Arthur Beesley: Country’s tax policy is not built on election slogans

Never mind the glossy manifestos. If you really want to know what’s going on take a look at the papers of the Tax Strategy Group, a body of ranking officials that prepares policy options in advance of the annual budget.

There’s always a big aspirational dimension to manifestos, which bind electoral strategy to the imperatives of politics, economics, taxation and numerous other variables.

That’s as it should be. Any party seeking election must set out its plan and its vision for the State and its people. Choices and trade-offs are the stuff of democracy.

It’s in the nature of manifestos, of course, to package assorted proposals as a unified whole under the umbrella of a single theme. This, inevitably, leads to slogans. You know the drill. Fine Gael wants to “keep the recovery going”. Labour wants a strong economy for a decent society. Fianna Fáil seeks an Ireland for all, Sinn Féin a fair recovery.

Policy perspective

From a policy perspective, however, these are but first gambits. It’s more likely than not the next administration will be a coalition, with all signs still pointing to a Fine Gael-led government. But it’s still a very open question whether that turns out to be with Labour on its own, Labour together with Independents and/or smaller parties or indeed with Fianna Fáil. This is in the hands of voters.

It follows that the eventual programme for government will be an amalgam of manifestos. Yet that’s only the start of it. If taxation is one of the ultimate expressions of any government’s sovereignty, all proposals on this front still end up with the Tax Strategy Group. This is the nuts-and-bolts crowd, where political objectives and rhetoric meet real-time forces and real-time constraints. This is in the nature of decision-making.

Bureaucracy

The papers of the group, published on the Department of Finance website (finance. gov.ie), are not cast to inspire voters. In the monotonous language of bureaucracy, however, they set out possibilities and parameters for movement. No matter who wins this day fortnight, this is where tax proposals will be put to the test before the ultimate political decision.

Take, for example, those promises to eliminate or cut the universal social charge. Before Budget 2016, the group noted proposals from Taoiseach Enda Kenny to increase to 500,000 the number of people outside the USC net. USC cuts were made, but not before the group warned that the proposals “go against the policy of applying the USC at a low rate on a broad base and would lead to concerns around the narrowing of the tax base”.

Further USC cuts are promised, but this is dependent on the performance of the Irish and world economies. The high political priority attaching to the USC “emergency tax” is clear. Figuring out how that is done, however, is another matter.

There’s more to tax, of course, than income tax. Late last year the Economic & Social Research Institute suggested the Government should consider a new land tax as an incentive to developers to build homes on vacant property.

This notion does not seem to be going anywhere, however. From the Tax Strategy documents, we learn of an ESRI assessment of this very question. “The paper develops a simple model of the Irish housing market and demonstrates that, in contrast to previous interventions, any tax incentives aimed at developers are likely to have little effect on supply due to a number of existing factors which appear to be inhibiting the operation of the market.”

Political decision

Then there is the matter of the sugary drink tax (SSD) proposed by Labour and Sinn Féin. There is no political decision on this yet, but Tax Strategy Group documents reveal the thinking on the matter – and costing exercises – are quite advanced.

"Given the difficulties in applying an SSD an ad valorem [tax in proportion to value] rate, it would not be prudent to implement it in Ireland. A volumetric rate imposed at a specific amount per hectolitre would be easier to impose and administer, and have a greater price impact on multi-packs, large volume SSD bottles and cheaper 'own-brand' SSD product."

This is how policy proposals are worked out. No politician would dream of going to the hustings with Tax Strategy Group documents as their vision for a better Ireland. Equally, no finance ministry would dream of moulding a budget on the simple basis of a manifesto document. Still, the two have to meet somewhere.