Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

This Government has several firsts on its record. This Government is the first ever to make more people pay at the top rate of tax than at the standard rate. This is the first Government to raise more in VAT than in income tax, because it relies on people who are on low incomes to pay tax. Through its tax policies, it is the first to put an average home beyond the reach of ordinary families. Every family must now pay €27,000 in tax. The lion's share of the 55% increase in just four years came from those families on modest incomes. When these families go to a shop they pay a 20% tax rate. When they buy a house, if they can afford it, they pay a 33% tax rate. When they go to the pub they pay a 50% tax rate. When they buy a car they pay a 65% tax rate and when they fill it with petrol they pay 130% in tax. These are the people who have been the backbone of the country, paying to keep the Government's spending machine rolling. They have been let down because the money they gave has not been used to deliver the improvements we ought to have seen. Every single category of tax has increased as a proportion of family income. In just four years it has increased by 7 percentage points from 31% of income. Now €39 of every €100 of family income goes in tax.

What of the commitment that only one in five was to pay at the 42% rate? Today's budget attempts to conceal what has happened here. The Taoiseach's spinners have a new dispensation to try to conceal what the Government has not delivered. When the figures are stripped out, they show that next year 31.5% of people will pay at the top rate of tax. The Government will have reneged on commitments to 255,000 taxpayers who were to pay not at 42% or at 41%, but at 20%. The Government kept its promises to bankers, developers and the wealthy who wanted tax shelters. However, it did not deliver for the ordinary taxpayers and reneged on its promises to them.

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