Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Hold on. There are two things I cannot let pass. I do not know whether the Minister has the list of committee amendments in front of him. It shows clearly that I submitted amendments to seek to get the money from elsewhere. They were ruled out of order. The particular method employed essentially provides for a sliding scale. It is not about hammering people as soon as they get over the €100,000 threshold. It is about doing it on a sliding scale. I am looking for the incremental increases to be organised on a sharper basis than is currently the case. We do not have a third band. I am proposing that the universal social charge be organised on the basis of a sliding scale of several bands. This approach would probably be more effective in the case of income tax. I am proposing it in the case of the universal social charge because that is what we are dealing with in this section. Under my proposal, a person on €150,000 would pay 12%, rather than 10% as proposed by the Minister, a person on €200,000 would pay 17%, and so on and so forth. It goes up to the extent that a person on over €350,000 would pay 20%. We could keep it going by tweaking and calibrating it until we get the €2.4 billion. The Minister could provide for this. The money is there. It would be a sharp increase, but it would not be a question of slaughtering people as soon as they exceed the €100,000 threshold. I think the Minister should be accurate in his responses to the alternatives that are being proposed.

I would like to make another point to the Minister in this regard. Figures can become somewhat meaningless at a certain level, particularly for those of us who spend a great deal of time looking at tables. The Minister probably does this as well. In the real world, there is a big difference between €100,000 and €120,000. It is massive. The Minister is absolutely right to say that someone who is on €101,000 a year could face quite a tough situation if they have four kids and only one person in the house is working. The circumstances of someone on €120,000 are quite different. The additional €20,000 is another person's annual wage. That is what people at the lower end are getting paid for an entire year.