Infrastructure: Costing too much and rewarding so few

I am not about to say the Luas isn’t great, having used the service several times I find it to be more efficient than the Dart or bus and in the areas that it serves it beats other forms of transport hands down for speed in getting there, that is really the golden aim of public transport, make it cheap, fast, reliable and it will work.

The issue I have however, and that we will cover today is that the Luas went well over budget and in terms of a capital project we have rewarded the people along the Luas line with unearned capital gains which will never be taxed and that gain came implicitly at the expense of the taxpayer.

I was thinking of canvassing the houses along the Luas line to ask them if they felt that ‘bank bailouts’ were a rip off and if the tax payer should be rewarded for such actions given that the state were paying for it, then to ask them if they …

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The Irish Tax System

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for pint and the bill for all of them comes to €100. If they split their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first man (the poorest) would pay nothing, [he’s unemployed] The next three would pay nothing  [they have jobs but don’t earn above the minimum threshold of c.€18,300 for tax.] The fifth man would pay €1. He does pay some tax when he passes the minimum threshold. The sixth would pay €3. (lower industrial wage earner) The seventh would pay €6. (average industrial wage earner c.€35,400) The eighth would pay €12. (above average industrial wage earner – more than c.€35,400) The ninth would pay €30. (earner who is well into the 41% tax band) The tenth man (the richest) would pay €48. (spends almost all of their tax paying time in the 41% tax band)

So they split the bill in this way, satisfied that they were all paying to their …

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