Sinn Fein and how do they form a government dilemma

and you are only supposing it will result in flight that damages.

Surely you can find evidence/data in those countries I listed to back up your point?

Nothing you have claimed has been

I have looked for issues with attracting and keeping people in those countries I listed but can find nothing of significance.

Regarding the buddget surplus, I feel this is being kicked around as if it's huge, and the answer to many problems.

The 2022 surplus followed two years of massive fiscal deficits.

The public debt is not small, and by some measures you could argue it is still quite high.

Where did he say that?

What is 100% clear is that Sinn Fein manipulates the rules and the funding arrangements to ensure that its income is hidden from the public in Ireland.

"The three topics the international community would say to me about Ireland is talent, housing and stable government policy,” Goddard told the Business Post."

Now where do Sinn Fein stand on these issues?

(1) Talent: MNCs need to attract talent to work in Ireland. As the Chair of the IDA has said, Sinn Fein's plans to increase income tax is scaring businesses off. This is a big problem as MNCs will not invest in Ireland if their senior people won't come here because of the high taxes imposed by Sinn Fein

(2) Housing: MNCs bring a lot of people to Ireland for short periods, for a year, for a couple of years, possibly a decade. Therefore, one of the key requirements they have is a stable rental market with institutional investors. Cost doesn't matter as much as that stability and predictability. Sinn Fein's plans to frighten off institutional investors will not go down well with MNCs.

(3) Stable government policy: Sinn Fein tell us they are the party of change. You cannot have change and stable government policy at the same time. The whole purpose of change is to destabilise government policy.

So I cannot understand how Sinn Fein have managed to reassure business leaders. Either they are telling lies to the business leaders, or more likely, they are lying to the Irish people.

I would say there's no one policy that should be pursued in all circumstances. In times of high unemployment, a job creation strategy is of utmost importance. In times of full employment, creating jobs may just lead to more demand for resources and driving up rents as people are imported to fill those jobs. Other strategies may be more appropriate.

In times of housing shortages, bringing more people into the country may not be what is needed. I think the problems in Ireland result from strategies formulated in the 1980s but pursued long past their net benefit to society.

That is not to say that the MNCs should not be listened to but rather that there is a balance to be made between their needs and the needs of society as a whole.

If change doesn't bring change, then it is not change, (stable government policy is the opposite of change), and Sinn Fein are speaking out of both sides of their mouth again.

In Ireland, we have had to invent new ways of measuring the economy because the MNC sector and FDI are so large, no other country has had to do that, because we are way beyond them in success of attracting FDI, yet one poster wants to compare us to Portugal for FDI? GUBU stuff.

There is an awful lot of bizarre nonsense posted on these boards.

Posters can claim that higher rates of income tax do not deter FDI and then even more bizarrely can claim that they cannot find evidence to refute this. There are some basics of economics and public policy that do not have to be explained every single time a poster challenges them. One of those is that higher taxes harm economic growth and FDI. From the OECD:

"For instance, Hajkova et al. (2006) found that the impact on FDI of labour taxes is generally substantially larger than that of cross-border effective corporate tax rates (see below)"

There are hundreds of academic studies that link higher income taxes with lower FDI.

I hear your point, but restricting job growth should really be the last card we play.

There are still plenty of high end apartments going up in Dublin at the moment, I dont think we will see a problem housing those folks over the short term, especially as the rate of job creation has obviously slowed.

All you have given is your opinion.

Can you point to where this has occurred. Simple request. I gave you a list of countries with higher income tax rates than here. Which of them have experienced what you claim would happen here?

Take the Netherlands for instance:

Or Denmark

I'm not saying restrict it though. Just saying that once we've achieved full employment, pushing for for more job growth may not be the current most optimal strategy for the well being of the country. Though, yes, it did make a lot of sense at times in the past.

You don't need to be an economist to know that you cannot just 'grow the economy'.

The party's of the power swap have not learned this and have left key infrastructure and indeed, people behind.

FG deputy McGahon got caught handing out this mantra on the Tonight Show last night.

He was valiantly touting the OECD report that placed us at No. 3 on the list of most 'progressive tax systems'.

He was completely stumped and showed he hadn't actually read the report when the presenter pointed out to him that that OECD report also said that our tax system had 'huge inequalities'.

'Yeh but....' was all he could reply.

It was clear that head office had armed him with the quote but not the substance of the report.

Not what the rest of the discussion said Pere.

VAT is part of the tax system and that was identified as a problem.

I am not, like McGahon and others going to pretend I have expertise in this or throw out selective quotes from reports, I am just making the point that there are inequalities and people and infrastructures have been left behind here.

Any attempts to balance and fine tune the system are worth looking at without the 'oh they are all going to leave' scaremongering.

We will never achieve full employment. Some people will always be unemployed for multiple different reasons. We are probably as close to full employment as possible now

Except that if you are not constantly renewing jobs, you will fall behind. Why did great economies of the past fail? Because they stopped innovating, stopped creating new jobs in new industries. We in Ireland are being slow to embrace wind and solar energy, slow to welcome data centres, etc. If anything we need to up our game in creating new jobs.