuts, and we're all going to get screwed monumentally by them. Some more than others because they're more out on a limb. It's a sad situation.

Dr Galen

Health spending in Ireland increased by an average of 8.8 percent per year, in real terms, between 2000 and 2006. However, most people would concur that this extra expenditure did not significantly improve the lot of the patient, and rightly question the amount of money that is now being spent on bureaucracy and consultancy fees.

while a certain amount of catchup was needed following years of total underfunding, I'd agree that throwing money into the Health Service is like pouring water into sand. Money that should be going into providing top class primary care services, keeping people out of hospitals and acute services and reforming the structures that provide health structures didn't. If things had of been managed in this way I'd hazard a guess that health spending as a sum total would actually be lower anyway. The time to do all of this though was during the "boom" years, when forced redundancies etc from the HSE would not have been such an issue as people would have been able to find jobs to move into. Now, all we'll end up with is more people on the dole!

I agree entirely. It is doing them, their lecturers, and their fellow students a huge disservice—because these students lack the basic skills needed for third-level success. It's no surprise that they idle desultorily and somewhat resentfully through their college years, only to emerge with inflated expectations and no real prospects.

i've been through the university system twice, completing 2 totally different degrees ( economics & nursing FYI) and seen this over and over again. Using nursing as an example, it costs a fortune to train a nurse in this country, but the number of dropouts was astonishing over the 4 years. Pretty much the same story when I studied economics too. You'd expect that anyone studying such a subject would have a decent grasp of maths, and while I was no genius at it, i had more than enough to get by. Others came from school with no clue about even some of the basics. A lot of dropouts or transfers after the first year. again costing a fortune in fee's for the government with no discernible return on the investment.

The no-fee's sytem certainly benefitted me, but I was prepared to work and get on with it. Many many people trip on to 3rd level, because it's the thing to do, no other reason. Thats wrong and needs to be reformed. Really focussing on career advice and guidance in 2nd level would help. Maybe forcing all school leavers to take a year between leaving school and going to college would help provide a bit of clarity and life experience?

thebigcheese22

Darragh29 wrote: »

On the 3rd level fee's, I remember when I was in college, 120 students might start a course in 1st year and maybe 20 graduates come out the other end of the system in 4th year, with 80-100 dropping out in years 1,2 and 3. Every year that students studied for, and then dropped out, this costs the state a years tuition fee that is simply wasted. If someone does 3 years of a 4 year degree course, and then drops out, the state has paid the 3rd level instuitution 3 years of fees and they don't have a graduate at the end of it and are out of pocket by over 10K if not a lot more. This is crazy I think, this was just one course, multiply those losses by courses up and down the country and the whole thing starts looking like a money burning exercise!

Can I ask what course that was? It is only in a tiny minority of courses that such high numbers drop out! :eek:

Also, the system as it is is as fair as it can be, as people who drop out in first year have to pay full fees to change course. People can't just drop courses at the drop of a hat, choose another, and incur no consequences... Despite what certain people might believe.

brianthebard

donegalfella wrote: »

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Unfortunately more money needs to be spent on education, when you look at the amount of schools with sub par buildings for classes, overcrowded classes, not enough special needs assistants, etc, etc. And what I'm trying to point out is that these things feed into the problems you just listed. If the money is being spent in a bad way that's one thing, and a different thread, but the money is still needed. Likewise the health service budget has increased hugely, sure, but two or three years ago the HSE had to give money back to the government because they hadn't spent it. Also there are still huge fund raising drives at local/regional level to raise yet more money because there is still more needed.

What people need to distinguish between is emergency cuts and planned streamlining. One is putting a big red mark through services, staff numbers, whatever it takes to get the spending down. The other is a serious thought out means of improving the service quality over a number of years by reducing waste. What is going to happen in the new budget is not planned streamlining to make things more efficient, if education money is cut now then there is not going to be an improvement in services provided. There will be a marked decrease.

Dr Galen

What people need to distinguish between is emergency cuts and planned streamlining. One is putting a big red mark through services, staff numbers, whatever it takes to get the spending down. The other is a serious thought out means of improving the service quality over a number of years by reducing waste. What is going to happen in the new budget is not planned streamlining to make things more efficient, if education money is cut now then there is not going to be an improvement in services provided. There will be a marked decrease.

as much as it pains me to say this...........we don't have any real choice. Immediate and large cuts are going to need to be made, otherwise we run the risk of prolonging this recession for much longer.

We should have been doing what you suggest years ago, not propping things up by throwing money at the problems.

Permabear

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bk

thebigcheese22 wrote: »

Can I ask what course that was? It is only in a tiny minority of courses that such high numbers drop out! :eek:

I've seen similar drop out rates in Comp Sci, in fact we had one programming test at the end of first year, which you had to pass, or you failed the whole year and was basically designed to weed out all the people who weren't up for CS. Great idea (basically meant they only wasted one year, rather the four).

As for education, I believe the problems faced by the education system aren't lack of resources or buildings or even class sizes. Rather they are problems systemic to our society. Most importantly parents who have little or no interest in their childrens upbringing.

Increasingly I think too many parents are selfish, preferring to spend time down at the pub or on holidays in Ibiza, then ensuring their kids are doing their homework, helping them in areas where they are having difficulty and teaching them responsibility and respect.

Smaller class sizes and swishier schools, with fancy, expensive equipment aren't going to help with that.

Tech3

thebigcheese22 wrote: »

Can I ask what course that was? It is only in a tiny minority of courses that such high numbers drop out! :eek:

Also, the system as it is is as fair as it can be, as people who drop out in first year have to pay full fees to change course. People can't just drop courses at the drop of a hat, choose another, and incur no consequences... Despite what certain people might believe.

Darragh29 is completed correct on this. I have been through it to witness it. I did an electronics degree a few years ago. In first year there was a total of 60 students in our class. Only 2 of us from the original class actually got the degree at the end. There was huge dropouts in first year well over half the class was gone. Many were there just to collect the grant and didnt even attempt to make any effort.

What Darragh29 is saying would be a good idea to receive some of the fee back when the course is completed. I never understand also why so many people hang around college wasting years off their lives repeating. I did the 3 years degree and it was great to see companies coming around to visit colleges offering jobs which I seized the opportunity. In the coming years there wont be that many knocking about. I couldnt imagine how much money was blown on fees for droupouts alone would have been enormous.

SeanW

This recession, and it's effects on the public finances, are a doozy, to be sure. But before we can talk about what sectors to protect, we need to propose cuts in 'vulnerable' areas to credible call for the protection of (whatever).

So I'll start with the areas where I think cuts are required.

1. Public sector inefficiency, the HSE is an oft-quoted example. On inception, they hired a whole load of admin staff. I thought the HSE was supposed to be more efficient than the scattering of Health Boards?
   
   Another example of public sector inefficiency is the Driver Testing Serivce, as run by the Road Safety Authority. There was a post in the Learning to Drive forum a few months ago from a newly redundant SGS tester that they were doing more tests per week for substantially less money (even before overtime) than the RSA testers. It's important to note that in the old days, with 6-18!! month waiting lists for driving tests, the trade union mafia running that show threatened hell over the proposal to do some testing by a private company - but I guess the government assured them that it was only a temporary thing and once the government got to screw over learners with new regulations, they'd have their monopoly handed back to them on a silver platter. And so it was that the government met in Emergency session one Friday in October to put all then 2nd provisional licenseholders off the road the following Tuesday (in the same session that they awarded themselves a 10% pay rise) SGS got the can around Christmas.
   
   Enough is enough. We can't afford this kind of carry on anymore.
2. Axe the RSA - they say they're improving road safety but from what I can see their only remit is to drown people in red tape, provide a make-believe driver testing service and burn money.
3. Axe the Seanad. WTF? It does nothing but provide a salary and pointless talking shop for government stooges and political has-beens. It serves no useful function and is fundamentally undemocratic.
4. Cut the dole - if unemployment reaches half a million as projected, reducing JA by €10 per week would save €260,000,000 annually
5. Reduce the scope of the various Misuse of Drugs acts. I maintain that the prohibitions on certain soft-ish drugs like marijuana are doing more harm than good, between creating a black market that would not otherwise exist with all the attendant problems that causes, the expense of locking up non-violent 'offenders' in many cases who just wanted to have a good time - or in some cases people with chronic illnesses looking for medicinal effects - and the opportunity cost of not having something to tax. In the U.S. for example, almost 1% of the American population is in jail - the prisons are little more than criminal academies - and a lot of those are in for non-violent offenses. e.g. drugs offences. Of course, some of those were tax paying citizens when they went in, but will come out brutalised and with less employment prospects with a criminal record.
   
   I don't know if it's that bad here, but certainly this would be a good time to re-examine our relationship with certain substances.
6. No more bank bailouts - MAYBE help our "flagship" banks, Bank of Ireland and AIB as these are the best known internationally, but no more. Anglo was little more than an aggressive kleptocracy and should have been let fail, AFAIK they didn't even have retail deposits or if so, not much.
7. Scrap the e-voting machines. There is no such thing as a secure e-voting system and the hardware they have now is of no use, and probably never will be. Computer equipment depreciates into obsolence fairly quickly and in any case, only survives a certain length of time. Time to cut our losses on this.
8. Decentralisation >_< a pointless exercise in vote grabbing.

That all said, there are some areas where protection of funding would be helpful.

I agree that health and education require protection - but only in so far as they deliver value for money. Donegalfella may well be right about our education system, given the governments handling of the public services, I wouldn't bet against it. The health and education budgets should only be defended as far as practices promoting quality are implemented, for example merit based pay for teachers, an end to compulsion in Irish language teaching, an expanded system of elective courses in 2nd level etc.

The big area where I would like to see ringfencing is capital projects - the construction industry has taken a hammering so projects can be done cheaply now. Ideally the government should have hoarded money in the real boom years and the bubble-time financing for precisely these kinds of projects, instead of inflationary pro cyclical budgets and waste on decentralisation, SSIAs etc but alas they didn't - there are still plenty of children going to school in portocabins and famine-era buildings. Indeed one school in the Longford area is close to physically collapsing. Also, during the boom years, the government dithered endlessly about certain transport projects, notably the Dublin Metro, and the DART Interconnector. If Dublin is to finally avoid Los Angeles style sprawl and universal car dependency, these two projects are vital.
Also in the realm of transport, while we may not be able to afford another round of long distance motorway buidling, many towns still require bypasses and these tend to deliver value for money, as they speed up journies for long distance traffic and remove said traffic from congested town centres. Some of these could be built to 2+2 dual or HQDC standard with a view to integrating them into longer LQDC or motorway routes as and when the economy and public finances recover.

Transport is a relatively small part of the budget but a very large part of our lives. Capital spending in this area IMO must be protected.

In short, all of the above are things that are IMHO vitally important and all make much more sense than where money is currently going.

Alcatel

Okay... But the fact is that you've not touched Health (in any real sense... To save real money, you have to cut services), Education or Welfare. I believe I heard a government minister on the radio a while back pointing out that we project we'll get 30bn this year in tax revenues, and before we kick off the mark welfare payments cost us 20bn. So, as much as I see this as an opportunity to cull the public sector into an efficient organisation all round, this talk of "Screw the bankers, tax the rich more and cut the administrators!" really only saves a few million. We're talking broad, sweeping, multi billion euro savings.

Permabear

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thebman

The Economist wrote: »

There is a stupid amount of waste in the HSE. Waste in HSE is no better than waste in the Dept of Agriculture. We can't afford to give a crap about class sizes.

Are there some things that shouldn't be cut? Yes. But there are far fewer of these things than people want to believe.

Agree on HSE, disagree on education.

We have to care about class sizes as it is directly related to results. You can't have massive class sizes because it becomes really difficult for the teacher to work out what the class is finding hard to learn or you end up with the class struggling in many areas due to the size of it without enough time to focus on those areas.

Not saying we can't look at it, there are probably more efficient ways to fix problems students are having but until there is such a system that one can stand behind saying we shouldn't care about class sizes is ignoring the issues IMO.

We doom our next generation if we give them a poor education.

DJDC wrote: »

The fact is that the top 10% of 18 year olds who always would have went to university still have a great chance of a graduate job because they generally have results to go to traditional universities like LSE,durham,TCD,oxbridge,edinburgh,UCD,UCC,manchester etc. However the other 40% are finding it very difficult to get graduate jobs after they qualify and a lot end up in very average admin/hands-on jobs that would have been described as non-graduates roles 10 years ago. Its a farce that you have people going on to 3rd level barely scraping passes in ordinary level maths and english.

I disagree with attributing so much weighting to traditional universities. There are plenty of great courses from great colleges with a high percentage of leavers getting jobs that aren't TCD, UCD etc... Some of your post does make sense however as there are a lot of people who got degrees that weren't actually useful for any specialised areas and end up in admin jobs that could be done by a leaving cert student with a week on the job training.

bobbbb

10% levy on all income, including the dole, for 2 years. No exceptions. Everybody , no matter how much or how little you earn pays the levy.

25% levy on the income of all of those in government while we are in deficit. Fix it and you wont have to pay it Brians.

For the dole the Levy increases by 1% (on top of the base 10%) for every year you have not worked. ie those lazy ****ers who never worked a day in their lives - your days of freeloading are over.

Cut child benefit altogether. People should not be paid for having children.

Problem solved.

Permabear

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bk

donegalfella wrote: »

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Exactly and it won't make a difference if there are 28, 30 or 32 in the class, a teacher still won't be able to give the one to one attention required by a child. Even a class of 15 would probably be too big, you would probably need a class less then 10 to make a difference and that simply isn't a realistic option.