Post by Stallit 2 de Halfo on Mar 26, 2009 13:56:19 GMT
Our income levels are grossly imbalanced
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
How can one call it “balanced” when one person gets 200 times what another person gets? asks VINCENT BROWNE .
MICHAEL FINGLETON got it right. The Ireland of the Celtic Tiger ordained that CEOs of financial institutions should be paid 60 times more than the average income and 153 times more than the average income of half of all earners in Ireland. As for a pension of €27 million, perhaps that was a little over the top. And the €1 million bonus paid immediately after the rest of society had guaranteed all deposits and loans given to his institution, Irish Nationwide, ill-advised.
But who among us has got the timing right always? There was a chap on television on Sunday night, Willie Slattery, of an outfit called State Street International, and he was of the view that the house of cards will collapse if we do anything serious about levelling things out. The €5 billion or so that has to be found right now to fix the Government’s finances has to come from public expenditure cuts, not from taxes. That is code for hitting the lower echelons.
Actually he spelled it out – public expenditure is running at around €55 billion, public sector pay amounts to €20 billion and social welfare now is topping €21 billion; they have got to be “addressed”.
Mary Hanafin, Minister for Social Welfare and something else, has already “addressed” the social welfare side, indicating that the people who are unemployed and about to be unemployed and those others already dependent on social welfare will have their entitlements “addressed”. So an unemployed person who gets €204.30 per week (€10,624 annually) looks like having their allowance reduced. This €10,624, which a person who loses his/her job because of the incompetence of this Government will get, that is less over a year than Michael Fingleton earned in a day and a bit (€8,846 a day) last year?
And that’s okay, is it?
If this unemployed person has a dependent spouse and two dependent children, he/she will get €391.90 a week, €20,379 a year. Yes, Michael Fingleton would have had to work for 2½ days to get this on his 2008 income. A non-contributory old age pensioner gets €219 a week (€11,388 a year). A full-time carer under 66 gets €220.50 (€11,466 a year).
Now that’s a socially useful job, caring for a dependent relative. It is also massively demanding – I think 24/7 is the lingo. Bankers are not entirely socially useless for their work has a social usefulness. But more socially useful than someone who is a full-time carer?
Why should a banker – as in Michael Fingleton – get 200 times what a full-time carer gets? And why should the carer have his/her income cut because the bankers acted in a socially reckless way and plunged the country into a financial crisis?
Brendan Smith, the Minister for Agriculture, was on the same programme the other night as Willie Slattery and he thought there had to be a “balance”, and everyone else on the programme – Billy Timmins of Fine Gael and Roisin Shorthall of Labour – agreed.
Balance? What balance? How can one call an arrangement “balanced” whereby one person gets 200 times what another person gets? Balanced when the poorer of the two then has their income cut because the richer of the two has their income cut? Or balanced when the bottom half earners (49 per cent) get just 17 per cent of total income, while the top 6 per cent of earners get 28 per cent of total income, 13 times the average earnings of the bottom half of earners.
There would be “balance” if there were some equality of income here, although some would argue that the more socially useful occupations – carers, teachers, gardaí, social workers, nurses, bus drivers, train driver, bin workers – should get more because of the greater social utility of what they do.
But a “balance” that retains the massive disparity of incomes? And the insidious dimension is that this “balance” results in even more social dysfunctionality, and, in one startling instance in a way that none of our “leaders” seems even able to mention: that around 5,400 people die prematurely here every year because of that “balance”, because of the huge inequality we have allowed to emerge. And associated with that, stress, anxiety, ill health and illiteracy. Feelings of worthlessness among a large swathe of the population. And then violence and criminality, in part, as a reaction to all this.
And when a sector of society, represented by the trade unions, announces a protest against the deepening of this “balance”, it is accused by sections of the media as saboteurs of the national interest. What national interest?
We are not all in this together, just as we were not all in the Celtic Tiger together. The patriotic duty is to subvert the social order that brought us this “balance”.
www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0325/1224243363745.html
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
How can one call it “balanced” when one person gets 200 times what another person gets? asks VINCENT BROWNE .
MICHAEL FINGLETON got it right. The Ireland of the Celtic Tiger ordained that CEOs of financial institutions should be paid 60 times more than the average income and 153 times more than the average income of half of all earners in Ireland. As for a pension of €27 million, perhaps that was a little over the top. And the €1 million bonus paid immediately after the rest of society had guaranteed all deposits and loans given to his institution, Irish Nationwide, ill-advised.
But who among us has got the timing right always? There was a chap on television on Sunday night, Willie Slattery, of an outfit called State Street International, and he was of the view that the house of cards will collapse if we do anything serious about levelling things out. The €5 billion or so that has to be found right now to fix the Government’s finances has to come from public expenditure cuts, not from taxes. That is code for hitting the lower echelons.
Actually he spelled it out – public expenditure is running at around €55 billion, public sector pay amounts to €20 billion and social welfare now is topping €21 billion; they have got to be “addressed”.
Mary Hanafin, Minister for Social Welfare and something else, has already “addressed” the social welfare side, indicating that the people who are unemployed and about to be unemployed and those others already dependent on social welfare will have their entitlements “addressed”. So an unemployed person who gets €204.30 per week (€10,624 annually) looks like having their allowance reduced. This €10,624, which a person who loses his/her job because of the incompetence of this Government will get, that is less over a year than Michael Fingleton earned in a day and a bit (€8,846 a day) last year?
And that’s okay, is it?
If this unemployed person has a dependent spouse and two dependent children, he/she will get €391.90 a week, €20,379 a year. Yes, Michael Fingleton would have had to work for 2½ days to get this on his 2008 income. A non-contributory old age pensioner gets €219 a week (€11,388 a year). A full-time carer under 66 gets €220.50 (€11,466 a year).
Now that’s a socially useful job, caring for a dependent relative. It is also massively demanding – I think 24/7 is the lingo. Bankers are not entirely socially useless for their work has a social usefulness. But more socially useful than someone who is a full-time carer?
Why should a banker – as in Michael Fingleton – get 200 times what a full-time carer gets? And why should the carer have his/her income cut because the bankers acted in a socially reckless way and plunged the country into a financial crisis?
Brendan Smith, the Minister for Agriculture, was on the same programme the other night as Willie Slattery and he thought there had to be a “balance”, and everyone else on the programme – Billy Timmins of Fine Gael and Roisin Shorthall of Labour – agreed.
Balance? What balance? How can one call an arrangement “balanced” whereby one person gets 200 times what another person gets? Balanced when the poorer of the two then has their income cut because the richer of the two has their income cut? Or balanced when the bottom half earners (49 per cent) get just 17 per cent of total income, while the top 6 per cent of earners get 28 per cent of total income, 13 times the average earnings of the bottom half of earners.
There would be “balance” if there were some equality of income here, although some would argue that the more socially useful occupations – carers, teachers, gardaí, social workers, nurses, bus drivers, train driver, bin workers – should get more because of the greater social utility of what they do.
But a “balance” that retains the massive disparity of incomes? And the insidious dimension is that this “balance” results in even more social dysfunctionality, and, in one startling instance in a way that none of our “leaders” seems even able to mention: that around 5,400 people die prematurely here every year because of that “balance”, because of the huge inequality we have allowed to emerge. And associated with that, stress, anxiety, ill health and illiteracy. Feelings of worthlessness among a large swathe of the population. And then violence and criminality, in part, as a reaction to all this.
And when a sector of society, represented by the trade unions, announces a protest against the deepening of this “balance”, it is accused by sections of the media as saboteurs of the national interest. What national interest?
We are not all in this together, just as we were not all in the Celtic Tiger together. The patriotic duty is to subvert the social order that brought us this “balance”.
www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0325/1224243363745.html
