A Sinn Féin-led government in the 34th Dáil – should that become a reality – will have to deal with the next global crisis, the burial of a 50-year debt cycle and the violent birth pangs of the next.
Difficult times require strong and capable leaders. The UK is in crisis because weak and incompetent leaders have fallen on hard times.
No modern nation built around enterprise, and dependent for more than one euro in five on foreign investment in employment, has ever chosen to launch taxes on assets in the belly of its economy. Sinn Féin proposes to do just that.
Sinn Féin sees ‘wealth’ starting at the level of the middle classes who drive Japanese cars
The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States has decided to sacrifice the economic growth of the United States in order to cause a recession – a recession that crushes the inflation it created by the excessive printing of money.
By raising interest rates so quickly from near zero to 4.5%, the Fed is leading a controlled detonation of asset values across the global economy. It’s a big cleanse, a reset that will take place throughout this decade.
Real estate bubbles burst. Stock markets collectively fell by 30 billion euros. Share prices of vulnerable banks are showing signs of further stress, and the cost of insuring against their bond defaults is skyrocketing.
Government bonds, a source of stability for bank reserves and pension funds, lost 12 billion euros in total value.
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Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald
Watching the Fed today is like watching a father, mad with regret and whiskey, at his daughter’s wedding. We hope he sobers up in time for the speeches, but fear disaster could strike anyway.
This is not shaping up to be a normal economic recession. It is more likely to be accompanied by three other horsemen – a liquidity crisis, a financial crisis and an energy crisis in Europe.
Sinn Féin’s shadow cabinet shares a common theme. Not a single day is recorded by any of them on their public profiles as ever acting as an employer running a business, especially in a recession.
Sinn Féin shadow finance minister Pearse Doherty has one of the keenest minds for grasping complex memoirs and is an exceptional listener.
A tax on Sinn Féin assets would trigger a flight of people, FDI and capital from Ireland
But across their shadow cabinet there is a lack of knowledge and experience beyond the narrowness of Irish politics – which, in a crisis, will be compensated for by falling back into ideological graves, everything as Liz Truss fell back into hers.
Sinn Féin sees ‘wealth’ starting at 20 times the average salary, at the level of the middle classes who drive Japanese, Korean and Czech cars.
Sinn Féin Asset Tax will adhere to 80% of the value of your home and 100% of everything else. It is payable at 1 pc per year – or 10 pc per decade, in cold hard cash on every euro over €1 million in combined value.
Although Ireland has the most redistributive tax system in Europe, Sinn Féin also intends to increase capital gains and inheritance tax revenue between 10% and 20%.
It will reduce the provisioning of private pensions, by halving the contribution from which pension tax relief can be claimed. It will also apply a double income tax to any element of a pension fund whose growth exceeds the economic cost of a teacher’s pension.
The impulse to sweep away the old and replace it with a new establishment is inevitable
If in power, the party will also add a 3% levy on all salaries above €140,000 a year.
Sinn Féin’s calculations are linear: the party expects business and job creators to remain stationary, within the crosshairs of their perimeter. Mention talent and capital flight, and Sinn Féin’s overwhelming response is a personalized attack on social media.
They know that an umbilical cord connects Irish economic transformation to our tax system, and that the Sinn Féin asset tax will trigger a leak. It’s always like that.
Retirees will move to Portugal, Malta or Cyprus, startups to Amsterdam, Barcelona or Berlin, and FDIs pretty much anywhere in Europe that doesn’t punish their workers with double taxation.
The impulse to sweep away the old and replace it with a new establishment is inevitable, and it is global. It pushes hardest among millennials.
Young, talented and highly educated Irish people yearn for change – and many see Sinn Féin as the only political alternative.
But an even more bloated big state will not work for them.
The solution will not be in Big Statism, because that is where the problem will be.
The idea that an unreformed state, protected from competition, can replace the modern private economy with a command economy will not long survive in ink on election posters.
Sinn Féin, like all Irish political parties, is completely silent on how to reform a state bloated with inefficiencies and a quango-land of NGOs. And yet, he demands higher taxes for no consideration.
Millennial and Gen Z voters want affordable housing, child care, a working health care system and long-term care for their aging parents — but they don’t need a big state that doesn’t. can’t build a children’s hospital without setting world records for incompetence without consequences.
