Green Party tax document:Taxes on labour should be cut, carbon taxes should be introduced, and the tax system should be revised in favour of the lower-paid, the Green Party will say today when it launches its tax policy.
Entitled Fairness and Prosperity, the proposals will be published by the party's leader Trevor Sargent, Cork South Central TD and economic spokesman Dan Boyle and enterprise, trade and employment spokesman Éamon Ryan.
The proposals, which are economically conservative in many areas, have been drafted deliberately to protect the Greens from attack by the larger parties, sources told The Irish Times last night.
Capital gains taxes should be increased from 20 per cent to 25 per cent, while residency rules that allow the super-rich to avoid Irish taxes by staying out of the country for more than 183 days a year should be scrapped.
Instead, the Greens propose that Ireland follow the example of the US, where taxes are levied on the basis of citizenship, and not just residency.
Tax bands and credits should be index-linked and employers' and employees' PRSI contributions should be reduced, so that the burden shifts from labour and on to unsustainable consumption.
However, the Greens do not propose tax cuts, unlike all the parties with which they could conceivably enter post-election coalitions - Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party.
Instead it argues that major changes should be made to tax credits rules because they discriminate against low-paid workers who miss out on tax breaks because they don't use all their credits.
Instead, the Greens will propose refundable tax credits that would be given in cash payments to taxpayers who do not use up all of them, in a move that would encourage "socially valuable, unpaid work", the Greens have said.
Significant extra taxes would have to be placed on petrol, motor vehicles and other sources of carbon dioxide emissions in a bid to cut CO2 production rather than pay fines under the Kyoto Treaty. Under Kyoto, taxpayers will pay more than €500 million for carbon credits between 2008 and 2012 because emissions are running far ahead of the promise to keep them no more than 13 per cent higher than 1990 levels.
Rather than pay money in international fines, the Greens argue that the Government should impose a €20 levy on every tonne of carbon produced to change behaviour.
