It seems quite a while since I was last speaking on this matter. We had quite an interesting session in between; I do not think certain contributions added anything to the matter under discussion, but we had a most interesting hour and a half. Let me try now to get back on an even keel. Deputy Carter talked about this being a social age and about the Minister having increased the income a dependent relative might have while the person supporting that dependent relative could still get credit for income tax on £60. The way Deputy Carter was talking one would think this would make a millionaire out of that person. One would think it was worth about £1,000 a year. The fact is it is income tax on £60 and, before the war, it would have been the equivalent of income tax on £125 at the very least, perhaps on £150, and, therefore, this income tax relief on £60 which is supposed to be so valuable is really, relatively speaking, worth little or nothing. Before the year is out it will be worth still less.
Earlier today, when the Minister was not here, there were references to the £ floating. I am afraid it is floating downwards or, as I said myself, it is sinking; the £ will be allowed to sink rather than float. Strangely enough, that is a word with a peculiar meaning in the financial world. Speaking for myself, I am all in favour of floating the £. I assume it will float, though I am doubtful that it will. So long as it floats I am all in favour of free exchange rates. Rigidity in exchange rates is like the Fianna Fáil Party's monolithic attitude. A few weeks ago here I was pulling the Minister's leg about something that had happened at a meeting in Europe and I asked him what had happened to the agreement made before last Christmas. The Minister said that this was all past. What happened to the agreement in which he took part a month or five weeks ago? How is it doing? I think the Minister knows how it is doing. The Minister is having a tough time. He is doing a great deal of hard work. Actually, I have a soft heart though I throw out an occasional barb. I do not like punching holes in a man who has been working as hard as the Minister has been recently.
Deputy Tunney talked about reliefs being granted. The one relief that should have come—it should have been give years ago—is the raising of the level at which income tax is imposed. That is the one relief which would be worth something to the ordinary worker. It is outrageous that a man with £1,200 a year is still paying income tax, even if he has two children. This is a disgrace. The same man pre-war, with no children, was free of income tax. This is the real disgrace in our income tax code.
The other disgrace is the exemption about which I was speaking before business was interrupted. Those who own the only real wealth in this country are the people who own the land. People may talk about mines, real or imaginary, about factories and everything else, but the only real wealth is the land. The idea that people who work the land and make large incomes out of it should be free of income tax is one of the greatest absurdities in modern times. It is proof that we as a people are conservative in the extreme. It is the right foot of what I was talking about a while ago, on which there is little pressure.
If we had a generally progressive social outlook we would insist on wealthy farmers paying their income tax. I come from a farming background and I also did some farming myself for about five years when it was neither profitable nor popular. It was during the war years and I was looking after a grazing farm; I had to till 30 per cent of the land and that was no joke when there were no preparations for doing the job. To make the situation much worse, just the same as the situation about which protests were made in the United States, wealthy people have devious ways of getting out of paying income tax. Legal and illegal evasion of tax both occur. The wealthy people are better at using the legal methods of evading tax, whereas the less wealthy people very often have to use illegal methods.
It shocks me to think that a single person who now has only half the real income that a man had before the war should be paying a sizeable amount of income tax. It shocks me still more that a man with a wife and two children should still be paying a sizeable amount of income tax on an income of £1,200 a year, when pre-war a married couple with no children, with the equivalent of £1,200 a year, paid no income tax. This is the disgrace of this Finance Bill. Everything else in the Finance Bill is only dotting i's and crossing t's and messing around with the way these Bills are drafted, this deplorable method of legislation over the years resulting in the fact that no ordinary person can understand this code of legislation at all. This is a great trick. It suits the fellows who make their incomes out of construing the Acts on behalf of the taxpayer and it suits the fellows who administer the system because they cannot be put on the spot by any ordiary person. They are not subject to the ordinary sanctions to which a civil servant administering any other code is subject.
It was said by one of the Fianna Fáil Deputies who spoke tonight that it was very hard to say anything about this Bill and that was proof that the Bill was good. This is not the case, of course. The reason why it is impossible to say anything about this Bill is that the Bill contains little or nothing. The Minister talks about 50,000 people being taken out of the net. Is it 650,000 or 700,000 people who are now in the net? I remember quite well—it seems only yesterday—when there were fewer than 200,000 people in this net. The smart aleck answer from those benches will be: "People are so much wealthier now than they were then that they are all paying income tax." That is not the reason at all. The reason is that the value of money has gone down and down and income tax in real terms has gone up and up and up, and it has left the unfortunate worker who is trying to feed his family and clothe and educate them, in the direct position. To go back to what we were discussing for the last hour and a half, that is the reason why the people who live in the city have no use at all for the Fianna Fáil Party, and they are right, because ordinary decency would require that some bow should be made in the direction of exempting from income tax people who are at subsistence level. As that tough old man, Ricardo, said so long ago, subsistence varies from time to time and what is subsistence level in one age is not subsistence level in another age. Accordingly, many people are paying income tax at present who in any age would not have had to pay income tax, and they would not have had to pay income tax before the first world war, let alone before the second world war, although the level of income tax at that time was 6d or 1s in the £.
That is the aspect of this Bill that I deplore. It is no use the Minister saying: "If I reduced the rate of tax or raise the level of exemption it would cost me tens of millions." It would cost him so many tens of millions because he is collecting this year £175 million in income tax. This is far and away the biggest part of the revenue. Up to comparatively recently, ten years ago, the income that came from customs and excise was very much bigger than the amount of money that came into the Exchequer from income tax. The whole thing has changed and has changed by the deliberate policy of not altering the exemption level as the value of money has fallen.
Therefore, the concession the Minister has given this year will be worthless. Already the floating of the pound, or whatever has happened to it, has already taken most of it away. In any event, it was merely restoring what was given in 1970 and taken back last year. Therefore, despite the fact that the value of money has depreciated at the rate of 10 per cent a year, we are now back where we were in 1970. In other words, the people will be paying income tax at a level at which they are 20 per cent worse off in real terms than they were in 1970.
