Budget 2023

This is a fair point.

I am against one-off rural houses, except for farmers.

But I am all for one-off houses in villages and towns.

There is plenty of land in most villages to allow the village to double its population.

By this I mean all within 1km of school, shops, etc.

And a fairly blindingly obvious one at that

So let me get you 2 right. We should pay more and more in tax (even do we just ran a very high surplus) and give it to others who don't work or don't earn as much and then with what ever money we have left over pay again for the majority of decent services and then we should cycle everywhere no matter the distance, no matter the weather, no matter if your carrying heavy goods, no matter how dangerous the roads are and we should all be happy with a dilapidated sh1tbox in a small town and be happy about it no matter how many kids you have, or how small the place is. REALLY

Some people spend their money on nice clothes, nice food. nice holidays and some like a nice place to live and forgo aspects of other areas. Who are you 2 or anyone else to tell and dictate what people do with their discretionary spend if you work for it you should be able to do what you want with your cash after the taxman takes his pound of flesh and also without the taxman coming in looking for more if you decide you want to live outside a city or drive a phucking car. Delusional the pair of you. The fact is the person buying the car and house has already paid income tax, stamp duty on the house, VAT on the life insurance for the mortgage, VAT on the home insurance and a recurring property tax, then on the car they have paid VAT on the car, VAT and carbon tax on petrol diesel and VAT on the car insurance and Motor tax. How much more do you 2 want to bleed from someone

That's the "user pays" sometimes called the "poluter pays" strategy. It means that the person who can't afford to pay doesn't get the service. Not something that works in terms of healthcare for example

I think what he is saying is they don't pay for public education, ie they go to public schools

Its not laughable. The money is paid in cash and goes back into the local economy.

You have got the solution backwards. The greatest use of petrol and diesel is in the rural community. We need to increase taxes there to change the behaviours. In Dublin for example, the Bus Connects and pedestrian projects are doing the job of reducing car usage anyway. Reducing car usage in rural areas is the next step.

I didn't say any of that.

What I am saying is that in line with the principle of the polluter pays, we need to find a way to ensure that there are no more McMansions built and that people start living in towns and villages. If that means higher taxes to do so, so be it.

Well give the polluter an alternative, you put up pics of a few dilapidated houses as viable alternatives for people to move into from outside the cities and towns, how much would someone have to pay to get that up to living standards. The alternative is not there ergo the housing crisis we are currently facing. Right then we should pay zero motor tax if polluter pays , you cannot double/treble/quadruple tax it. If they put the tax on petrol/diesel and took away the motor tax then I could see some merit to what your saying but a person driving a car has already paid multiple times in various different taxation payments, polluter or not.

...seriously, whats the craic with such nonsense! again, most money received by welfare recipients is spent back into the economy, very little goes towards savings and paying off debt, this keeps many businesses in business, maintaining and creating jobs, of which us workers work in, i.e. round and round the money goes....oh and most revenue at the moment is currently coming from corporation taxes, so unless your a large corporation, most welfare payments arent coming from you, the taxpayer!

Perhaps leave the Diesel/Petrol taxes the same in rural locations then, increase them in the cities and use the money to reduce the cost of electricity (public chargers and households) in the countryside as well as other incentives to promote them to move to EVs?

Why would you do that? You would be subsidising unsustainable living. It has to work the other way around, increase the costs of rural living to encourage sustainable living in towns, villages and cities.