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

I will reply to the Minister's point in response to our suggestion of a higher income social charge to replace revenues from the USC, which People Before Profit believes should be abolished because it was an austerity tax and an unfair imposition on workers that has massively increased the tax burden on ordinary workers ever since it was introduced. Notwithstanding some reductions and tweaks, the tax contribution of ordinary workers jumped significantly as a result of the USC. That burden is overwhelmingly carried by ordinary workers. We want to remove that burden but we need to replace it.

As I said, and I will make it clear to the Minister, we are not only proposing a higher income social charge in order to replace those revenues. In our alternative budget, we also argue for additional tax bands for those who earn in excess of €100,000, as well as the higher income social charge. The Minister may have read our proposal. In fairness, I think he reads our budget submissions. We propose to make up the €2.5 billion gap there would be after we introduce the higher income social charge by having four new bands on those higher earners. These are a 50% rate on earnings between €100,000 and €150,000, 55% on those earning €150,000 to €200,000, 60% on earnings between €200,000 and €275,000, and 65% on earnings more than €275,000, which would raise an additional €2.5 billion. That is how we intend to do it. Our alternative budget also goes into a whole range of other measures to target the wealth and income of the very highest earners, as well as increasing the tax contribution of the major corporations. For our part at least, we fully intend to balance the books but redistribute the tax burden in order to create greater equity in the tax system and to reduce the gap between rich and poor. I wanted to say that for the record.

I will point out that there is also a significant inequity. The elephant in the room is the huge gap between the tax contribution ordinary workers make relative to the income they earn, as against the tax contribution corporations make relative to the income they earn. There is a huge gap. The Minister has projected €20 billion in corporate tax receipts this year. I know he does not have all the figures and they are delayed by a year or so, but insofar as he is able to project €20 billion in corporate tax receipts for 2022, I am curious to know, and I assume he has a projected figure for, what the gross trading profits were that he extrapolated from for 2022. The last available figures indicate that those profits were €193 billion up to 2020, which was a massive jump of approximately 140% over the past decade. Presumably, the Minister had some sort of projected figure for what gross, pre-tax trading profits were that could lead him to project €20 billion in corporate tax receipts. What he will find, however, if he does have that figure, is that the gross pre-tax earnings of corporations dwarf the total amount of income earned by ordinary workers. The tax contribution of corporations is €20 billion whereas the tax contribution of workers in terms of their income is €30 billion.

To put it simply, workers, collectively, earn less and pay more than corporations by a very considerable margin. It just seems like basic fairness and justice that the cleaner who works at Google should not pay more, proportionately, of her income in tax than the shareholders in the corporation that is making extortionate profits. That is what tax justice means to me and that is the logic behind our proposals.