Seamus Coffey
speaker
117 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Jul
Seamus Coffey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Typically, when we talk about taxes, if you go into a
basic first year course in economics you talk about taxes as being a withdrawal from the economy the government is taking money out in the form of taxes and then when recirculated back through government spending and that will be the injection and in net terms you have the money flowing around the economy but if you look at these corporation tax receipts that ireland is collecting they're not coming out of the domestic economy they're coming from u.s multinationals yes they have activities here but they're here to serve as international markets and we are collecting tens of billions
of corporation tax from a very small number of companies that is hugely boosting the public finances.
And it's not coming out of the domestic economy.
It's not subtracting from demand.
When the government spends that money, as they are, and they do plan to spend most of it, well, that's an injection into the economy.
That is a fiscal stimulus to the Irish economy.
coming from these bumper corporation tax receipts paid by US companies.
And this is at a time when the economy doesn't need that sort of fiscal stimulus.
We know it all too well over the last 40 or 50 years, the issues that arise when you get fiscal policy wrong.
When you pump money into it and the economy is performing well, you think you can survive through maybe a downturn.
It turns out that that money you were pumping in was temporary or transitory in nature.
We were hit by an oil shock in the late 1970s.
Of course, there was the
The credit crunch in 2008 and maybe the position we thought we found ourselves in was much weaker than we actually believed.
And when these shocks came, huge holes opened up in the public finances.
And at a time then when the economy needed support, we actually made recessions worse.
We increased taxes and cut spending.
as unemployment was soaring and the economy was in sort of a negative position.
And I think there's a warning now that we could be doing something similar, that the economy is performing well.
Showing 61–80 of 117 · page 4 of 6
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