Cliff Taylor noted this about the Budget in the IT this last week:
History teaches us how quickly the public finances can turn, of course. The exchequer's borrowing position is the difference between two massive numbers. A world recession of some sort looms and the budget forecasts see the domestic economy effectively flatlining for much of 2023, meaning tax revenues are unpredictable. But the resources are in place to cope with more pressures in 2023.
The pity is that a lot of spending over the past few years has been redirected — correctly — to emergency supports, rather than being used to give a push to key priorities in areas like housing and health. That is one of the enduring costs of what we are going through. Protecting this vital longer-term spending through the turbulence ahead remains vital.
Consider that point about how those priorities are losing out due, in no small part, not being addressed previously. Decades went by when they were long-fingered. And so the problems exacerbated.
Shana Cohen of TASC on the IT podcast made a similar point about the Budget as a whole. Speaking overtly from a progressive or left-wing position, she noted that for all there are measures that can be welcomed in the Budget there's nothing there that offers an actual vision. In a superficial way the budget is not particularly right-wing, rather it is a sort of political practice as short-termism, an aversion to engaging in the market through collective or state action that by its very nature means that problems are addressed but only in a certain manner and not in a way that would fundamentally improve them.
Of course to say that is to see how in some ways it is a very right wing budget indeed - albeit eschewing any effort to frame a goal beyond the continuation of the status quo as was the case with the ill-fated recent mini-budget in the UK. Say what one likes about the impacts of that last, but clearly those who designed it had a clear (if politically self-destructive) destination in mind that that was meant to bring them to and moreover to reframe the British socio-economic mix (and still may do given only some aspects of it have been jettisoned). But the Irish budget is right-wing in the sense that at a time when even the British Labour Party is rediscovering some of the benefits of nationalisation it avoids state endeavour as much as is possible - holds the line against this polity following that approach, at least until the next election. That's revealing as to the current constraints on the parties that shaped it. But it is more revealing as to their ideological constraints and where they will and will not go.
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