Today's public sector strike

A copy of a post I made on a forum, on today's strikes. It got a lot of endorsement there.

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xxxx wrote:

yyyy, to be honest its not about whats sustainable is it.  We are paying back the cash the bankers spunked and wasted and we bailed them out.

That's not really the whole truth, is it?

The previous government went on an accelerating spending spree from about 1999 to 2008, hiring like crazy (and of course, for each and every new hire, making promises it had no idea could be kept by future governments concerning pension "rights"). They stoked up an artificial boom by allowing the banks to create stupid amounts of credit, and raked in their share of the new money via taxes on the banks' profits (not profits in any normal sense of the word, just the proportion of their newly created money they kept for themselves). But that still wouldn't fund all the previous government's schemes, so they borrowed directly, piling debt upon debt. When the party came to its inevitable conclusion, the spending programmes were still in place but taxes on bankers' profits dried up. That effect was far greater than the direct bailouts of banks carried out by the previous government. zzzz and I (and a couple of others) actually bottomed out the figures and amazingly came to a measure of agreement, because the figures spoke for themselves.

This leaves us in a position where the government is spending more on debt interest that on defence. And they're not even planning to reduce the debt: only to lessen the rate at which extra debt is accumulated. If our government had to pay the same rate of interest as Spain or Italy (which is surely a possibility), then interest payments would be more than spending on education, and in all probability the debt could never be controlled without inflation destroying everybody's savings (eroding steadily already via 5% inflation).

So it IS about sustainability and NOT about bailing out the banks.

Now, workers in big companies have seen their final salary schemes vanish, or at the very least closed to new entrants. Workers in small companies never had such schemes. They've seen contributions they've already committed, under a set of assumptions about tax, being subject to ongoing tax raids. They've seen the stock market stagnate at best, so their pension pots are not growing at the rate they might have anticipated. They've accepted contribution holidays when their companies go through bad times (and sometimes when they're not). They've seen their companies and their pension schemes go bust. This has been the warp and weft of private sector existence for decades. And even if the government backs down now, the worst of this could happen to you: a future government, not very far down the line, might run out of money to pay your pension.

So while I don't regard everyone in the public sector as a waste of space, it's your turn for pruning and you need to realise that previous governments have made promises that cannot be kept, and suck it up like (nearly) everyone else. Meanwhile, you might google the sacrifices that have been made in the public sector in Ireland: without much complaint, because there's a sense of grim realism there.