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Biting the hand that feeds you.
Read more about: Fianna Fail, Housing
Considering this weeks cartoon are Fianna Fail biting the hand that feeds them? From the Irish Examiner. Property speculators should be taxed out of existence to keep prices down, warns Ahern
Noel Ahern warned that people who trade in houses and apartments or buy land to sell on to developers should be “taxed out of existence”.
He also said
“I, personally, would like to see those people taxed out of existence,” he said.
“People who see the demand, move in to make the fast buck. They should be playing the commodities market in the London Stock Exchange on oil or cocoa beans or whatever, rather than with houses.”
Are Fianna Fail trying to undo some of the bad press from the Galway Races tent.
I don’t see why; Fianna Fail and the construction trade both know what situation the Irish property market is in now, and the fact that even the most positive of anaylists expect a levelling off in 2007… as well as this FF are in bed with the builders, not the buyers.
By bad-mouthing property speculators and pointing to them as a source of the problem, FF can claim it was their action that encouraged a levelling off in prices, because they pushed the bad guys out of the market… notice how FF have so far paid no heed to those who have told them what’s going to happen to the Irish economy in the next 2-3 years? That’s partly because acknowleding it would force them to either take responsibility or act to counteract it, but it’s also so they can pretend it was their doing and not the inevitable twist of the international market.
I’m sure FF reassured the construction lads in the big tent that they’d be taking this tack for a while in advance of the election to ensure they were still the ones in power but that nothing would come of it afterwards.