Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 18 June 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. John Moran:
One has to look at, to be honest it's, it's useful because there are lots of European controls now anyway, right, in terms of the amount you can increase expenditure and everything else. But, but there is a path that has been set out, which is to get to a position where we're no longer borrowing money to keep the lights on and I think that's one that we should continue to, to keep doing. And look at, the example I give in, in my statement is that when you are building 50,000 or 60,000 houses and you only need 25,000, lots of things are happening in the economy that is not sustainable, it won't continue all the time. And you actually find yourself with an awful lot of payroll taxes coming in, in those years. And you could sort of consider those almost to be windfall gain, you may still need to build those houses on that time but it's not going to happen all the time, sort of a blip in the system. If people are selling an awful lot of houses at the time your capital gains number goes up. If you could take that money and put it aside, so that when you actually start building 25,000 houses again and those 25,000 houses and all the people are now on the unemployment list, you draw down on that money to pay the wages. That's what I mean by building these rainy day funds up, right, we aren't in a luxury at the moment of having those rainy day funds but we do need to protect against, and I said this, I think, at something before I left. We do need to protect against the fact that interest rates could go back up. You know, that will put a significant pressure on the expenditure side of this, this, this calculation for which we have no control, necessarily.
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