Nice one, Charlie. Judging from the media reportage so far, you - and the civil service mandarins who devise the Budget speeches you utter in such melodious Kildarese - have got away with it. You've been rumbled here, but no matter: nobody will notice, and the felonious farce of a twin-tier tax system means that the public service has yet again escaped with the bag marked "Swag". When it comes to civil service PRSI, you employ bronchial economics; that is, it's a perpetual wheeze.
Of course, like any magician as he's pulling rabbits out of hats and introducing his lovely assistant Charmaine - she with the enormous tax-concessions bulging out of her bodice - Charlie is simultaneously removing the Eiffel Tower from the Paris skyline; and nobody notices. Obviously, he's not going to draw the public's attention to this larceny, any more than one expects thieves obligingly to trip the burglar alarm.
So: if Charlie mentioned the bronchial economics of PRSI in his speech, I am unable to find it. Oh, very possibly this is because I am stupid and unable to read a Budget address without falling into a coma. Or maybe, very possibly (and very astutely) he simply forgot to mention his wheeze; the wheeze is, however, in his figures, and if you're in the wealth-creating sector of the economy, you should yourselves feel a wheeze coming on when you read what follows.
Bronchial economics
Here are the figures. The amount of income on which one pays Pay Related Social Insurance has increased by £1,200 from £24,200 to £25,400. But the public service does not pay PRSI at the same rate that the private sector does. Whereas those in the wealth-creating sector of the economy pay PRSI at 4.5 per cent, those in the civil service pay it at 0.9 per cent - that is, at one fifth the rate. So for example, those in the wealth-creating sector of the economy who are earning £25,400 (the point at which PRSI ceases for all sectors) will, according to Charlie's bronchial economics, pay an extra £54 per year. But civil servants will pay only £10.80 extra.
And that is just the phlegm on the pavement of bronchial economics; there are two full lungs to examine as well. After the first £100 per week earned, the wealth-creating sector experiences deductions of 4.5 per cent on every pound earned, while public servants have just 0.9 per cent removed after £20 a week. Taking this abstractive process through to the common cut-off point, it means that employees in the wealth-creating sector will have to pay £909 a year in PRSI; but civil servants will pay only £219.25.
But that is not the end of the matter, because PRSI payers must pay tax on that PRSI money as if they had had the use of it. Those in the private sector who have forked out nearly £700 more than those in the private sector will have to find another £300 to pay the tax on money they never had. In all, payments to the Exchequer on foot of PRSI deductions from the wealth-creating sector and at the top rate will total over £1,200; from the civil servants - the architects and the beneficiaries of bronchial economics - PRSI deductions total about £292. In other words, the private citizen will pay over £900 a year more in secret tax than will the public servant on the same income.
Fewer benefits
And we get nothing for it. Nothing. No benefits await us for our extra contributions to the State; the once much-touted free dental care has long since vanished. For, as you might expect with wheeze-economics, extra contributions mean fewer benefits. Since it's economically impossible to manage a pension fund which is index-linked, it is equally impossible for private employers, or their employees, to create an investment portfolio to protect the wealth-creating sector in their old age. However, the public service, protected from both Arctic winds of the real world by having access to the public coffers, does have index-linked pensions. So when the members of the Garda Siochana recently received a whopping pay increase, the pensions of retired gardai went up by exactly the same percentage.
And paid for by whom? By the wealth-creating members of society who are being taxed at a far higher rate than the wealth-absorbing members, and who can only dream moistly but forlornly of such post-retirement largesse. Yet that is not the baffling part. The really and truly astonishing part is the docility of the wealth-creating classes in the face of this daylight larceny by bronchial economics. There, before their eyes, this grand felony is perpetrated, and they say nothing.
Irish disease
Why? Is it the damnable Irish disease of not wanting to cause a stir? Is it that even more damnable Irish affliction of not wanting to appear greedy? Is it that yet even more damnable disorder of having to feel gratitude at having a job at all? Is it that vile piety which suggests that State employment is more virtuous than private? Or is it all four, aided and abetted by a trade union movement, which, dominated by the very public-sector unions who benefit from this dual-taxation system, is therefore an accomplice to this bare-faced thievery?
But Charlie, it's not the theft which so truly dispiriting; what is dispiriting is the craven silence of the robbed even as they hear the joyous wheezes of the departing robbers.