Should we pay more tax to have a better society?

Steven Barrett said:
And where do you cut? Less police? There's not enough. Less medical? There's not enough? Or is it just the civil servants and paper pushers you want to get rid of?
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not less doctors but improve IT infrastructure and incentives for right behaviour so we can improve services. Not less police but less bureaucracy and effective judicial system to deter crime. Make paper pusher accountable for making wrong choice or bad practices.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
One area where we could definitely do some work is paying tax just to get it back in services.

For example, the Fair Deal Scheme. Why should the taxpayer be paying the nursing home costs of people who can well afford it themselves? The argument put forward is "Well old people paid taxes all their lives, so it's the least we can do.".

I think it would be much better if the state paid for nursing homes for those who can't afford it but the rest pay for themselves.

There are thousands of posts on askboutmoney from wealthy people or their children about how to minimise their contribution to the Fair Deal Scheme. I think that anyone who owns their own home should pay for their own nursing home. It shouldn't be for me to pay for it so that their children can inherit more.
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This could lead to people being neglected in homes, without the right support.
Sad to say, it happens in the UK. Families will push for their elderly relative to stay in the family home, with limited support and out of the nursing home. Even though they, almost certainly, need to be in a fully staffed nursing home. There is no limit in the UK and the full value of the property can be taken to cover nursing home fees.
Better to just increase inheritance tax and reduce the threshold.
 
Allpartied said:
This could lead to people being neglected in homes, without the right support.
Sad to say, it happens in the UK. Families will push for their elderly relative to stay in the family home, with limited support and out of the nursing home. Even though they, almost certainly, need to be in a fully staffed nursing home.
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You don't have to go to the UK to find examples of that. It's absolutely rife in this country.
 
T McGibney said:
You don't have to go to the UK to find examples of that. It's absolutely rife in this country.
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Indeed, so maybe free universal care for the elderly, financed by increased inheritance tax is the way.
It can be a lottery if Joe in the 500k house pops off in his sleep and Tom, in the house next door, gets dementia and needs years of professional care.
 
Allpartied said:
Indeed, so maybe free universal care for the elderly, financed by increased inheritance tax is the way.
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So this is the dilemma.

On the one hand, the government should tax less and let the people who can afford stuff to pay for it themselves. For example, let them pay for their nursing home care.

On the other hand, we should spend more on those who genuinely need it and can't afford it so that means taxing more.

But others say - no, let the state provide everything despite it being more wasteful than people spending their own money.

An example of this is the number of people I have told to go to The Chemists Warehouse for half price drugs. They say that it saves them no money as the state pays for everything over €80 a month, so if their bill is €200, they gain nothing by having it reduced to €100.

Brendan
 
Brendan Burgess said:
An example of this is the number of people I have told to go to The Chemists Warehouse for half price drugs. They say that it saves them no money as the state pays for everything over €80 a month, so if their bill is €200, they gain nothing by having it reduced to €100.

Brendan
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An interesting example.

It suggests we should move to a % reimbursement, maybe with floor / ceiling.
 
T McGibney said:
Wouldn't that be an incentive to shove dad, mum or uncle Cyril into a nursing home at the earliest possible opportunity, regardless of whether or not they actually need to be there?

What could possibly go wrong?
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Well, mum or dad, or Cyril, would still have agency, their own decision making. They might be pressurised by some, but I doubt it. In the UK family members see their only hope of inheritiance disappearing year by year, if their parent is in a care home. My parents did not own property, so I'm not biased in this, but I do have some sympathy for people who are in that position.
Tax is designed to redistribute wealth, created by all of us, and we should strive to ensure our resources are managed in the fairest way possible.
Universal healthcare and education are provided by the state, so why not a safety net of social care for the elderly.
 
Allpartied said:
Universal healthcare and education are provided by the state, so why not a safety net of social care for the elderly.
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Why should universal healthcare be provided by the state?

There are pros and cons to it.

I think I would agree with this in theory or philosophically. But in practice, it doesn't work in Ireland. We are not good at managing such large scale projects.

There are risks in private health care as well but, personally, I am much happier relying on the private healthcare system than the public healthcare system.

When I need social care, I would like to pay for it myself.

I know a lot of wealth elderly people and their children complain "The HSE will only provide one hour a day of visits". I look at them in astonishment knowing that they and their parents are very well off and could easily afford to pay a carer to visit a few times a day, but they prefer to leave their parents without the care they need. Madness.
 
Allpartied said:
Well, mum or dad, or Cyril, would still have agency, their own decision making. They might be pressurised by some, but I doubt it.
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Do you not see that the pressure may come from them, particularly as the State's provision of free-at-the-point-of-use services tends to entail shortages and waiting lists?

It's easy to see a scenario that fit and healthy elderly people might rush to get themselves free nursing home accommodation and care on the grounds that once they have it, it can't be taken away from them, and if they defer doing so until they actually need nursing care, it'll be too late to find something without an inordinate waiting list.
 
extopia said:
At a meeting with a solicitor recently, I was struck by how, in a conversation about inheritance and tax, the professional advisor assumed that my default position would be to minimise my own ‘tax bill’ in relation to my potential inheritances, and to minimise my children’s tax bill in relation to theirs.
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This is the entirety correct approach.

Every individual should use all available mechanisms to minimize the amount of tax they pay.

The government are entirely capable of collecting the required amount of taxes to run the state.

If any individual feels the desire to hand over extra cash to the state, they are free to include an Exchequer donation when making their will.
 
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I've paid north of €1M in taxes over the past 20 years and got very little in return from the state for it. Before that, I lived in Germany for many years and recall that the taxation rates were similar but the services that I received (healthcare, public transport, public infrastructure, pay related state pension) were far better than in Ireland. Our public service and government waste far too much tax payers money and are inefficient and often poorly run / nepotism / vested interests. Giving them more tax would only result in more money being wasted by various government departments. Look at our health service which recieves as much/ if not more money per head from the state than countries that actually have a good public healthcare system but 15+ years after the A&E trolley list started they still havent manged to solve the issue.
 
I'd have zero confidence in our officials to invest / spend the increased revenue appropriately, due to a combination of skulduggery and stupidity.

Sadly, that means I'd be against the concept, even though I do look on at Scandinavian countries regularly, and dream of what might have been, here in Ireland.

Finland recently ranked 1st, on the world rankings, for peoples happiness. 8 of the top ten countries, were relatively small, with populations under 15m. Ireland ranked 17th (source: RTE, 20.03.2024).

... That's a pretty poor rating for Ireland, in my mind, while it illustrates that size of population wouldn't prevent us from doing a lot better
 
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Protocol said:
To be fair to public services, many of them can't or don't experience the same increase in productivity as seen in industry.

Your industry, and many others, like making electronics, toys, etc. experience economies-of-scale, automation, leading to large increases in productivity, and falling unit costs.

In contrast, nursing, education, medecine, police, etc., are very labour intensive, and don't see the same increases in productivity.

This is known as Baumol's cost disease.

It's why I can buy a chicken at 4 euro, cheaper than ever before, but the price of a haircut keeps rising. A barber can't cut any more heads compared to 50 years ago.


However, in saying all this, we could still do with much more EHR, automation, ICT in the public service, especially in the HSE.
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The more layers of bureaucracy there are in an organisation the more waste there is and the greater the opportunities there are for efficiency. The Barber doesn’t have layers of management and forms to fill in. He just cuts hair. Talk to anyone who works in a hospital or in any relatively senior level in the HSE and they will list off teams of ways that things could be improved. LEAN is just listening to those people, measuring the waste and implementing what they suggest.

My understanding of Baumol's cost is that it is wage increases in those labour intensive jobs that haven’t increased productivity due to labour cost increases in other parts of the economy which have seen high levels of productivity increases. In Irelands case that would be high wages in multinational companies which are highly productive in both labour and capital causing wage increases in the State sector which is grossly inefficient and wasteful.
 
bish123 said:
not less doctors but improve IT infrastructure and incentives for right behaviour so we can improve services
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The lack of facilities in GP practices is also a good example of what’s wrong. In other countries GPs will perform minor surgeries, stitch cuts etc. The unwillingness of Irish GPs to do that sort of work or to invest in their business so that they can provide a better service to their customers (without handouts from the taxpayer) is emblematic of the problem with the health service.
 
Flybytheseat said:
I've paid north of €1M in taxes over the past 20 years and got very little in return from the state for it. Before that, I lived in Germany for many years and recall that the taxation rates were similar but the services that I received (healthcare, public transport, public infrastructure, pay related state pension) were far better than in Ireland. Our public service and government waste far too much tax payers money and are inefficient and often poorly run / nepotism / vested interests. Giving them more tax would only result in more money being wasted by various government departments. Look at our health service which recieves as much/ if not more money per head from the state than countries that actually have a good public healthcare system but 15+ years after the A&E trolley list started they still havent manged to solve the issue.
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Similar experience living in France. Paid similar levels of tax to Ireland, but the benefits received were far better. Healthcare, infrastructure, public services, social insurance, all done to a much higher standard. You felt you got value for what you were paying in. I had an Italian colleague who thought similarly, so it would seem this isn't a universal throughout Europe.

The major difference I see here is that if you're a higher earner there's a narrative that on top of hefty taxes, you should still be paying for services. Whereas in France, that narrative didn't exist. You'll pay a high rate of tax as you're a higher earner, but you'll also then benefit from the same services as everyone else (low cost healthcare & medicines, efficient public transport, heavily subsidised childcare, excellent social insurance etc). There would be better acceptance of higher tax rates here, if the same approach was adopted.
 
I make a clear distinction between front line service providers who should be fully supported and layers of admin and bureaucracy built up in the public sector over decades. I’ve worked predominantly in the private sector but spent 3 years in the public sector 12 yrs ago and it was an eye opener. There were some good people there but others who were spending a career doing what we now call quiet quitting with no consequences as they clocked up a full public service pension for very little output. The proportion of sub-par performers was far in excess of what would be tolerated in the private sector. Of course from junior officers to Sec Gens, there is no motivation to upset the apple cart. I believe the biggest wasted opportunity of the crash was that the coalition didn’t blow up and restructure the non- front line public sector at a time when they could have used the Troika as cover. I believe in progressive taxes but don’t want to pay more to fund the broken inefficient permanent public sector admin and bureaucracy.
 
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