Happy Pocket Money Day

And: Against PAYE

It’s budget day, which means those of us who write about Irish current affairs for a living are supposed to care. We’re supposed to tune in to the Dáil, where everybody is in their best suit for the big day, and parse the holy writ as it drops from the tongues of our benefactors. A tenner for granny. Fifteen quid a week for the layabout down the road who’s spent his life on the dole. Fifty a month for the income tax payer. Five grand for the first time buyers, who’ll spend it all bidding against the other first time buyers, so it’s really five grand for the developers.

Whatever. Who cares?

Some of you do, I suppose. Better to get a tenner than have to fork one over.

But ultimately this whole system is built on a single rotten edifice, which is Pay as You Earn. This turns your employer into the state’s tax collector, meaning that Simon and Jack never have to put their hands directly into your pocket. They’ve already lifted the cash from you before you ever get your share.

This diabolical, genius, near perfect system is one of the biggest blights on a democratic society. It can never be abolished. The problem is that it was created in the first place.

Consider what it does.

First, it takes all the pain out of paying taxes. You don’t miss what you never really got in the first place. Imagine how different the politics of this country would be if, for example, every PAYE worker had the system abolished, got to keep all of their own money, and then had to write a big cheque at the end of the year. Thirty grand in some cases. Fifty or sixty in others. Even a cheque for ten grand isn’t fun to sign, when you’re getting nothing for it other than the privilege of seeing ads on the telly telling you to not drink and drive (a subsidy to RTE, if you’re wondering).

Second, it divorces the citizen from the state almost perfectly. It means that you have no feel for how much is being taken from you. Psychologically, I suspect it means you are much more blasé about the waste and the mis-spending because you don’t feel it, as such, as being “your” money that’s wasted.

Third, it pre-empts and prevents protest. It’s not viable, in Ireland, to have a mass disobedience campaign where people respond to some scandal by saying “we’re not paying any more”. Your leverage – collective leverage – over the levers of power is drastically reduced. There’s no mass movement that can starve or weaken the state by denying it funding.

Now you might say – and indeed have a very good point – that this is all better than the alternative. That it makes the state’s income predictable. That it takes away the pain and misery of employing accountants. That it gets fewer people in legal trouble for tax evasion.

You’d be right. As I say, it can’t be abolished. Much like leaving the EU, the immediate costs of doing so would simply be too high for the system to bear.

But we should talk about the costs. One of the reasons we have so much waste in this country, both literal in the sense of wasteful spending and figuratively in the sense of spending on useless things (Are you Emergency Ready?) is that it is so easy for the Government to acquire the public’s money, using a system designed – allegedly – for taxpayer convenience.

It’s not really for your convenience, it’s for theirs.

Now, circling back to the stupid budget: It’s the usual, really. The Politicians have done what the politicians always do, which is to divide us all into little interest groups and throw us all a bone. There was something for your sports club. There was something for the childcare moms. There was something for the disabled. I don’t know if, in the end, the hundred quid for the teenagers to go to a concert was in there.

I hope it was, because that’s the Irish budget in sum: Pocket money day. The politicians give you your few quid if you’ve been good.

What there wasn’t, and what there never is, was a plan to use the resources of the state to solve any particular problem: Five grand for first time buyers won’t make a hair of difference to the housing market on a macro level – the only purpose is to buy some votes. Same with the dole tenner or the home-heating oil freeze. There’s no strategy here, just a voter appeasement scheme.

There is so much that could be done in Ireland, if politicians had imagination. Instead, I write this having just received news that a relative who went to a public hospital last week emerged from it with a potentially fatal infection. The HSE budget last year? €26.9billion. Or €3.07million, every single hour.

If we don’t feel ourselves paying it, we’ll never be as angry about it as we should be.