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An Rud Eile's avatar

RE: wealth taxes - the ESRI report 'Options for raising tax revenue' reinforces your point that most known irish wealth is in housing and any wealth tax which excludes property will raise minimal amounts. For reference current property tax income is circa - 500m pa. applying a wealth tax excluding homes up to 1m would bring in less than 54m. Therefore proprty tax is effectively a wealth tax in Ireland. (at least of known wealth whcih can't be easily offshored.)

For comparison the ESRI assumes - increasing the zero VAT rate to the standard VAT rate would bring in 2.4bn and increasing the reduced VAT rate to the standard rate would bring in 2.2bn - which would be regressive but could be offset with increases to existing allowances.

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Jim Power & Chris Johns's avatar

Thanks Micheal, it’s always important to quantify the policy debate, use data, use evidence. Sadly, we live in era of evidence-free policy assertions.

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