where’s it going to come from?
Borrowing.
It will take years to readjust our tax base; while I am firmly of the belief that we need to raise higher proportions of our tax take from direct taxation, including income tax, this can't be done rapidly without exacerbating the economic shock and having more money and more employers take flight from the economy.
We also need to change our approach to property tax - the reliance on bumper stamp-duty yields, as opposed to current tax take, is part of what's got us here. I think the introduction of the second-property tax (even at a measly €200 p.a.) is a move in the right direction, and I suspect the longer term plan is to increase this steadily over a number of years.
We may well also see changes to the CGT / CAT regimes - but again, things like that have to be done quite slowly.
We need to take a strategic approach which will produce a more sustainable and predictable tax base; re-address the pension burden since we're busily wiping out the National Pension Reserve Fund; create structures which allow any future "boom" capital tax take to be split between debt management and infrastructural investment; focus more on education and training [we are not, and never have been, really one of the most highly educated workforces in Europe. We're not bad, but one of our biggest assets has been that we speak English]; do
something about the financial and delivery nightmare that is the health service.
But we have a Government which is lurching from crisis to crisis - at least some of which are not, or at least not wholly, of its own making - and it is extraordinarily difficult to think and plan strategically for the medium to long term when things are critically urgent now. I just hope that Government is not panickily losing sight of those longer term issues.
In the meantime, I simply cannot see where the money can come from, other than borrowing. And hopefully achieving savings that can reduce the borrowing requirement [yes, including a likely pay-cut across at least some of the public sector and certainly including people at my income level], but without wiping out services and cutting all infrastructure plans.