Sir, –Further to recent correspondence (September 29th), it is true that almost everyone pays some form of tax, and it is also true that almost everyone avails of some monetary transfer or usage benefit from the State, whether that's driving on the roads, being taught in our schools, or visiting a GP whose education was funded from the tax net.
The crucial questions are how many people are paying in more than they take out compared to how many people are taking out more than they pay in, and how sustainable is that equation and the degree of dishonesty there exists in the public discourse about that.
I do not question the usefulness or benefit to wider society of the work that those in the public service do, merely that without external resources being provided by those in the private sector, they would not be possible. Public services are not for the most part self-funding, nor should we expect them to be.
Half the population is kept out of poverty, not be some abstraction called the state but by other people. Denying the human role of those who contribute more than they take from the system is part of a narrative from the right and the left that treats those who work and generate the resources for wider society as mere units to be counted and squeezed and yet works to deny those in most need the resources they most require.
Attempts to target resources to those in greatest need are shot down by those who favour a universality of payments and a targeting of taxation generation on a minority. In 2011 the current Tánaiste argued against the targeting of children benefit with unchallenged claims about the plight of wives of stingy millionaires not providing for their own offspring.
A broad-based system of social protection needs to have a broad-based taxation system, and we need to acknowledge that the universality of benefits and the ever-extending definition of poverty are not in the best interests of the genuinely most vulnerable. – Yours, etc,
DANIEL SULLIVAN,
Marino,
Dublin 3.