Coronavirus - Here for life (In high population density areas)

To be fair to Niall he could have seen it on the official FF twitter page that schools would be closed until mid term before they promptly deleted the tweet.

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McDonkey is a psycho. He doesn’t live in the real world. Tomás Ryan is the same. I saw Luke O’Neill speak before and he was great, down to earth and funny and amiable as well as clearly being a bit of a genius.

I don’t know about the inflation. What’s the craic with Japan? Hasn’t it essentially been borrowing and had low inflation for years?

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Basically I think we will do alright as long as the EU does alright. The EU is not treating this like it did the financial crisis, lessons have been learned from that and that’s a good thing. I’m positive we’ll do alright.

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The chosen few Irish scientists have done sweet fuck all only recommend lockdowns of increasing severity…it’s almost as if the lockdown they just recommended didn’t do the trick.
And paddy stands by in slack jawed adulation.
You literally couldn’t make it up.

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Funnily enough, the new scientists appointed to NPHET have had little media presence up to now.

The debt we are building up though will burden the country and very significantly so if we don’t open everything up safely fairly quickly later this year.

I think nearly every developed country was pretty much at peak debt to GDP ratio prior to Covid, which was already a worry. I reckon outside of Dublin and Cork, the rest of the country has had maybe three or four good years out of the last ten since the financial crisis.

Balance sheets etc are in better shape in the banks on paper but the future is far from certain, I can see people continuing to save unprecedented amounts for the first of half of this year anyway due to the combination of nothing being open and I suppose caution too.

In sepetember of this year Prof. Gerry Killeen in a post apolyptic style broadside in the Sindo stated that children in school would turn out to be “stealth bombers in a covid society” , he stopped short of calling them silent killers
it was a remarkable piece of writing tbh
he’s laughing now

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The 3 cientists and their enthralled politicians have developed a scenario where they can never be proven wrong

Cases go up… yizzer not doing lockdowns correctly. Cases go down… told yah lockdowns work…

All the while everyone living in misery and cheering them on. Mad stuff.

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As long as a) the ECB continue to support the bond market and b) our deficits don’t diverge from the rest of Europe, servicing the debt won’t be a major worry for the next decade. The major worry I’d have is certain sectors such as hospitality, leisure tourism badly hit for the next few years and smaller retailers and sole traders gone forever to be replaced be the internet behemoths.

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Fair points, I think people are a bit niave generally though if they think your man McGrath and Pascal arent going to have an austerity budget later in the year.

Maybe the multinational corporation tax receipts will keep us going, Pharma is certainly going to have a good year in fairness.

The ‘stealth bombers in a covid society’ is a beauty on many different levels. There won’t be a better line than that during the new normal.

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The new variant was a great stroke in fairness on top of that.

Why would McGrath and Paschal do that?

They can borrow for free and are being encouraged to so. Why would they choose austerity instead?

Does Ireland have an airforce? Only one course of action here

Just because you can borrow infinitely mate, doesnt mean you don’t have to balance the books,

Ultimately it’ll depend on what the EU deem fit when they look at tax receipts versus our outgoings,

I think you’re being niave if you think just because there is negative interest rates at the moment that the Irish taxpayers won’t be impacted if we’re faced with a 30 or 40 billion deficit,

I believe McGrath even mentioned tax increases before Christmas for 2021. As it stands in my view, they’re on the way

Edit, link below.

I’m not being smart, but isn’t that exactly what it means? As farmer said above, you don’t have to pay back the debt, just the interest on it. That can still be quite an amount, but the end point is that you don’t have to balance the books.

Away with that talk with you

Isnt there limits to what you can borrow though vs your GDP?

Look, hopefully you’re right, I don’t want to pay anymore tax. That’s for sure,

We’ll see.

There are EU rules on Debt to GDP ratios but these are suspended currently. Rates are zero or negative now because in the ECB you have a willing buyer. In the absence of the ECB you’re at the mercy of the ‘market’ who will penalise you for running deficits so in the medium term we’ll have to make an effort to balance the books. The €5.5bn borrowed today will cost nothing over the next ten years but when the bond matures the bond that is issued to replace it will likely incur a cost that will be higher if we haven’t our house in order.

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