I should have liked to have spoken on the different sections of the Bill, but, first of all, I have been abroad and have only just come back and I have not had time to go into details as I would have liked to do. Secondly, I cannot help feeling that proposals and suggestions on the Committee Stage of the Bill in this House are rather futile. Therefore, I shall not delay the House very long and I have taken the line of speaking on the Final Stage on the matters contained in the Bill.
One would expect from a Finance Bill, which is the translation of the Budget into law, that its provisions would go further than merely collecting taxation from the citizens and the business community. It is always felt, and it should be a fact, that the Finance Bill should be an instrument not only for collecting taxation but also an instrument of economic policy, something that would enable the country to expand its economy and create wealth from which more money could be derived by the Exchequer at a lower rate of taxation. If our economy were expanded sufficiently to give a larger national income, we would be able to get the money required to run the State at much lower rates of taxation.
If you ask anybody to-day what he thinks of this Finance Bill or its contents, he will probably say that what strikes him is that it is a further tightening of existing methods of collecting taxes and an extension of the ways of doing it. First, there is a greater squeeze on individuals; there is to be a more rigidly-imposed form of assessing taxation and the Revenue Commissioners are to utilise further the ordinary citizens and business people to do tax collecting for them. That is the broad picture most people see in the Bill. There are reliefs for exporters and industry and some other minor reliefs, but on the whole these reliefs are unimaginative and not the type of thing we in our present circumstances require to create national wealth and achieve the increase in national income we need, if we are to keep our people at home and employ them here.
One of the characteristics of this Bill also is that it seems to be copied straight from the British Finance Act, except that we seem to select the rather penal and petty side of the British Finance Act, without giving the imaginative side or the really broad and visionary side any consideration. To take one outstanding item— surtax—we start surtax at £1,500, whereas in Britain, at present, it is £2,000. There is talk—and serious talk —in financial and business circles of extending the £2,000 to £5,000. I am sorry to say it is an indication of the small-mindedness that we bring to bear on financial and business matters in this country, that it was thought not only by this but by other Governments, that it would be unpopular to extend surtax beyond £1,500. Anybody having £1,500 is supposed to be wealthy and supposed to be able to bear this penal taxation. I would submit that is not correct. I think the surtax figure should have been raised here from £1,500 to at least £3,000.
My point is that we are disappointed that on this occasion, as on every other occasion, no imaginative approach was made through the Finance Bill to bringing about the dynamic industrial economy here which we so badly need. In fact the boot is on the other foot; we have a running-down economy; we go abroad to Paris and elsewhere telling the people we are an undeveloped country, that we are only starting. We cannot always be "only starting", especially after 35 years. This approach is rather pathetic. Western Germany had to start in 1945 having been beaten to the ropes and yet we now find her with one of the most dynamic economies in the world. That is because she used finance weapons imaginatively and by using private enterprise instead of trying to carry on with a half-baked socialist, state-run economy.
