PD tax plan would cost over £2bn, says Rabbitte

THE Progressive Democrats economic package was pie in the sky, and calculated to exploit simplistically the innate wish in all legitimate taxpayers to pay less tax, according to the Minister of State, Mr Pat Rabbitte.

Mr Rabbitte, in a statement, calculated that the cost of the plan would be more than £2,000 million. On income tax alone, he said, the cost of the PDs proposals to assist disproportionately high earners was £934 million. The estimated cost of reducing employees' PRSI was £432 million and employers' PRSI was £325 million.

Mr Rabbitte calculated that the PD proposals on corporation tax would cost £280 million in a full year. The reduction in capital gains tax to 25 per cent would cost £12 million. The abolition of residential property tax would cost £10 million. This put a price tag of £1,993 million on the package, excluding the cost of their proposals on widening the tax bands.

To suggest that these proposals could be funded from growth and a privatisation programme was "utterly misleading", Mr Rabbitte stated.

When the Labour Party produced its own five year strategy for the Irish economy, then, and only then, would it have the credibility to criticise other people's policies in this area, the leader of the Progressive Democrats, Ms Harney, said yesterday.

She was responding to criticisms by the Labour TD, Mr Pat Upton, of the new PD document, An End to Tax and Spend.

Referring to Mr Upton's claim that PD policies were aimed only at the wealthy, Ms Harney asked whether a single person on £238 a week was wealthy and should be taxed at an effective marginal rate of 56 per cent, or that a married couple on £300 per week, with one earner should pay £70 a week in tax?