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

This amendment is a proposal specifically for a wealth tax on the top 5% of households at a rate of 2% on their accumulated wealth while stripping out €1 million to account for the family home. We do not believe in taxing the family home because it is not the same as wealth that is additional to that, for example, multiple properties, large landholdings, large holdings of shares, large amounts of cash in the bank, etc. Those are two different types of wealth, particularly in a country where 70% of people own their own homes. I suspect that is where our approach to these matters differs from the Labour Party's, but we stand over it and do not believe that people should be punished for managing to own a family home, particularly where the State has failed so badly in the provision of social housing and the fear of homelessness or paying extortionate rents often drives people towards trying to purchase their own homes. They work hard and struggle to achieve that only to get landed with regressive further taxes on something that they have already paid for using income on which they have already paid a great deal of tax. That is our view.

It is with this in mind that our proposal on a wealth tax comes about. At the end of the first quarter of 2021, net household wealth - that is after debts, liabilities and so on - was €883 billion, an increase of €89 billion in just one year. That was an extraordinary increase over 2020, which was the year of the pandemic. Tying into Deputy Nash's point, the €883 billion includes €400 billion in financial assets. That is a lot of financial assets. I do not have the exact figures in front of me, but the bottom 50% have only 1.4% of all the wealth whereas the top 10% have 53% of the wealth.

It is self-evident when we are talking about that amount of wealth, 53%, which is €440 billion, in the hands of about 140,000 people. Our proposal, just so we are not accused of taxing the family home, is to strip out €1 million for those 140,000 people but we are still left with hundreds of billions of euro concentrated in the hands of that group. We are proposing a very modest 2% tax on the value of that wealth and assets. Frankly, they would not feel it but it would generate a lot of revenue.

Wealth taxes are commonplace in many other jurisdictions. They were more commonplace 20 or 30 years ago and I think it is regressive that countries have moved away from wealth taxes, although some countries still have them and some have actually introduced them in the context of Covid as a sort of solidarity effort to try to redistribute some of the wealth and income. It is a reasonable thing to do. Our proposal goes slightly further than other proposals for wealth taxes that groups like the Think-tank for Action on Social Change, TASC, and the Nevin Economic Research Institute, NERI, have proposed over the years. Why would we not at least discuss the possibility of a wealth tax when it is done elsewhere? We can discuss the fairness of it and have a national debate about that inequality in the distribution of wealth and to what extent it could contribute a lot more money to the revenue for the public services that we all agree we need. I do not see why we would not want to have that debate. I do not apologise for pressing to have that debate every single year because, eventually, we will have that debate, in my opinion.