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

There is the unseemly spectacle of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil scrambling over who will get the credit for the reduction in the USC. We have been consistent in all of our budget submissions since the introduction of the USC in arguing that it should be abolished and that, although the USC was unfair, its abolition should be paid for. The Minister knows this, as he has seen our budget submissions as well as the questions we tabled recently arguing that the USC's abolition should be paid for by having new bands of taxation in respect of those on incomes of more than €100,000 as well as by having wealth taxes, for example, those that Oxfam is proposing, which are similar to the one we have proposed every year. Oxfam estimates that a tiny tax on those who have more than €4 million in wealth could raise up to €8 billion per year, which would be more than enough to pay for the USC's abolition in respect of those earning less than €100,000. Would that not be fair at a time when some people are being crushed by the cost-of-living crisis yet there are others whose wealth has been growing every year? We can see that growth in the Central Bank's quarterly reports on household wealth. That wealth is heavily concentrated at the top of Irish society, where people are doing well while workers are being hammered. Why do we not address this issue in a fair way?

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