Budget asks working families to pay for 12 years of FF financial recklessness
Issued : Tuesday 7 April, 2009
Statement by Eamon Gilmore TD
Leader of the Labour Party, Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs & Trade
In a preliminary response to the budget the Leader of the Labour Party, Eamon Gilmore TD said:
This can best be described as a payback budget, where families on low and middle incomes are being asked to pay for twelve years of Fianna Fail financial recklessness and mismanagement of the economy.
People who pay for everything are being asked to pay again. They have already been asked to bail out the banks and now they are being asked to rescue wealthy property developers.
Families on relatively modest incomes – say a Garda and a nurse earning around €40,000 each- will now face a doubling of the income levy, an additional health levy of 2.5% and the potential loss of mortgage interest relief.
Middle income families are being turned on a financial spit, while many wealthy sectors have escaped yet again. There was not even a single mention of the scandal of the tax exiles in the budget and the urgent need to end the myriad range of tax reliefs has again been kicked into the distant future.
Families with small children are being asked to accept the abolition of the early children supplement on the basis of a promise from Fianna Fail that it will be replaced with a year’s free pre-school education. The people know well what will happen. The early childhood supplement will be gone and Fianna Fail will discover technical or procedural problems about the introduction of the pre-school scheme.
I said yesterday that the real test of this budget would be measures it took to tackle the jobs crisis and the extent to which the tax measures were fair. Minister Lenihan’s budget has failed the test on both counts.
Given the extent of the jobs crisis the measures to promote job creation are far too modest although I do welcome a number of proposals for training which are very similar to those proposed by the Labour Party.
Measures which target those on the national minimum wage and turn the screw on middle income families cannot be regarded as fair and are not acceptable to the Labour Party.
