Taxation: the hidden agenda

What passes for politics here is now all about shaping up to an election still two years away.

It is about positioning, about not frightening the horses, or at least the middle class horses, about ruses (compensation for Telecom shareholders and taxi drivers - that sort of thing), about focus groups, electoral strategies and, oh yes, a bit about policies.

The policies bit will be determined by everything else, not vice versa and there are a few policy fixtures.

The first and by far the most important policy fixture has to do with tax. The imperative is not to say or hint or imply or concede any suggestion of a tax increase. That is income tax increase.

Corporation profits tax doesn't really matter; only a few are directly affected by that. Capital gains tax might be tricky but one can afford a risk here. Cutting back on the more flagrant tax loopholes - well, everyone is agreed on that. But income tax?

Low income taxes are dressed up as a public good. The line is that low income taxes have created the Celtic Tiger and any messing with income taxes will drive us back to the 1950s.

There is no acknowledgement that other factors played a part, such as education. Had there not been consistent investment in education for 40 years, financed by income taxes, there would be no Celtic Tiger. There is no acknowledgement that the fixing of the fiscal crisis created by the recklessness of the late 1970s was a crucial component and that that fixing was paid for, not by those who made fortunes from the recklessness of the late 1970s, but by the degradation of the health service, the cutbacks in social welfare and the further impoverishment of the already poor.

Neither is there an acknowledgement or even recollection that the economy was thundering on in mid-1997 when Fianna Fáil and the PDs took office.

Why were further tax cuts then necessary? Why, given the economic successes that abounded, were those who had borne the brunt of the cutbacks of the late 1980s and early 1990s not recompensed?

Why did we need more enrichment of the already rich? What further stimulus did the economy require? Why, if we reverted to the income tax levels of 1997, would there be a collapse when those 1997 tax levels saw such spectacular growth?

Why will no party, not Fine Gael, not Labour, not the Greens nor, as far as I know, Sinn Féin, talk of what additional public finance would allow in terms of health, education, eradication of poverty, the regeneration of the poor areas around the country and the removal of the bottom 25 per cent from the tax net altogether and the widening of the tax bands?

The "common sense" of our politics is that nothing can be achieved out of office and however constrained one may be in public office at least some advance can be made in areas of importance. Therefore to get into public office one must trim one's sails to winds of agenda.

The agenda is all.

The agenda is that further "progress" along the lines we have been going for a decade is imperative. There is no other way. No matter if the point all along of creating more wealth was to address social problems and inequities. The point now is to go on creating more and more wealth, not for any social or public goals but for itself.

The agenda says the creation of mass fortunes from speculation and property development and the halving of the tax on the vast capital gains made from those fortunes - fortunes that derive in many instances from the contribution of nothing at all to the public good - is a necessary concomitant of the system that has brought us such benefits.

Why?

The agenda dictates we cut provision for community groups, starve disadvantaged areas of promised resources, keep education and health cash-strapped (no point in "throwing" money there), while squandering billions on construction projects, thereby vastly enriching the already rich. Is there not something bizarre about the unavailability of public funds for legal aid, for instance, while the roads expenditure is €9,000,000,000 over budget in the last six years? And there is no uproar about it?

That the repaying of money to the estates of old people from whom hundreds of millions was stolen by the State is not possible because it would cost an extra few hundred million and the road are costing €9 billion over? And the amazing thing is no one protests, no one at all.

The agenda also dictates that only some criminal harms are regarded as "crime". Banks steal millions and millions from customers, do so knowingly and over several years. And what happens as far as the criminal justice system is concerned? Nothing.

The banks were involved in fraud on a scale that none of the gangs conventionally regarded as "organised crime gangs" have not even contemplated. Did the Criminal Assets Bureau make even a phone call to the banks about that criminality?

That is the "common sense" of our era.