Budget, taxes and squeezed incomes
Deputy Boyd Barrett attacked Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil over rising hardship, low real incomes and poverty despite large profits. The Tánaiste defended Government tax cuts and spending increases, said more fiscal envelopes would be set out soon, and accused the Deputy of wanting to kill enterprise.
People Before Profit. Does the Tánaiste think it is a bit rich that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Ministers are tearing lumps out of one another at the moment saying how much they will help the squeezed middle and ordinary people in the forthcoming budget when it was collectively Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael that squeezed them in the first place? I ask the question particularly when one considers Unite's report that, for example, the average worker has lost about €4,000 in real income over the past two years and that we have 952,000 people living at risk of poverty while massive profits are made by supermarkets, energy companies and property vultures. Will we get some serious promises from the Government about the budget that it will increase incomes to lift pensioners, social welfare recipients and people on disability payments out of poverty, in which they currently live, and that all workers will see income increases to compensate for the profiteering and the wage cuts in real terms they have suffered over the past two years?
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Last year we announced about €1.1 billion in tax cuts and about €6 billion in additional public expenditure in respect of a whole range of services. Shortly before the summer recess, in the summer economic statement we will give the financial envelopes as to how much more we can spend on services and how much we can do as regards taxation. That taxation will take many forms. It is not just one form of taxation. We are committed to having a taxation package for the rental sector to make sure that more people continue to rent out their homes and that those people stay in that market, which is important, and that renters get a break as well in the budget. All of that will have to be collectively agreed by the Government over the time between now and budget time.
The Deputy's policies overall on employment and his model of the economy, I think, would destroy jobs in this country-----
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-----and lead to investment flowing out of the country. His model is to kill enterprise. That seems to be his view.
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My view is that we should end the poverty.