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

As a member of the budget scrutiny committee we were engaging with the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council today and it pointed out that the significant expenditures related to Covid-19 and, previous to that, Brexit, that led the Minister to defer the plans to put €500 million into the rainy day fund were part of a trajectory of debt, even though it approves of the Minister's decision to make them available, as do we in the Opposition, for which we would have to pay the piper at some point in time. The way it put it was that hard choices were coming, not immediately but in the medium term. I think we all know what hard choices means. Hard choices means austerity or raising taxes. That means we have to really think about those consequences and decide which way we will address that problem. The choice the Minister has made for now is to borrow. As I said, we agree with the decision. In fact, in terms of the increases in capital and current expenditure, we would have gone further.

We did not need Covid as an excuse to do some of the things that we have now had to do, particularly having to increase the capacity of our health service, invest more in housing and so on. Nonetheless, we agree with the countercyclical, emergency approach to dealing with this crisis. How do we finance it in the medium to long term? How do we make those hard choices? The approach that the Government has taken is borrowing.

The alternative that we have argued for and that we have seen put into practice, with a tax that is almost a cut and paste from People Before Profit's pre-budget submissions for the last few years, has now being imposed in Argentina, and not by a radical left Government. A Covid solidarity wealth tax has been introduced, which is on wealth and assets in excess of £1.8 million sterling, which is quite a high threshold, on the richest 12,000 people in Argentina. They expect that it will raise 300 billion pesos. That money will be spent on health, relief for small and medium enterprises, social developments and so on. There will be slightly higher taxes for people who have wealth and assets kept outside the country. It is a fairly middle of the road regime adopting a policy that the Government regularly dismisses as being off-the-wall left-wing economics. That should give the Minister pause for thought. While the Fiscal Advisory Council does not pronounce on specific measures, when I asked it directly if we need to look at these options and if it is legitimate to look at wealth taxes as a choice to deal with the debt situation that is developing, it said that we need to start to look at these things.

I will put it simply. If one borrows, one is borrowing from people who have much surplus money, with interest. If one introduces wealth taxes, one takes the surplus money off them. Which is better value for us, borrowing from very rich people with surplus wealth who make more money from having surplus wealth, or taking it from them with taxes to equalise the distribution of wealth and to fund needed social services, infrastructure and so on? I put it to the Minister that it is the latter and the decisions that he has had to make here are indicative of a fundamental change away from austerity economics and debt-financed spending towards redistributive wealth taxes.

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