Triple Crisis blogger Mark Blyth was interviewed by Radio Open Source about the Irish debt crisis and the resulting EU and IMF bailout package, noting that taxpayers pay twice for the crisis: first to bailout the banks and then with cuts to social services like education and health care.
From, “Mark Blyth on Ireland: The Circle will not be Squared”:
“The just thing is that the banks should pay. No question. You made the mess. Clean it up. It’s a pretty simple rule. But the basic line is this: if you let the banks fail, there’s nothing coming back. So if you’re Ireland, the Celtic Tiger, and over 10 percent of your GDP is in the financial sector, that’s where you make a lot of money, bankers’ salaries and all that. So let’s say you decide to blow up 10 percent of the economy. What’s your next trick? We can try to reflate it. We can hope that it comes back. We can hope to raise the patient from the dead basically. In order to do that you need to have a growing economy. So obviously hacking away at austerity politics is not going to bring back the bankers’ balance sheets. But on the other hand, it’s not clear what else you do with them. They don’t have any money to pay back, unless you bring the corpse back to life. Now the only way you can do that is by having growth-enhancing policies, and that’s why austerity is not one of them…”