The People’s Budget, published by the Communist Party of Ireland, starts from what working people need now, and goes on to ask what the country has to show for public money once it has been spent.
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Every October the same argument comes around. The Government announces its package, the opposition parties publish their alternatives, and the country debates whether the pension should rise by a few euro more, whether a tax band should be widened and whether the very wealthy should be asked to pay a little extra. Those arguments matter, because for a family choosing between the electricity bill and the childcare bill this month there is nothing abstract about a Budget. However, the alternatives on offer tend to be longer shopping lists, spending more here and taxing more there, while the question of who owns the country’s land, homes, energy and industry is left exactly where it was.
A government could tax wealth more heavily, raise every welfare payment and pour billions into public services for five years, and still hand over a country in which housing depends on developers and landlords, jobs and revenue depend on a handful of foreign multinationals, and the big decisions are taken in boardrooms abroad. Taxation can change who gets what, but on its own it cannot change who owns what, and it is ownership that decides where power lies.
Subsidising the landlords
Housing shows the difference better than anything, because the State spends a fortune on rent supports, and for the family receiving them that help can be essential when it keeps a roof over their heads. But follow the money and it passes straight through to the landlord, whether an individual or an investment fund, and the same bill comes through the door the following month, so that public money is in effect subsidising private landlords, bolstering their finances and keeping housing in private hands year after year. The same money put into a home the public builds and keeps would house that family just as well and leave an asset behind.
The fact of the matter is that the same circuit runs right through the economy. The State buys in private hospital capacity because it lacks enough of its own, subsidies get wind farms built while the asset and its income stay in private hands, bus routes are tendered out to private operators, and grants, tax reliefs and publicly funded research help firms to make profits the public never shares in. The People’s Budget rests on a simple argument: that public funds must build public assets, so that the economy depends less on imported energy and food, on the private car and on foreign capital for its industry. To break that dependency, we have to break with the circuits through which public money now flows.
Money that builds
None of this needs money the State does not have. Its surpluses rest on corporation tax, nearly 60 per cent of it paid by just ten firms, and without those windfall receipts the Department of Finance reckons this year’s surplus would be a deficit of about €12 billion. The Government’s answer is to park billions of that windfall in savings funds, while hundreds of thousands of people wait for a first hospital appointment.
The People’s Budget shows how €4.25 billion of it could be invested in renewable energy and public enterprise, because temporary money must build things that last. It also shows how €2.9 billion a year more for incomes and services could be paid for by dropping most of the Government’s planned tax cuts, and by taxing the highest incomes, capital gains and inheritances.
“Tax the billionaires” is a fair demand, and the programme gives it teeth with a levy on net wealth above €3 million. However, it must be stressed that a billion euro is not earned. A worker on the median wage who saved every cent would need more than twenty thousand years to reach it, because wealth on that scale comes from ownership rather than work. That is why the levy could be paid in shares held by a public fund, so that taxing great wealth also begins to change who owns it.
A programme, not a shopping list
This is where the People’s Budget departs most clearly from the usual alternative, because each year is designed to make the next one stronger. Land bought in the first year carries homes in the second, apprentices trained this year build next year, and money repaid to a National Development Bank is lent out again, so that over five Budgets the programme can grow into a public alternative large enough to free people from dependence on landlords and private markets. A planned public system can also keep open the rural bus route, the post office and the factory a community depends on, because it judges the whole system rather than demanding that every part turn a profit.
Five years is the lifespan of a government, and so is the fair test of any party that asks for our vote. Its working targets include 18,000 to 20,000 public homes a year, more than half of our electricity under public, community or social control, and about 40,000 new public childcare places.
Who carries it forward
This is not a manifesto for the next coalition that calls itself progressive, and nothing in it waits for one to take office, because what it sets out is what working people must organise for and win. It is a minimum programme for maximum participation, made up of demands that working people can put now to every candidate. That is why it treats workers’ organisation as part of the country’s infrastructure, calling for the repeal of the 1990 Industrial Relations Act and a law that guarantees the right to organise and to strike.
Not one of these demands will be won without a fight. Every serious reform cuts across someone’s profit and will be resisted from inside the State as well as outside it, and capital will fight tooth and nail to win back whatever it loses. Budgetary measures can begin to break the circuits that keep the country dependent, but ultimately the working class must become large enough, organised enough and united enough in its goals to break them for good. The People’s Budget does not need to settle the final question of ownership in advance, but it creates the material conditions in which that question can be confronted. In the end, we cannot tax our way out of class struggle.
So take the People’s Budget into your union branch, your tenants’ group, your community organisation and your campaign, argue over it and improve it, and put one plain question to every candidate who comes to your door: will you stop public money going into private assets, and start building public ones?
A People’s Budget is not ultimately judged by how much money it redistributes, but by whether it begins to redistribute economic power.
