“Can we afford to keep borrowing money so that our Garda, Teachers and Medical Staff can aspire to a certain standard of living?”
That’s one way of putting it. Another way would be to ask whether we can afford police, educational and health systems at all? If you want a functioning civil society, you have to pay for it, it’s as simple as that, and workers have a basic entitlement to be reasonably remunerated for their labour. It’s hardly as if the vast majority of people employed in the sectors you identified are living the high life. Following cuts in recent years, very many public sector employees are suffering considerable hardship and struggling to make ends me.
It’s also an error, I think, just to ask whether we can afford to pay for a public service by simply looking at levels of borrowing alone. Much as right-wing economists like to use the analogy, a state is not a household. There isn’t a fixed level of income into which expenditure must fit. Governments have powers to raise revenue as well as spend money. Look at one of the IMPACT press releases above. It shows that when it comes to high earners, those above €100,000 the vast, vast majority, both in absolute and per capita terms are in the private sector. But we have a government which refuses to increase income tax whatsoever, even at those levels. Of course, if you take low income tax rates as a given, you’re going to end up with a huge deficit. But let’s not pretend that that’s the only choice the government has.