Finance Bill misguided attempt to bribe financial and corporate elites ...

Bill shows bankruptcy and short-termism of government?s strategy for economy and jobs

In a statement, responding to the publication today by the government of the Finance Bill, Richard Boyd Barrett TD, Finance spokesperson for the ULA, said the bill was a misguided attempt to bribe corporate and financial elites when it should have been used to deliver genuinely progressive tax reform.

Deputy Boyd Barrett said that the bill moved the country in the opposite direction to that which it needed to go, and was typical of the bankruptcy and short-termism of the government?s strategy for dealing with the country?s financial and economic crisis.

Deputy Boyd Barrett said that the bill was entirely based on a failed economic doctrine of incentivising private markets and corporate elites and would not put the country back on a sound economic and financial footing, but would in fact make the country more prone to further shocks in the anarchic and volatile financial markets.

He said the proposed tax breaks for corporate high-flyers and the financial services sector linked in with the equally misguided government position of refusing to sign-up to the proposed European Financial Transaction Tax.

Deputy Boyd Barrett said the bill should instead have introduced progressive wealth and income taxes on top earners and the super-wealthy, to move the country onto a more sustainable financial footing and to finance strategic public investment and job creation.

Richard Boyd Barrett TD said: ?Really this government just doesn?t seem to get it. We have an unprecedented financial and economic crisis in this country and across Europe. That crisis was caused by the profit hunger, greed and anarchy in the financial markets and among corporate elites. And yet our government?s budget response to that is to offer more rewards, bribes and taxbreaks to those same financial markets and corporate elites. It beggars belief.

The government says offering these tax goodies to financial services companies and high-paid corporate executives will create jobs. In reality it will further make the economic fortunes of the state even more vulnerable to the absolutely inevitable future shocks in the volatile and crisis ridden financial markets.

We need to diversify our economy to develop sustainable and rational industry and enterprise ? producing goods and services actually needed by real human beings. We precisely need to avoid over dependence on a single sector, especially one as crisis-ridden as the area of financial services.

There will be more shocks in the international financial system and wholesale collapse cannot be ruled out. In this context basing our strategy on opting out of attempts to tax this sector with the FTT, and worse giving bribes and incentives to increase our dependence on it, is really crazy.

This has echoes of the property madness, where sane onlookers were saying: rein in the developers and don?t base our whole economy on this property madness?, and they were ridiculed.

Now we have something of the same attitude from this government when it comes to financial services, corporate elites and the so-called export growth model. It?s another accident waiting to happen

What we need to do, instead of depending on anarchic markets and corporate greed to resolve our economic problem, is to re-distribute the huge wealth that is concentrated in the hands of corporate elites and millionaires through wealth taxes and progressive income taxation, and use that money to finance strategic public investment and job creation.?

(Photo: Greg Manahan)

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Source: http://richardboydbarrett.ie/2012/02/08/finance-bill-misguided-attempt-to-bribe-financial-and-corporate-elites-instead-of-delivering-progressive-tax-reform/

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