Would you support a significantly higher rate of income tax?

Iwasfrozen

You're in government, and are spending other peoples' money, on other people. Without insanely strong accountability regulations - like executing Ministers who screw up or bankrupting public service unions that hold the public services in a deadlock of ineffectiveness - you have absolutely no personal interest in the task, your decisions have no bearing on you personally, and no mistake you make can hurt you in any way.

Except the chance of not being elected again and losing your only source of income ? Though it might be nice to see a Politician in the Dole line.

You see the problem here? A "world class government service" is almost a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, like "the tall midget" or "the rich homeless man" and is impossible in most cases.

I see no contradiction, more like tautology.

Then publish "league tables" of schools exam results, doctor/hospital recovery rates, and other pertinent information to give prospective parents and patients an idea about what a particular service provider is "all about." This so that anyone, from the poorest to the richest can say of a non-functional service "screw you, I'm giving this money to an organisation that can do it properly" which a private system could provide.

Might be all good and well in a city, but what about at grass roots level, Ireland is a rural country and a private company will simply not be motivated to set up business in a place with limited chance to expand. Take for example my home county Monaghan, with a population of circa. 50,000 there is simply not enough sick people to keep these greedy private companies happy here. Are we or any one else in a similar situation to drive to the nearest city Dundalk in the case of an emergency ? Allot of people don't cars are we to phone the ambulance just to go to A&E ? This ideal may be well and good for a city but simply won't work for the majority of the population.

SeanW

Except the chance of not being elected again and losing your only source of income ? Though it might be nice to see a Politician in the Dole line.

That's why all our public services are so efficient?

Iwasfrozen wrote: »

With the extra revenue increased Taxes will generate we will be able to incease the quality of Public Service Schools.

It's not that simple. Some government services will by their very nature suck up any available money and not deliver quality.

Why sould the child of a rich person recieve a better education than a child from an improverished area ?

I don't believe they should, and this explains the "Left leaning" part of my self description of "Left leaning Libertarian." I'm all for children getting a good education - but the government is often as responsible for the two tier system as the disparity in wealth.

Take another hypothetical. Suppose it is found that the cheapest a privateer or charter school can educate a child to a high standard is €1500. The rich man spends this on lunch money but the poor family cannot pay this, so they have to send their child to a poorly performing public school.
Get rid of the public school and give the poor family a €1500 voucher, and lets say a high quality private school opens in the area and asks between 1500 and 1800 per year. Chances are, the poor family can afford to make up the shortfall, and in any case the child gets a better education.

Permabear

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NewDubliner

Iwasfrozen wrote: »

Except the chance of not being elected again and losing your only source of income ? Though it might be nice to see a Politician in the Dole line.

Bless you innocence. They become lobbyists and consultants.

Iwasfrozen

Iwasfrozen wrote: »

With the extra revenue increased Taxes will generate we will be able to incease the quality of Public Service Schools.

Lol, that's a good one

NewDubliner

donegalfella wrote: »

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OMG, you're a closet PD

Lockstep

NewDubliner wrote: »

OMG, you're a closet PD

He's more PD than the PDs themselves.

Iwasfrozen

That's why all our public services are so efficient?

It's not that simple. Some government services will by their very nature suck up any available money and not deliver quality.

Which is both why I want huge reforms in the Goverment.

Take another hypothetical. Suppose it is found that the cheapest a privateer or charter school can educate a child to a high standard is €1500. The rich man spends this on lunch money but the poor family cannot pay this, so they have to send their child to a poorly performing public school.
Get rid of the public school and give the poor family a €1500 voucher, and lets say a high quality private school opens in the area and asks between 1500 and 1800 per year. Chances are, the poor family can afford to make up the shortfall, and in any case the child gets a better education.

Nice, but how do we afford the vouchers without increasing tax ? You and I seem to be on the same scale, Social Democracy. Pity we can't agree on what role the Goverment should take.

Bless you innocence. They become lobbyists and consultants.

Lol, that's a good one

Not sure how to respond to these, never the less, Sig Worthy!

Permabear

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SeanW

Iwasfrozen wrote: »

Which is both why I want huge reforms in the Goverment.

Bless your innocence First, the "reforms" would have to be strong enough to overcome the iron law of self interest as I described above. Second, you'd have to get politicians to support them, which would be like getting turkeys to vote for Christmas. Literally, since something like the rules governing the Doge of old Venice would be required.

Besides, if we take the Irish example of the Driver Testing service, where according to one ex-SGS tester, they were doing more tests per week for less money, and the public sector union in charge of the RSA operation is too strong to allow their gravy train to be derailed. I also pointed out the Walter Reed Medical scandal in the U.S. as another example.

If we assume that this kind of madness is just a highly visible microchasm of what is else is going on in the public services, then IMHO the question goes beyond reform, to how do we smash these abysmal failures, and what if anything to replace them with.

Nice, but how do we afford the vouchers without increasing tax ? You and I seem to be on the same scale, Social Democracy. Pity we can't agree on what role the Goverment should take.

Before we get to arguments about whether we should have a welfare-state or not with protections for the poor, or anarcho-capitalist-libertarianism, or to what degree of each, there is a lot of bad value for money in current services that needs to be rooted out in either case. In my hypothetical school system above, a public monopoly school could be taking €1500 per student/year off the taxpayer and providing a crap service. Should we allow that to continue?

francish

In answer to OP's question, absolutely not. How could anyone trust an Irish politican of any party to spend extra taxes wisely? Rather than look simply at tax as a percentage of wealth, you have to look at the quality of service we get for what we currently spend. Is there any public service out there where there is not huge waste. It absolutely sickens me to hear all the commentary focused on increasing taxes or a reduction in services. Why as taxpayers are we not demanding reform and value for money?

Permabear

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P. Breathnach

This discussion seems a bit odd to me, because the cart has been placed before the horse, and nobody seems to be focusing on that.

I am not in favour of increasing taxes in order to do anything. I am in favour of reaching a social agreement on what we want the state to do for us, and then levying taxes sufficient to pay for that. I think most of us would agree broadly on what we want the state to do for us -- a very broad agreement, with lots of vigorous skirmishing about the details.

That's not the whole story of course, but it is the starting position. The challenges are that we need to
1. ensure that there is efficiency in how the state makes the provision;
2. decide on what types of activity we levy taxes, and how the burden is distributed;
3. do some economic management.

In those three areas, I disagree with the policies that we have been following for the last few years. So do many other people, but we don't all disagree with policy in the same way. I think our differences on these matters are greater than on the more basic question of what we want the state to do for us.

[This submission takes no account of the libertarian fringe on this forum. I don't think they are part of the national consensus.]

Permabear

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silverharp

P. Breathnach wrote: »

[This submission takes no account of the libertarian fringe on this forum. I don't think they are part of the national consensus.]

Neither is the bond market, but by god will they have the final say the way things are going

P. Breathnach

donegalfella wrote: »

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You a libertarian? Who would have suspected it?

We've adopted a "throw money at the problem" mentality over the past decade of plenty. When our coffers were full, nobody was keeping a particularly close eye on how the state was spending our money.

Agreed.

Bureaucracy, inefficiency, and waste became rampant.

I think we have always had bureaucracy, with its shortcomings. I am not sure that it increased. Yes, I think we became victim to inefficiencies, partly due to a lack of political will to control things, and partly because of system failures. Yes, I think there has been waste, but what I might consider to be waste somebody else might consider useful spending (your small local hospital is wasteful; my small local hospital is a necessary service).

Social welfare payments rose to multiples of what they are in the UK.

That's part of our national consensus.

And then the boom came to a shuddering halt, and now we are faced with the prospect of borrowing billions every year so that we can sustain outrageous levels of public spending.

Modify "outrageous" and we are ad idem.

Look at this on a personal level. I recently lost my job, like many other people in this country, so my revenue has dwindled dramatically. The very first thing I did was go through my budget and make radical cutbacks. I have trimmed my lifestyle back to the essentials. My priorities are (a) to find another job as quickly as possible; (b) to live within my means while doing so; and (c) not to have to borrow money to survive.

I don't think this is unusual. Most people when they suffer a drop in income don't carry on spending like they did before. They buy their clothes in Dunnes and their groceries in Aldi; they don't buy a flashy new car; they don't go on holidays to exotic destinations.

You have outlined a very sensible strategy. Yet I know people who have lost their jobs who are not yet adopting such a strategy. Some find it very difficult to make an adjustment.

But our politicians, who are not spending their own money in any case, want to carry on pretending that the credit crunch and ensuing recession never happened. They want to party like it's 2006. They want to keep on throwing money at problems. They refuse to recognize the reality of the situation that we are in.

I think that just about all of them know what sort of things need to be done. Most of them don't have the courage to say it to us. Even less do they have the courage to do it. Like the newly unemployed, necessity will force them to change their ways. It's a pity that they are trying to avoid the inevitable day of reckoning. But, to an extent, it is our fault for consistently voting for populists.

[I didn't expect that I could find such large areas of agreement with a libertarian!]

Gael23

I feel it is important to keep the low paid out of the tax net or at least at the standard rate of tax. What I would like to see is a third tax band of maybe 45/48% on incomes of say €150k+.

P. Breathnach

ryanf1 wrote: »

I feel it is important to keep the low paid out of the tax net or at least at the standard rate of tax. What I would like to see is a third tax band of maybe 45/48% on incomes of say €150k+.

So under €150k is low paid?

A tax like that would raise relatively little. That's not a reason for not implementing it. But most of the rest of us will have to take some pain, too.

Permabear

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silverharp

P. Breathnach wrote: »

I think that just about all of them know what sort of things need to be done. Most of them don't have the courage to say it to us. Even less do they have the courage to do it. Like the newly unemployed, necessity will force them to change their ways. It's a pity that they are trying to avoid the inevitable day of reckoning. But, to an extent, it is our fault for consistently voting for populists.

I'd give them some credit if they saw it coming , but I see no evidence that from say 2000 that they suspected that that there any sort of "one off " element to tax revenue this decade. For instance they could have pulled money out of the economy to fund the NDP going forward. They could have pulled the property reliefs when Ireland went into the Euro.
I fully agree that they are avoiding the day of reckoning , by the time the day of reckoning comes I suspect that we will have real interests rates here of around 12% , that could be -4% inflation and borrowing costs of 8%. Any setup like this will destroy the private economy and will slam the state budgets into a brick wall. The system as I see it is designed to fail. It builds up in the good times and there is no correcting mechanism on the downside.

Capt'n Midnight

1987 http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/special/2004/mcdowell_ibec/index.htm

Personal and other taxes were struck at suffocating rates. The lowest rate of tax was 35% plus 7.75% PRSI - a "low rate¨ of more than 42% of the lowest taxable incomes of the most humble PAYE workers. The top rates of tax were reached by single workers earning below the average industrial wage - who faced marginal welfare and tax rates of two thirds of income.

http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0476/D.0476.199703120045.html
Highest rates until 1993 was 58%
(in addition to PRSI etc. , there was a 48% band too but it was narrow)
Emergency tax was 60% of everything above your tax free allowance if your PRSI wasn't sorted out quickly enough.

http://www.rte.ie/money/2008/1010/tax.html
Back in the 1970's the top rate of tax here was ... 80% :eek:

jimmmy

What about a new rate of income tax on unearned income, like pensions ?
On the RTE pensions programme the other night, it showed the pensions of some people paid by the public purse to be over 100,000 euro per year. If politicians and public sector pensions cannot be cut ( the markets have already decimated most private pensions ) ....why not a new tax on all pensions ( public + private sector ) over say 40,000 per year ? Most people who are pension age have their mortgage paid off , family reared etc ....perhaps pensions over 800 euro per week need a new tax ?

Because the new tax will be on pensions only, it should not dis-incentivise new firms from manufacturing here etc. The people who are struggling financially will not be affected.

P. Breathnach

jimmmy wrote: »

What about a new rate of income tax on unearned income, like pensions ?...

Unearned? I earned my pension.

Rental profits, interest on deposits, dividends: they are unearned income.

jimmmy

P. Breathnach wrote: »

Unearned? I earned my pension.

If its a public service pension its subsidised by the people who do not get such pensions. That is a fact. Irrespective of your opinion on if you earned your pension or not, I am just saying it should be taxed fairly.

Pensions are often comprised of "Rental profits, interest on deposits, dividends"

bridge

we all got more for the boom years so we just have to settle for less for a few years

Lockstep

donegalfella wrote: »

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AMerican Libertarianism I always found amusing.
Kind of like this;

Gael23

P. Breathnach wrote: »

So under €150k is low paid?

A tax like that would raise relatively little. That's not a reason for not implementing it. But most of the rest of us will have to take some pain, too.

No thats fairly high paid, I agree that we all have to take some pain but the high earners should have to take more than the person who is struggling as it is. 150k was just a rough number maybe it should be slightly higher than that,

NewDubliner

jimmmy wrote: »

If its a public service pension its subsidised by the people who do not get such pensions. That is a fact. Irrespective of your opinion on if you earned your pension or not, I am just saying it should be taxed fairly.

Public sector pensions ARE taxed.

Private sector pensions are also subsidised by people who do not get such pensions. You're paying the pension of anyone you buy goods or services from.

P. Breathnach

jimmmy wrote: »

If its a public service pension its subsidised by the people who do not get such pensions. That is a fact. Irrespective of your opinion on if you earned your pension or not, I am just saying it should be taxed fairly.

No, you were saying that it should be taxed unfairly by suffering a higher rate.

Pensions are often comprised of "Rental profits, interest on deposits, dividends"

Private sector ones.