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

I move amendment No. 8:

In page 11, after line 34, to insert the following:

“Report on abolition and replacement of Universal Social Charge

11. The Minister shall, within three months of the passing of this Act, produce a report on abolishing the Universal Social Charge for all those earning less than €70,000 per year and replacing it with an emergency Covid-19 Solidarity Tax on the incomes of those earning in excess of €100,000 per year and on the profits of companies whose net profits exceed €1,000,000 per year.”.

Every year that I have been in the Dáil we have made the case in our pre-budget submission for wealth taxes as against taxes that impose a further tax pressure on low and middle income workers that we should look at wealth taxes. That is something the Government has resisted but Covid-19 creates a new context for the case for wealth taxes because we are borrowing huge amounts to finance income supports and other increased expenditure in areas such as health and so on to sustain us through Covid-19, and particularly the incomes of those who have been hit by the pandemic. It is worth saying that many of the people who have been hit had precarious incomes and circumstances in the first place or would have been low paid people in areas like bar work, hospitality, the arts, about which we have talked a good deal, music, live entertainment and taxi drivers. These would not be people who had very high incomes to start with and they have been hurt very significantly by the measures. While there has been some income supports for them they are people who are really suffering as a result of Covid-19. There are other sectors of our society who are not suffering but actually doing extraordinarily well. The report of the Central Bank for the second quarter of this year that came out in the past few days underlines that in spades where the net household wealth has now reached the highest level ever in the history of the State at €817 billion. That is a jump of approximately €60 billion on the year before. It is an extraordinary accumulation of wealth. As the Central Statistics Office, CSO, demonstrated in its studies on the distribution of wealth, that wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated in a small number of very wealthy households. For example, the richest 1% of the population have more wealth than the bottom 50%. That is an extraordinary fact. The richest 1% have more wealth than the combined household wealth of the 50% at the bottom. The wealthiest 10% have half of that wealth, 50% of that €817 billion. That is extraordinary, and it is growing every year because once we reach a certain threshold of wealth the money begins to make money.

Against the background of many people being hurt in the Covid-19 pandemic and us clearly needing very significant additional investment in key public services more so than ever after Covid-19, for example, in our health service, to reduce class sizes in education and to invest in key infrastructure projects, surely there is a serious case for wealth taxes or, in this specific context, for a Covid solidarity wealth tax. These are measures that have been introduced in a number of countries since Covid-19 or are being actively discussed around the world if countries have not yet introduced them. I refer to the idea of imposing Covid solidarity wealth taxes on those with the very highest incomes and those who have very significant accumulated wealth. That would save us from having to borrow as much as we are having to borrow and it would be an important measure, underpinning with real action, the principle of "we are all in it together", which has very much provided the framework for the public attitude towards the sacrifices and hardship they have to make to deal with Covid-19.

That is why we press the case for removing more aggressive taxes on working people and replacing them with wealth taxes, in particular in the current climate a Covid solidarity wealth tax.