Irish exchequer returns:- January tax take up 7.3% against same period last year
THE IRISH GOVERNMENT COLLECTED OVER €300M MORE IN TAXES IN THE FIRST MONTH OF 2016 THAN IT DID IN JANUARY OF LAST YEAR, THE LATEST EXCHEQUER RETURNS SHOW.
About €4.5bn was taken into the State’s coffers, up 7.3% on the €4.2bn collected in January 2015.
Income tax receipts were €1.6bn to the end of January, a year-on-year increase of 8.7%.
The Department of Finance said the improvement in income tax is consistent with the recovering labour market, employment growth and increases in average weekly earnings.
About €2.1bn was collected in VAT, with January regarded as a key month as it relates to the Christmas trading season. VAT receipts were up 6.6pc compared with last year.
Corporation tax receipts were €24m last month, down from €49m in January of last year.
The Department of Finance said January was not a significant month for corporation tax receipts.
Finance Minister Michael Noonan said the figures highlight the effort made in stabilising the economy.
“Overall, taxes have grown by 7.3% in January. This is an improvement when compared to the same period last year and to the Budget 2016 projection of a 5.8% increase in tax take for 2016,” he said.
“Taken in conjunction with today’s fall in the unemployment rate to 8.6% (lowest since December 2008), it is clear that the strong end to 2015 for the economy is continuing into 2016.”
Fine Gael are making election promises they cannot keep says Pearse Doherty SF?
THE FIGURES SHOWN ON FINE GAEL’S NEW PARTY BILLBOARD IN RELATION TO THE FISCAL SPACE DO NOT ADD UP, ACCORDING TO SINN FEIN’S FINANCE SPOKESPERSON.
Pearse Doherty TD accused Fine Gael of making election promises it cannot keep in relation to promised spending on public services.
“Fine Gael has been caught out on its election promises to abolish the USC. This was the main plank of its campaign but it simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny,” said Doherty.
“It has now scrambled its figures to try and make out that there is more fiscal space which allows it to invest in public services while scrapping the USC. This is wrong. Their numbers don’t add up.
“You can’t allocate 50% to USC cuts, 25% to contingency, 70% to public spending,” he said.
“The gross fiscal space is €12.7billion. Fine Gael has already committed €4.1billion of that to measures such as capital spend, demographics and public sector pay increases which were included in Budget 2016. So the real fiscal space available is €8.6billion.
“From that the government has allocated €3.2billion to their contingency plan and abolishing the USC will cost them €4billion,” he said.
“That leaves just €1.4billion for new investment in services which is just over 16% of the fiscal space and a far cry from the 70% that Fine Gael has promised,” Doherty said.
Sinn Féin’s plans for a fair recovery will see the party allocating funds to invest in public services and tackle the health crisis, said Doherty.
“In addition to this one of our first priorities in government is to ease the burden on the average family and we will do this by ending water charges and the property tax and taking 277,000 more workers out of the USC,” Doherty said.
M.D. Higgins questions emphasis on tax cuts in election campaign
LAUNCH OF ETHICS INITIATIVE AT ÁRAS A STARK REMINDER OF PAST FAILURES IN LEAD UP TO CRASH
PRESIDENT MICHAEL D HIGGINS ON THE OCCASION OF THE PUBLICATION OF THE FINAL REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND’S ETHICS INITIATIVE.
In an unprecedented intervention on the eve of the general election campaign President Michael D Higgins has questioned the emphasis being placed on tax cuts by political parties.
“Is it possible to have a decent society and at the same time continue to lower taxes for the purposes of securing the best short-term benefit?” asked Mr Higgins.
Speaking to The Irish Times at Áras an Uachtaráin yesterday after the publication of his report on The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative, Mr Higgins warned that essential services must not become a political football in the election campaign.
“I can’t obviously comment on the platforms of the parties that will contest the election,” he said before discussing the issue of taxation. “People setting their face against tax and using the language that regards it as inevitably a great burden I’m afraid represents a view of the world [which] is not one that I think really can engage with what we are speaking about in the ethics initiative.”
GREAT FAILURES
The President said there had been great failures of an ethical kind in the lead-up to the recession but the good news was that the public wanted to get to a new place and wanted to get there ethically.
“But sometimes they are contradicted because they are being offered short-term advantages for themselves which are, if you like, contradicting the best of their social aspirations,” he said. Most political parties have made reductions in tax a key element of their election manifestos. Fine Gael is proposing the abolition of the universal social charge (USC) over the lifetime of the next government.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said this will reduce the maximum tax rate for middle income families from 52 per cent to 44 per cent. The party will also seek to introduce a new levy on high income earners.
Labour has pledged to abolish the USC for low and middle income earners. Fianna Fáil will move to reduce the USC if elected to government. Sinn Féin is pledging to take those earning under €20,000 out of the USC net and introduce a wealth tax.
Terry Wogan only discovered he was terminally ill three weeks ago
IT’S BEEN REPORTED THAT TERRY WOGAN FOUND OUT HE WAS DYING FROM CANCER THREE WEEKS AGO.
According to his friend Father Brian D’Arcy, the 77-year-old radio star, who passed away over the weekend, revealed that his health rapidly declined after Christmas.
”I think alarms bells began to ring about three weeks ago. He had been in some pain before that, and he had got through Christmas,” he said.
Terry reportedly found out three weeks ago that the prognosis was not good?
“And the family had a lovely Christmas because I rang them to specifically to see and everything was fine, and then things began [getting worse].
”Last Thursday, something told me: ‘Brian, go and see him’, and I rang [Terry’s wife] Helen, and she said: ‘Please do come Brian’. I did, and it was the saddest day and the most rewarding day of my life,
However Brian admitted it would be unlikely that a public funeral will be held for Terry as no venue could be big enough to honour the broadcaster.
Laid to rest: It is reported that Terry will be laid to rest in England rather than Ireland.
He also added that the Limerick native will be laid to rest in England, rather than Ireland.
”How can you have a public funeral for Terry Wogan? Where would you put it? Wembley wouldn’t be big enough for it, so there will probably be just family and friends at a private funeral,” he added.
“I suspect it will be probably early next week. It is in the UK. The BBC usually holds a quite public memorial service later on.
It’s been reported that Terry Wogan found out he was dying from cancer three weeks ago.
According to his friend Father Brian D’Arcy, the 77-year-old radio star, who passed away over the weekend, revealed that his health rapidly declined after Christmas.
”I think alarms bells began to ring about three weeks ago. He had been in some pain before that, and he had got through Christmas,” he said.
Terry reportedly found out three weeks ago that he prognosis wasn’t good
“And the family had a lovely Christmas because I rang them to specifically to see and everything was fine, and then things began [getting worse].
”Last Thursday, something told me: ‘Brian, go and see him’, and I rang [Terry’s wife] Helen, and she said: ‘Please do come Brian’. I did, and it was the saddest day and the most rewarding day of my life,” he said on RTE Radio 1.
However Brian admitted it would be unlikely that a public funeral will be held for Terry as no venue could be big enough to honour the broadcaster.
Laid to rest: It is reported that Terry will be laid to rest in England rather than Ireland.
He also added that the Limerick native will be laid to rest in England, rather than Ireland.
”How can you have a public funeral for Terry Wogan? Where would you put it? Wembley wouldn’t be big enough for it, so there will probably be just family and friends at a private funeral,” he added.
“I suspect it will be probably early next week. It is in the UK. The BBC usually holds a quite public memorial service later on.
The artificial 3D brain shows how our wrinkles and folds take shape
HOW THE BRAIN’S OUTER SHAPE CONTROLS ITS INNER WORKINGS.
Anyone familiar with the appearance of the human brain would recognise the distinctive, wrinkly folds that cover its surface. Scientists believe that the brain’s folding enables a large cortex to fit into a smaller volume reducing wiring length and improving cognitive function – but how does the brain physically end up in this convoluted shape?
Researchers at Harvard University have gotten closer to understanding how this process works, building a 3D-printed layered brain model that replicates the manner in which real brain cortices fold in upon themselves.
Brain folding doesn’t actually appear in all animals, and is limited to a number of species including some primates, dolphins, elephants, and pigs. While the link between these animals’ brain folding and their comparatively high cognitive functions has been noted before, it is not yet fully understood by scientists.
In humans, the folding starts at about the 20th week of gestation of a foetal brain, with the process continuing until a child is approximately 18 months old.
The folding happens as the brain grows, with the number, size, shape, and position of neuronal cells all contributing to the expansion of the cortex – also called grey matter – relative to the white matter that lies underneath.
To mimic this folding motion with an artificial brain structure, the researchers sourced MRI images of human foetuses. With the data in hand, they made a 3D gel model of a smooth, unwrinkled foetal brain as it would look before any of the folding takes shape.
The model’s surface was then coated with a thin layer of elastomer gel, effectively representing an artificial cortex. To replicate the natural process of cortical expansion, the gel brain was immersed in a solvent, causing the outer layer to swell and expand. Within minutes – sped up considerably in the GIF seen here – the artificial brain’s outer layer resembles the formation of folds in real brains.
“We found that we could mimic cortical folding using a very simple physical principle and get results qualitatively similar to what we see in real foetal brains,” said one of the researchers, L. Mahadevan. “This simple evolutionary innovation, with iterations and variations, allows for the thin but expansive cortex to be packed into a small volume, and is the dominant cause behind brain folding, known as gyrification.”
According to the researchers, the shape and position of the folds that result from the cortex expansion are critical to health, with the form of the brain related to its function.
“The geometry of the brain is really important because it serves to orient the folds in certain directions,” said one of the researchers, Jun Young Chung. “Brains are not exactly the same from one human to another, but we should all have the same major folds in order to be healthy.”
The findings, which are reported in Nature Physics, could help scientists to better understand how the outer shape of the brain is related to its inner workings.
“Our research shows that if a part of the brain does not grow properly, or if the global geometry is disrupted, we may not have the major folds in the right place, which may cause potential dysfunction,
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