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

The rich in this country pay more tax because they have vastly more wealth. It is not because it is a particularly progressive system but because there is a massive inequality in the distribution of wealth and income. The two things are related. There is a completely bogus argument or spin from officials that this proves we have a progressive tax system. It does not prove that at all. What it proves is that the rich have vast accumulations of income and wealth. At the very minimum, we should start to gather this information. It is very telling that we do not have a register of wealth and assets that would allow us to work out how wealth, which has gone through the roof in recent years, is distributed. The figures on deprivation, which we do keep, show that the levels of deprivation, poverty, energy poverty and so on are rising but the companies' profits, the wealth of billionaires and the overall net wealth in the country are all going up. Somebody has the money and it is not the working people of this country.

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