Total Cost of Manifestos

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24601

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During the debate last night there were plenty of references to manifestos being fully costed by the Department of Finance, or whoever. Is there anywhere I can see these? I'd like to be able to compare parties by how much they would increase current expenditure, what they would spend on capital projects, what the cost of their tax cuts would be etc. I have no real sense of how much each party is planning to inflate the State but just get a feeling that they are all going to splurge roughly the same amount with marginally different ways of accumulating said splurge.

Who can I vote for that will increase spending the least and keep the tax base as broad as possible?

*Edit: OK, so the manifestos of the 3 big parties have costings at the end of them so this information is there. My bad! It's not presented in the same manner across the parties so I can't really compare them without more leg work than I'm willing to put in, but I can get a sense of each party's profligacy from these.
 
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It's a sign of the immaturity of the Irish electorate that they are so willing to be bribed with their own money.
 
Cost of manifestos you say? I can imagine a Waterford Whispers headline:
Taoiseach defends using same printer as the OPW to print the FG manifesto at a cost of €450,000....
 
It's done by the Parliamentary Budget office, guidelines from them are below

Total Cost of Manifestos

During the debate last night there were plenty of references to manifestos being fully costed by the Department of Finance, or whoever. Is there anywhere I can see these? I'd like to be able to compare parties by how much they would increase current expenditure, what they would spend on capital...
www.askaboutmoney.com

I don't know if there is a "bonkers" type website that compares and contrasts
 

The parties spending plans

Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin all have serious questions to answer on their spending plans
howtotaxandspendit.substack.com

Credit to Barra Roantree, TCD.

"As Cliff Taylor wrote in the Irish Times this week, a “real issue for the parties is how they would deal with this [loss of corporation tax revenues] and what parts of their programme would be lost if the resources available were less than expected. None have been clear on this.”

Judging from the tenor of the campaign to date, there is no reason to expect this to change by polling day next week."



 
Right, so they're all planning to embark on very risky spending increases but FF/FG are less bad than SF* (and interestingly the exact same). I assume all the microparties would spend even more so I'm left with no option but to vote for FF/FG as the least worst - but still terrible - option. Grim.

* I also have evidence from the recent past that FG/FF would reign in spending during a recession whereas MLMcD won't even agree to the idea of cutting back were there to be a material threat to the Irish economy. SF's front bench is also full of people who have a very childish understanding of economics and how things work.
 
That's exactly where I am on the election.
 
Purple said:
That's exactly where I am on the election.
Click to expand...
I don't know whether to despair more at the parties or the electorate. You would like to think there is a cohort of voters that would like to see the government reign in spending and keep the tax base as broad as possible as we move into very risky territory, but I have no doubt that any politician offering such a view would suffer terribly at the polls. The Irish voter is quite content to see government spending increase & taxes reduce despite being fully aware that we're just one escalation in Ukraine or Trump policy away from big trouble.
 
The narrative is set by the media and they tend to frame everything in an emotive human interest context.
That said I think the main problem is the electorate.

In the US people see government spending as the State spending their taxes. Because we have a very narrow income tax base and we get so much money from US Multinationals there is a disconnect here in how Government spending is perceived. Therefore value for money just doesn't enter into the discussion, except in a stupid childish narrow way like the Bike Shed issue. We don't see that as symptomatic of a broader structural issue and we think that the fix is different people doing things the same way instead of the same people doing things differently.

Most of us also seem to think that the constraint on the supply of services and infrastructure is always money whereas the constraint in the Irish economy is labour. Labour productivity in the State sector is lower than the private sector so the more the State spends and the bigger the State gets the more inefficiency is baked into the economy.

Because of the emotive framing of issues it's hard to have a proper grown-up conversation about them. A good example is the shortage of nurses, speech and language therapists and teachers. There is no shortage of suitably qualifies people any of those areas. The issue is that so many of them choose not to work or choose to work part time. What is it in our taxation and childcare models that causes so many skilled women to exit fulltime employment? That happens across the board but is particularly apparent in female dominated sectors.
If we ask the wrong questions we'll get the wrong answers.
All of that means that the cost of manifestoes, pro-cyclical spending and value for money gets no oxygen in the national narrative.
 
24601 said:
During the debate last night there were plenty of references to manifestos being fully costed by the Department of Finance,
Click to expand...
The Parliamentary Budget Office has a series of reference documents that explain the key insights to the economy.

This series, for instance, is a guide to public spending and taxation.

It also has interactive tools. This one is on Debt Sustainability.

Regarding manifesto costings, Dail members can request costings including costings for election campaign proposals – scroll down to Our Costing Service. Only members can log on. This remedies a previous situation where only the Government of the day had access to the required figures.
 
24601 said:
SF's front bench is also full of people who have a very childish understanding of economics and how things work.
Click to expand...
SF's front bench (& representative base) is full of people who have a very childish understanding of the world in general, not just economics.
My beef with them is that they laid waste to the north, and spent most of the last 20 years there basically refusing to be in government. They also missed loads of easy wins on stuff like education, failing to properly abolish the 11 plus, failing to tackle the scourge of sectarianism in schools for the 15 years or so they had the education portfolio.
Housing in the north is proceeding in a direction not far behind the south in terms of housing, and its on SF's watch. But the biggest problem with them is that they always put their own interests politically ahead of the general interest, and left a vacuum of governance for years at a time.
 
lff12 said:
Housing in the north is proceeding in a direction not far behind the south in terms of housing, and its on SF's watch
Click to expand...
That despite the population of Northern Ireland growing at less than one third of the rate ours is growing.
 
Purple said:
The narrative is set by the media and they tend to frame everything in an emotive human interest context.
That said I think the main problem is the electorate.
Click to expand...
Agreed! There's a really poor understanding & the great recession actually exacerbated that misunderstanding because there was a tendency to simply blame banks outright instead of looking at what caused that to happen. (Aka, entry into the system of non Irish banks using collateralised debt on a grand scale before Irish institutions realised they could do exactly the same).
This is nowhere more obvious than the shortage of bus drivers - Dublin Bus starting salary is nearly 44k, not including benefits, with pay scale of 6 years - 51k within 6 years.
Construction sector salaries for 3rd/4th year apprentices now over 40k - again a very tidy salary for someone likely to be 20 or 21.
That's just starting salaries. Agreed its a lot lower for some public sector roles, but there's a lot of well paid jobs out there for young people, with good conditions likely to only improve over time.
A couple with a combined income of 86k would have a take home pay of 6k a month - that's one of the reasons rents for 1-2 bed units in Dublin are 2k a month - there's a large market of people who can just about manage that. Such a couple as the one in my example (going on pwc tax calc, taking into account rent credit & assuming they pay a little into a pension & get health insurance), would have 4k left over after paying rent.
When myself & my ex were renting in the mid 00s, between us we had barely that before rent, never mind after it. If such a couple put 750 a month away & scrimped a bit they'd have 36000 saved in 2 years, which if they were happy to live somewhere like North County Dublin would get them a house.

Part of our problem is simple population growth and a lack of willingness to countenance or plan for it. The reasons why are obvious - there's always someone to object to literally everything and the perfect is always the enemy of the good, resulting in nothing being done at all.
And there's a couple of derelict homes behind my estate that routinely put in a PP every 2 years, there's an outcry from the comfortably housed homeowners in my estate in their 450k+ homes, especially if the word "apartments" gets mentioned, that ensures those houses remain derelict. Everyone who owns any kind of property in this country is part of the huge interest group silently willing on the rise in land/property values ad infinitum, while decrying the housing crisis, but making sure that submissions are made or judicial reviews donated to when actual plans to build en masse actually occur.
 
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