Mr. Brian Cowen:

I've explained that, obviously, we were ... if you had reduced housing output, you were going to have reduced taxes coming from that source and you would have to either find cuts in other areas of activity or provide for greater spend. But the reason why, by the way, we had this move to capital taxes, which is something that should be, presumably welcomed by people who call themselves social democrat, because it takes down the burden on direct tax on working people. We wanted to make sure that working people got the benefit of some of this prosperity. Also, we wanted to use, to deal with a tight labour market where ... in terms of trying to ... promote a moderate incomes policy, we wanted to use our fiscal policy to ... in other words, the taxation issue, increasing tax credits, helping people to retain more money of their own at work, that that was a pro-employment policy, that that ensured we avoided poverty traps, it ensured that those people who were on lower wages, at minimum wage were outside the tax net altogether, something that we brought in. And also we wanted to make sure that ... there was also 200,000 people in traditional manufacturing in this country, who have wages which are less than the average industrial wage-----