"The Great Resignation"

I'll wager a goodly number of those vacancies are poorly paid jobs where staff get kicked around by bad bosses.

People aren't going to put up with that kind of race to the bottom sh1t anymore.

I think various diverse online "movements" which existed before Covid are relevant here. ERE/FIRE, MGTOW, Incels, anti consumerists. Also the gig economy and digital nomadism could be factors.

Both a 20 year old who is struggling in every aspect of his life and a 40 year old millionaire who has been saving and investing for years may be encouraged to resign or not bother with traditional paid employment. Covid has been a massive disruption and may well have pushed people over the edge and changed their outlook on life.

I think its only the start of inflation, in fairness in the eighties they lived through paying 65% income tax and 17% unemployment, hopefully we wont see that again. The weird thing is the stock market continues to rise despite the discounted future cash flows due to inflation. There's no fundamentals in the market anymore, for example the promise of an electric vehicle company puts its market cap higher than the likes of ford. Despite the fact that I don't see the general population affording EV, nor does the infrastructure support it. The US government appears to be supporting liquidity and cheap debt. I think its a false market. I don't blame capitalism for this, I blame government interference in the market. I don't blame left or right because they have both done it in their time in the seat. It only benefits those who participate in capital markets and those people are already wealthy enough to invest. It seems it pays for governments to support the interests of the welathy

i know of an irish family, that has done very well over there, has recently moved to spain, it has become too bad for them, the father said he didnt see a future for his kids there, scary stuff really.

yes, ireland has dramatically changed in the last few decades, but thankfully we havent taken on this extreme form of capatalism, such as america, and i suspect we re all starting to realise, something is very wrong with it, we re at a critical turning point right now, hopefully we do what needs to be done, which i think we are and will do

...again, this is more so the free market libertarian view of whats going on, even though not completely wrong, you re also not completely right either. we need to get over this idea of so called government 'interference', this type of language only truly came about in the last few decades, from the so called thatcher/regean era, effectively attempting to demonise welfare classes, and the 'interactions' of governments. since this era, the cost of living has sky rocketed, this has been done from a multitude of approaches, i.e. demonise welfare classes, attack government and state regulations, advocate for de-regulation of markets, particularly in relation to finance, and more so with the fire sectors in general. all this in turn has inflated asset markets into what can only be described as hyper inflationary at this stage, most obvious being in property and land markets, baring in mind, asset ownership is heavily skewed, leading to rapidly rising inequality.

again, you re overly criticising governments, even though governments have indeed played a critical role in creating these outcomes, as both the left and right have been advocating for these approaches in running our societies and economies, yes they have indeed helped cause it, but not entirely

I can see where they are coming from.

We are going to live in Portugal as soon as this covid business is over.

My brother is already there.

Im just retiring in my early 50s :)

Why? Because im sick to death of paying 50% of all the overtime or income from other jobs I do. Ive had enough.

Then watching other family members who never worked a day in their life have all this time off, plenty of money and a house worth €500k handed to them.

Fcuk that. Im out.

The way that the welfare system is set up means that it acts as a poverty trap, where people end up in a situation whereby if they start a minimum wage job they're earning the equivalent of cents per hour extra by the time you factor in things like rent supplement payments and medical cards on welfare, and the cost of travel etc. in work.

Most people don't realise that, having worked since leaving school, until they're put in a position where they're no longer employed or working. Covid will have made a lot more people realise it all of a sudden, so they're probably wondering whether 40 hours (excluding travel) of their time is worth scraps of extra cash. There is very little distance between being very poor and a tiny bit more than very poor. Plus in the age of the internet they wouldn't necessarily need to go to college or official courses to upskill. They could easily sit at home and use their newfound extra time to do online coding bootcamps or online marketing/advertising courses or whatever to put themselves in a position to apply for better paying jobs. Or they could be catching up on every Netflix series ever made. Whatever.

The downside of that is that as a society, we need the "grunt" workers to man the shops and fast food joints and clean and serve pints and so on. So we need to find a way to bridge the gap between welfare and work to make it worthwhile without the do-gooders getting up in arms about there being a marked difference between the standard of living of people on welfare and people in entry-level employment. It should pay to work.

My suggestion would be something like a tax system that starts negative (so that people who cannot work or are temporarily unemployed receive whatever the minimum standard of living income is) and adjusts for changing circumstances. So if you start a minimum wage job, your negative tax decreases but only by, say, half, so you're getting half of what you were getting when unemployed plus whatever your employer pays you. And since your income tax at that point is negative and your gross wage is your net, the minimum wage amount could be lowered to make businesses better able to afford to take on new/more workers. As/if your earnings increase, then your income tax would adjust so that eventually you enter positive income tax where you begin to pay into the system. But at every stage, working would afford a significantly better standard of living than not working.

Of course, the government would have to stop fleecing middle earners on tax and start taking more in corporate, and people who have a bee in their bonnet about "welfare scroungers" or whatever would have to wind their necks in... so that won't happen. But it could!

irish hedge fund manager eric lonergan is also watching this unfold, and is becoming increasingly concerned about it, he realises his sector is playing a critical role in this situation, its very worrying to see serious failures occurring, and we re not sure in how to approach it, but you can see that many keep defaulting to what theyve been told throughout their lives, i.e. blaming welfare classes and foreigners for these failures, when in fact, reality is far more complex than this....

I'm genuinely at a point where I despair for the future my kids will be trying to live in tbh. Between climate change and the massive inequality our rampantly capitalist system is causing I just don't see how ordinary people have any chance unless there's some kind of global socialist revolution.

Well the reason why wages are not rising as much as house prices is because of immigration , we need to tackle irregular migration from outside the EU , the whole language school thing is a sham and a vehicle to get many people into the country to do low paid , under the counter work.

The language schools are profiteering because they know that people will pay the extortionate fees just to get a student visa to enter the country, then they can work legitimately for 20hrs a week and God knows how many hours illegally. There is virtually no checks on the illegal economy in Ireland, you never hear of immigration raids to check on work visas like what happens in other counties.