Political promises aplenty on the election trail

One week into the election campaign and torrents of abuse are flowing in every direction. In the clamour for political roadkill, everything and anything will do.

Fianna Fáil accuses Fine Gael of an open-ended tax cut with its plan to eliminate the universal social charge. Fine Gael accuses Fianna Fáil of having no jobs plan. Labour accuses Fianna Fáil of a tax plan to reward the wealthy.

All three of them have in their sights Sinn Féin, a party which claims now to be the unimpeachable guardian of fiscal probity. As if.

On and on it goes. Renua leader Lucinda Creighton took a pop at her erstwhile Fine Gael colleagues yesterday, saying its plan to scrap USC was redolent of “Bertie-style showtime” politics. Memories, eh.

Here’s Lucinda: “Just over a year ago, speaking in an Oireachtas debate on the USC, Michael Noonan was unequivocal about his position on USC and stated then that he saw ‘the USC as a permanent feature of the personal taxation system’. What a difference an election makes to the sound management of our public finances.”

Noonan did indeed utter those words so that’s a perfectly-formed political point to the Renua leader, who wants to be the people’s watchdog in the next government. Lucinda wants the law changed to allow the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council cost manifestos and determine what she calls the “true” fiscal space, which is “not the one imagined by the politicians for election purposes”.

What, in this context, are we to make of Renua’s storied “flat tax” plan? The tiny party, which makes a virtue of sound public finance management, has already acknowledged that the overall tax return in its plan would drop by up to €4.5 billion before the returns suddenly recover because of “broad and dynamic” effects.

That’s every bit as much of a whopper in terms of political promise as anything uttered by the non-watchdogs on the campaign.

They’re all at it, every one of them.