Sir, – From your front-page article (July 4th) I see that the Government is likely to breach the 5 per cent spending increase limit in the upcoming budget (“One-off spending measures likely in budget”).
While considering the wisdom of that I was appalled to realise that “spending” – both in the context of that limit and in the opinion of The Irish Times – includes nominal reductions in the taxes imposed upon us.
The “extra spending”, it appears, will include “an adjustment of the bands and thresholds that will reduce the amount people would otherwise have paid”.
We do not yet live in a Socialist Paradise and what we earn is ours, not the State’s.
The State takes some of it away from us to finance its activities, but when it adjusts the tax system to take less, it is not “spending” anything. And certainly when the average worker has half of his additional income taken in tax, an adjustment is desperately needed.
We all – including our politicians and journalists – must stop thinking of tax reductions as a form of spending or a way to give something to taxpayers.
Not taking something away is not the same thing as giving. – Yours, etc,
WILLIAM HUNT,
Dublin 6.