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

Similarly, in all our budget submissions in recent years, we have proposed a wealth tax. I find it indicative of the priorities of this Government and of previous Governments that when they want to take money from low and middle income earners, they go to extraordinarily lengths to bill them or to find out what means they have in order not to give them something. The most obvious current example is water metering which, to my mind, is an utter waste of money. Some hundreds of millions of euro are being wasted. Immense effort has been made to ascertain how much one can charge somebody with a regressive tax. Similarly, there is very invasive means-testing for a number of social welfare benefits. The State went to extraordinary lengths to try to establish the value of family homes in order to charge for the local property tax.

All this can be done but what we cannot do is work out how much money the very wealthy have because that is just too difficult. I do not accept that for one minute. Just to inform Deputy Walsh, both our wealth tax proposal and Sinn Féin's, although it can speak for itself, exclude the family home. What we are talking about is a wealth tax on financial and other assets, excluding the family home.

I mentioned it earlier but I would like to see the same sort of drive from this Government, or from any Government, to find out the distribution of the €508 billion net, which is after liabilities are taken out, in household assets in this State, half of which, according to the CSO, are cash or financial assets. The family home takes up a significant amount of that but half of it is financial.

If the wealth distribution estimates given by Credit Suisse for Ireland are even close to true, they indicate a shocking inequality in the distribution of wealth and, overwhelmingly, that wealth cannot be family homes. If it is true, as Credit Suisse estimates, that the top 1% have 20% of that €500 billion, or the top 5% have 40% of it, that is €200 billion and 200,000 people accounting for that. Some 200,000 people have about €200 billion, so even if one takes out their family homes, the majority of that is financial assets or commercial property, which is generating revenue. That money in financial or other assets is just sitting there and is generating money all the time. They do not have to do anything with it or lift a finger. It is in investment funds and so on. What is the average return on investment funds for people who have several million euro? I would say that these days, it is 4% or 5% per year. Could we not put a 2% tax on this? They would still make money. They would not lose out on anything. If one is a millionaire, one's millions are making money all the time. We would not even be hurting them but would just be taking a little bit of that money, which is just money making money, from them and putting it back into society, into our infrastructure, into redistributing the wealth and into narrowing the gap between rich and poor.

However, whenever one talks about these things it is said it is cloud-cuckoo-land economics, it is all too difficult and that these people will all leave. These people are obviously not very patriotic in that if they are asked to pay a little bit of extra tax, they will all run away. There is a thing called capital controls. Iceland did not implode when it imposed capital controls. These things can be done if there is a will. There would certainly be fairness to it. As Deputy Doherty mentioned, it averages out at approximately €200,000 per person in the State but the majority of people having nothing even approaching that amount.

I do not see why there is no willingness, or no will, to really delve into this and to show the same energy delving into this which the Governments so often demonstrate when they try to take money from the less well off.