AT this time of year I tend to write a diary about money simply because I have just been punched in the nose by the Revenue Commissioners, and it hurts, not least because this nose leathering is not fairly distributed about the place.
In other words, we are back" to PRSI. Why not? Pay Related, Social Insurance within the private sector is one of the greats" scandals of the State. It is not social insurance at all. It is simply another system of revenue collection which is levied hardest on the private sector. Those who devise this tax and who implement it the public servants are largely exempt from it, though they are the ones who enjoy index related, pensions, which in the long", term promises to bring economic ruin to the State.
If they were contributing to those pensions by appropriate insurance contributions though in fact it is not economically possibly to fund such pensions it would be one thing. But they are not even doing that. Their pensions are taken out of current account, the only way of financing them and we do not even know how much they cost the taxpayer, since the Government estimates do not distinguish between pensions and salaries. Book keeping as sloppy as this in the private sector would soon bring about bankruptcy but this is the never never land of public accounting, in which the PAYE, worker in the private sector is easy victim.
Gullible gulled
A couple of facts. The total PAYE sector paid £3.3 thousand million in income tax in 1994. The self employed the farmers, the doctors, the solicitors, the many thousands of businessmen and women paid £517 million. What is not in those figures is the stealth tax of PRSI for the term insurance" there is a lie, a falsehood, a term designed to gull the gullible. And the gullible have been well and truly gulled.
Let me bring you to the reason why at this time of year I get ratty let me in other words, bare my financial soul. Accumulated fees for recent television services most arduously rendered came to £5,080. On that fee I paid £2,438.40 tax and I paid £390.95 PRSI. Total state deductions came to £2,829.35. My share came to £5065
Let me repeat out of fees which I earned, the State received £2,829 and I got £2,250. What cut my share below the 50 per cent mark was the PRSI £390.95. And PRSI is the tax that public servants pay at 2.2 per cent. It took 7.7 per cent of the money which I earned and handed it over to the bright lads and lasses in Finance on 2.2 per cent PRSI. The nicest bit is that I also pay tax on that 7.7 per cent, though I never saw it, and Finance gets that as well. Bloody lovely.
A colleague wrote some time ago that she was pleased to be able to pay PRSI because she was in work and her PRSI could be used to help the old and the poor and the needy. Sorry but that is not PRSI money used for those purposes should be called tax, and paid equally by all.
Impoverished envy
But of course it wasn't and it won't be, and it won't be because we have a trade union movement which is dominated by public sector special interest groups, who are perfectly happy to insist that we in the private sector fund their absurdly high pensions pensions which my colleague might in old age contemplate in impoverished envy.
We in the private sector meanwhile must fund our own pensions that is, if we feel like having a dignified old age with the freedoms which our money has been contributing to the State employees over the decades those freedoms from want and cold and hunger which are certainly not free for us.
How is it possible that this has come to pass? Lassitude largely. As I said, the public service unions are not going to rock this boat and the private sector unions are doing what, they do best, whatever that is. I note that my union the British based NUJ now insists on black quotas in committee. Nice to belong to a union so in touch, with things in Ireland.
It was illuminating to see how the professional classes dealt with the attempts by Government to bring them into fiscal line. The accountants smote Ruairi Quinn's proposal to make them legally accountable for the misdeeds of their clients and the doctors even more firmly wrecked his withholding tax, which Mr Justice Costello ruled as unconstitutional.
Notion of fairness
I have not a complete copy of his ruling, and it certainly is not necessary to deal in detail with it. What is interesting is his notion of fairness in court ruling. Of the consequences of the withholding tax, he said "This seems to me to produce results which are manifestly unfair to established taxpayers."
That description fits perfectly those who pay 7.7 per cent into the maw of Government, as does his condemnation of the withholding tax as a double payment of tax, as does his observation about one measure of taxation of doctors which "imposed a permanent measure which involved a permanently unfair method of collecting tax".
Thus might we describe PRSI, which we are promised will be reduced next week. But one thing we can be sure of it will not be fair. Public servants will doubtless say that we who pay full PRSI get all sorts of benefits. Rubbish. Those benefits disappeared for most of us long ago. They might say that because they cannot be sacked they should not pay into an insurance scheme against unemployment and that, neatly, is a most perfect violation of the contract that binds us all within a society.
This wheeze would not survive the rigorous attention of Mr Declan Costello for a minute. I have no idea what the NUJ does with my subscription other than occasionally ensure we have a few black faces around the place perhaps it could spare the time and money from its cross channel preoccupations to take a case before nice Mr Costello?