Professor Alan Barrett:

We touched on some of these issues earlier, but we can repeat it very quickly. I do not want to call it an ESRI position, but a personal position which I think Dr. McQuinn shares is that it is unwise to reduce taxes at this moment. One can try to frame it in the context of revenues and expenditures this year and the balance between them, but we are taking a slightly longer-term perspective. In this, we are very much in line with the Fiscal Advisory Council. If one looks down the road, the pressures on public finances and public expenditure are only going in one direction. In comments earlier, we talked about the recent experience of raising revenue and just how difficult it is, which suggests that it would be most unwise to take away revenues which are currently flowing in. Nobody likes paying USC or anything, but there is a level of acceptance. It does not make sense to me - and there is an element of political economy in this - to hollow out a particular base when one absolutely knows that in the coming years one will have to raise revenues again even to maintain services at their current level. It strikes us as a bad idea to reduce the aggregate tax take, even before one gets into the issues Deputy Donnelly raises as to whether we need better-quality public services immediately, which case one can certainly make across a whole range of areas and whatever about tweaking within the total quantum. We made the point in our opening statement and we have elaborated on that through questions.