We were pleased to see our points about property tax on the Tonight Show on VMT given time to get worked through. The full show is available online at Virgin Media.
"If your income went up 100% would you want more tax money? Of course you would. So stop being hypocrites." – @karldeeter disusses property tax and asset millionaires. #TonightVMT
The Tonight Show, Monday to Thursday at 11pm on Virgin Media One. pic.twitter.com/Cl2cYxpxXW
— The Tonight Show (@TonightVMTV) January 15, 2019
People often discuss economic incentives in terms of ‘sticks’ and ‘carrots’, it’s an adage that refers to getting a donkey to work, you use a carrot to entice it forward or a stick to give a more coercive physical encouragement.
When it comes to property tax the rules in Ireland are damn near shambolic. Our property tax rates are some of the lowest in Europe, for that reason under-occupancy reigns supreme and nobody has to pay the price for it other than those who are on the outside looking to get in (ie: mostly renters).
We have a tendency to under use property, this isn’t just well to do older people living in big houses on their own, it happens in low-income homes too, to an extent that you just don’t see in almost any other well run European country, in fact, elsewhere almost the opposite is true. (see the table below).
In fact, when it comes to people in the lowest quintile of income, we are exceptional because many of them own their own homes outright, this is …
In this discussion the way that council houses are used was discussed, the piece is very topical because there are serious overcrowding issues in many council houses where you have five or more people crammed into a one bed home while other people in council owned houses occupy four bed houses on their own. Our view is that this is a national emergency and for that reason the people in these situations should swop with one another.
(click into the blog post for the video) We were really happy about taking part in panel on the Late Late show on RTE to discuss the rented sector and some of the issues being experienced in it at the moment.
This was an interesting conversation that we took part in, it wasn’t about mortgages or property for a change! It was about whether political correctness has gone too far. Karl Deeter was asked to discuss this from the perspective that perhaps it has, as a believer in freedom of speech he argued that it has along with Larissa Nolan and saying that it hasn’t was done by Collete Browne of the Independent and Peter Kavanagh from the Green Party.
We were pleased to take part in an interview on The Tonight Show with hosts Ivan Yates and Matt Cooper on Virgin Media TV. The topics raised were fiscal responsibility and public sector wages. Karl Deeter was making the point that with such a good economy we should be planning for when things aren’t good and running a tight fiscal ship.
We took part in a panel discussion about the ‘take back the city’ campaign. While we are in favour of solutions to housing shortages, taxing dereliction and land, we are not in favour of taking people’s property. This has to be balanced against why property rights were established in this country and we also questioned why they went after private property rather than the abundant and abandoned state owned property which includes council owned homes that are not being used.
Comedian Deirdre O’Kane and Karl Deeter were on Matt Cooper’s ‘Last Word’ last week to take part in the ‘Friday Panel’ which is a segment of the show that goes through the big stories of the week. There were lots of topics covered, presidential elections, property protests and parenting tips!
Newstalk’s ‘Lunchtime’ with Ciara Kelly did a piece on new wealth statistics issued by the Central Bank which featured Karl Deeter from Irish Mortgage Brokers. It looked at the average wealth per person in Ireland and the point was made that property was a very large component of it. Other things that affect wealth were also discussed as well as some of the problems around using ‘averages’ to describe anything.
We took part in a conversation with Matt Cooper on The Last Word about bank taxation with Joan Burton from the Labour Party. We tried to make the point that short term thinking about bank taxation is a mistake, that we are better off getting the maximum amount of money back to the state rather than losing bank value in order to score a short term political win.