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FIANNA FÁIL IS going to battle with Fine Gael over cuts to the Universal Social Charge (USC) in the Budget.
Fianna Fáil is adamant that the confidence and supply agreement with Fine Gael agrees to steadily reduce the USC for low and middle-income earners.
However, over the summer months, Fine Gael has discussed increasing the entry point for the higher rate of tax.
Last week, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said he plans to amalgamate PRSI and USC over the next few budgets.
Fine Gael’s plans
He also gave specific details about increasing the standard rate cut-off point for income tax.
“The top 10% of income earners pay 24% of total income tax and USC, the top 6% pay 49% of total income tax and USC, and the top 26% pay 83% of all income tax and USC collected in our country. It is absolutely right that those who earn more pay more and those who earn less pay less.
“But a taxation system that takes more than 50% of the income of someone just above the average industrial wage is not fair, it is not efficient and it is not sustainable. I want to gradually increase the standard rate cut-off point for income tax. We will prioritise band widening over rate reductions. I believe the issues relating to the standard cut-off point and levels of USC for those with low or middle incomes, are areas we have to make steady progress on,” said Donohoe earlier this month.
‘Mixed messages’
Ahead of the party’s think-in in Longford today, Fianna Fáil’s party leader Micheál Martin said the government have been giving “mixed messages” about tax cuts over the summer.
He said his party would be monitoring any fluctuations from Fine Gael in the agreement which is propping up the government.
“There have been promises of tax cuts. There have been promises of pension increases. One minister says it’ll be a fiver, another minister says something else. There have been all sorts of promises and to be honest it’s a bit incoherent. It’s confusing to the general public because an awful lot was happening in July/August in terms of the budget. As you get down to the wire the room for manoeuvre is becoming more narrow. Public services need improvement and delivery,” said Martin.
“We want to remain faithful to the confidence and supply arrangement,” he said, adding:
On the tax front it’s very clear in the confidence and supply that both parties are signed up for a reduction in the universal social charge.
The most effective one would be reducing the 5% to 4.5%. That would take in 1.3 million people. It would be more effective than what Fine Gael are proposing which will take in far fewer people on higher incomes.
We would benefit people on a wider income, particularly low to middle incomes. Anything up to €70,000 would benefit from our proposal. We believe that subject to the available funding that’s our priority. That would be the most effective way of dealing with tax.
A deal’s a deal says Fianna Fáil
He said if Fine Gael want to introduce tax reductions the party will have adhere to what’s in the confidence and supply agreement.
The agreement does specify: “The government must introduce reductions in the Universal Social Charge on a fair basis with an emphasis on low and middle income earners.”
“It’s very clear from the outset that what underpins our support for the budget is the confidence and supply,” he said, adding that the document is clear cut about what both parties signed up to in order to get a government formed.
The confidence and supply is very clear and both parties signed up. I’ve been getting mixed signals from Fine Gael over the summer because at certain times they are talking about their long-term plans. They acknowledged the existing of the confidence and supply in some of their comments during the summer.
But we’re very clearly focused on what we’ve signed up to in the confidence and supply agreement. This will be the second budget of that confidence and supply and we believe the commitment by both parties should be respected.
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He’s full of shįte, that’s a five cent coin.
U should go to Speechsavers.
Most people imagine that evolution began with Darwin but all Darwin did was introduce a speculative cause for evolution and the calamitous survival of the fittest as a ‘law of nature’ which includes the curtailing of savage populations through famine (it came about 15 years after the Great Famine so we get included as a less favorable race ).
Evolutionary biology began with evolutionary geology by an Catholic Archbishop Nicolas Steno who actually drew the conclusion from shark’s teeth found in rock strata far removed from the sea -
http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/histgeol/steno/steno.htm
It progressed through William Smith who showed older rock contained more simpler lifeforms and newer rock more complex forms -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Smith_(geologist)
The old ideas of a global flood came from observing that marine fossils were found on mountaintops and the ancient authors wove narratives around these observations such as Gilgamesh or Noah’s flood .
Mention evolution and Darwin’s picture comes up but this is an accident of empirical propaganda normally directed against the Biblical texts however a more expansive view generally puts it all right.
@Gerald Kelleher: Darwin spelt it out to the world scientifically very well. That is why he would be more famous than earlier understandings. Anyway at this point what does it matter?
@Gerald Kelleher: And it was Darwins cousin, Galton, who turned ‘survival of the fittest’ to mean a treatise on eugenics.
@Séamus Longshanks: The Southern rednecks in the States could live with the idea that negroes were yard apes, what they couldn’t live with was that their white skins were linked to monkeys with negroes forming a level closer to monkeys then they were.
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” Darwin 1871
You will never,ever understand the rationale behind the mass extermination in WWII without the awful attempt to insert a cause into evolutionary biology which was cause neutral up to then .
” A lopsided education has helped to encourage that illusion. Man must realize that a fundamental law of necessity reigns throughout the whole realm of Nature and that his existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife. He will then feel that there cannot be a separate law for mankind in a world in which planets and suns follow their orbits, where moons and planets trace their destined paths, where the strong are always the masters of the weak and where those subject to such laws must obey them or be destroyed.” Hitler
I am full sure that more than a few can see the academic whitewash on evolutionary biology and no ’cause’ is required to explain evolution as a ‘law’ or anything else.
@Gerald Kelleher: if you really want to be thorough, then you should mention the first musings on evolution which was in 600BC by the Greeks, also medieval Islamic scholars posited the idea of survival of the fittest. However as per the previous poster, it is all irrelevant. Lamarck was the first to actually create the evolution hypothesis with his transmutation theory but Darwin did expand on all that went before and consolidated the idea of a tree of life which is truly the modern theory we accept today.
@John B: I trust the reader to spot that they replaced negroes in Darwin’s original proposal with Neanderthals to make it fit for contemporary consumption. What a bunch of academic thugs who take no responsibility for how that ‘law of nature’ played out in the gas chambers !.
The full title is not ‘On the origin of the species’ it is the “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”.
I am delighted that a few readers have enough sense to make the distinction be they ever so silent.
Nicely said. Also this Weltenschauung allowed both the Afircan people enslaved in America and German people who were Jewish to be renders “socially dead” I.e nasally alienated, violently dominated, and generally dishonoured.
From that point, the “I-It” relationship was established between one group of humanity and another, with PRediCtable outcomes for the latter.
@Gerald Kelleher: if I posted this comment my wife would say it was too long.
@Sean: Here you go Sean, let me show you your Irish place in the academic world using images in case your small brain can’t handle two sentences -
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Scientific_racism_irish.jpg
For those who can go beyond two sentences, this is unfinished business. At least a few here are aware that when they hear those pseudo-
authoritative upper class English accents of Farage or Dawkins that sometimes there is trouble.
Ireland was close to the equator? That must have been nice. Though probably not so good for the spuds.
With a coat hanger beside it
And to think our Galaxy has made only one revolution/spin in that time.
The second last paragraph doesn’t make sense (“The main fossils we find in these rocks, there’s not a huge diversity of them so it’s always been interpreted as a very difficult environment so finding a shark tooth, especially one that size, that’s quite a large shark. It tells us that there was a lot going on that there was a wider diversity than we previously thought.”)
@Tom Sheridan: could do with some more punctuation alright.
The church is cool about this discovery.
An apex predator of 70cm ???
@Catherine O’Connor: Was wondering about that myself.
Mini-Megalodons. leprechaun sharks. Figures. We’d never get the big ones.
It is commonly misquoted as being ‘the survival of the fittest’ whereas in fact it is the ‘survival of the species that are most adaptable to change’
Also known as those most able to pass on their genes successfully yea unto the nth generation (but on behalf of all parents today here’s hoping that’s at least as far as FTL travel after that it’s a lottery). We’ve come a long way in 200,000 years only, even 8,000,000 since separating from common chimp ancestors, and in 14 billion years of the Universe existing you’d imagine a Very Large Number of civilisations like ours arose – purely on the mathematical odds – but hit the Big Filter and extinguished themselves thru uncontrolled technology. If as a species we could survive from now to development of some space folding version of the Enterprise warp speed would be where we hit infinity and beyond. Like to think some posterity might be there then. Must ease up on the popular science bukes.
Don’t think that shark would have stood a chance if “Dusty the dolphin” was around back then.
@Al coholic:
Or Davy Fitz doing a wobbly.
Lol…. call the media quick. Are you serious.
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