Every motion at this Conference has a price tag. We have an ambitious social programme and an equally ambitious desire to modernize our congested infrastructure.
So the price tag will be high and even when we take the chronic record of mismanagement and waste of this Government out of the equation we will still need to find a lot of money to meet the needs we have set out in our agenda.
Tax Justice is all about doing exactly that.
Tax Justice has been conspicuously absent these past number of years from the FF-PD agenda. For all the loud and proud boasts they make about low taxes these 2 parties now have dragged a higher percentage of PAYE workers into the higher rate band than any other in the history of the State.
Never before have so many been forced to pay so much of their modest incomes in higher rate income taxes and exceptionally high VAT rates.
Higher incomes and full employment have taken the sting out of this reality but the basic truth remains.
This Government:
•taxes more workers than ever,
•taxes more of them at the higher rate
•and then adds a higher VAT bill to every shopping bill and every service purchased.
Their boast of being a Government of low taxes is a sham.
As if that is not enough they compound it further by a conscious and deliberate slant of the tax code to enable the very best off to pay less and less of their just share.
The old slogan of progressive politics “From each according to their ability” has been turned on its head and replaced by its direct opposite. In ‘The Bertie Ahern little red book of Drumcondra Socialism’ those with most are required to contribute the least and then only when frog marched by the threat of penalties and jail.
I don’t need to repeat the shocking facts we extracted this year from a reluctant Minister…the amazing numbers of high earners who can and do escape all or most of their tax liabilities by the use of tax shelters or off shore tax havens.
There is a fabled luxury yacht built by Onassis but now owned by parts of the Irish Elite. A discreet clause added to a Finance Bill turns it into a tax shelter for its owners enjoying a unique status.
A last minute amendment to another Finance Bill opened up another shelter in the form of private hospitals. Every month brings proposals for another one. The use and extension of this clause is now Mary Harney’s big idea for Health Reform, acerbating even further the unequal and unjust two tier nature of our Health system.
There was a lot of bluster some months ago about closing loopholes from the Minister and from the Taoiseach. Tax free millionaires didn’t fit in with the new carefully contrived image of a caring Fianna Fail after Inchydoney.
Since then they have gone all quiet. There are reviews going on, they tell us but Brian Cowen sees nothing wrong with residence laws which allow some of the richest merchants declare themselves to be non resident but still conduct an active business and social life. You see them here, you see them there: at the races, at the big golf events, the high profile charity gigs, but under the Cinderella Rule they are not here at all if they are out of the State by midnight on enough nights of the year.
Fianna Fail care all right. They care for their friends and donors and make the laws so that these friends don’t have to share any of their wealth to pay for health, education or roads.
I take a sceptical view of all the reviews promised. On the one hand Bertie says bluntly that the game is up for the tax free millionaires. On the other hand Brian Cowan is more reserved while Mary Harney can’t have enough of them to foster private medicine, even a truly perverse suggestion of tax breaks for private mental health facilities.
So it seems for every one shelter that will be closed down, a couple of new ones will be set up. So don’t hold your breath for any great leap forward under Bertie Ahern’s stewardship to fairness or equity in the Tax Code. For these people the only acceptable bottom line on their tax form is zero and they won’t rest till the keep what they have and look for more.