Voices
For every €100 you take in via taxes, you have to pay €12.50 before doing anything else. That is an enormous constraint. To repeat: every cent spent paying the interest costs from the decisions of yesterday reduces the room to manoeuvre today.
The year is 2031. With three weeks to go until budget day, the Minister for Finance sits at her desk, exhausted by the budget negotiations. Like her predecessors, she understands the budget is less an exercise in public finance and legal administration of the State, and more a matter of internecine negotiation. She will never, ever have enough to satisfy all demands. Whether she tries to mollify most people with homoeopathic amounts or plumbs for two or three large programmes, people will leave her Budget 2032 speech saying she ‘should have done more’. Budget decisions are always about increments. In…
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