My friend Jason O’Mahony has what I think is a very fun idea about how Government could dispose of the €14billion-ish Apple Windfall whenever they get their paws on it come springtime: Divide it up and send a cheque to every adult citizen with their share. It should come to a few grand each.
It’s a fun idea because, of course, approximately half the country would go mad. Since the money would be going to everyone in equal portions, there would be a slew of complaints that the rich were getting money they didn’t need while the poor were short-changed. There would be howls from the opposition that the cash should be spent on infrastructure and public services (and from the greens that it should be spent on windmills and electric busses). Fintan O’Toole would hail it as a historic missed opportunity to deliver transformational change, and so on.
But, Jason suggests, Government could get around this: Simply tell voters that anybody who personally preferred that their money be spent on public services just send the cheque back to Revenue, who would re-allocate it back to general government funds.
How many people do we think would send it back? A few thousand, is my guess, out of 4 million or so cheques. But perhaps I’m a cynic.
I write this because Heather Humphreys has gotten in warm – if not hot – water for her comments about child benefit in the aftermath of the budget. She was asked, as Ministers often are, about whether it makes sense to pay a universal benefit to people, many of whom don’t need it as much as others. Why should millionaires with three children get a cheque for nearly €500 per month from the Government – wouldn’t it be better to “means test” it and offer bigger payments to the deprived? Indeed, as my colleague Niamh noted on budget day, the basic rate of child benefit hasn’t risen in years.
This is what the Minister said:
“When queried as to whether the double-double child benefit payment is needed, given it is a universal payment, Heather Humphreys said the version of that benefit paid after last year’s budget had proven “extremely, extremely popular”.
“I worked in a credit union for many years, and people say that millionaires get it (child benefit). I didn’t see too many millionaires, I saw a lot of parents who were damn glad of it.
“Rearing children is expensive, it’s so difficult when you think of the costs that families have, and as I said, last year it was very well received.
“If people don’t need it, they can give it back, but I don’t think that’s the case. Most people I know do need it and are glad to get it,” the minister said.”
Now, as to whether there is an actual mechanism for giving child benefit back, I’m not sure – though I suppose one could simply not apply for it in the first place. In any case, the minister’s point is well made.
In the first instance, as the name suggests, child benefit is paid for the benefit of the child, not the benefit of the parents. Unfortunately, it is evidently true that in addition to some parents receiving it who do not need it, there will also be those parents who need it, but do not spend it on the child. We live in a society where there will be some minority of troubled parents who collect their child benefit and give it to their drug dealer, or otherwise spend it other than how it is intended. Equally, on the other side of the ledger, wealth does not make somebody a good parent. There will be many struggling families in Ireland where children feel much more loved and secure than they do in some families that might outwardly appear very privileged.
Second, the idea that child benefit is somehow being held down at an artificially low level because of a few wealthy families collecting it is transparent nonsense, as anybody who observed this week’s budget might instinctively know. The Government has – and had – the resources it needed to increase payments to poor families. Indeed, it would argue that this is precisely what it has done with the two additional payments announced in the budget. It also had the money to choose, if it wished to, to increase the basic payment in line with other welfare payments. It chose not to – but not because it lacked the money due to wealthy parents claiming undeservedly.
Third, this is one of those areas where gimlet-eyed accounting types take no account of the social and administrative costs of taking a universal payment and making people qualify for it. Even if you believe there is merit in depriving better off families of child benefit – if that’s the hill you wished to die on – then there’s the associated stress of making poorer families prove to the state that they are sufficiently impoverished to warrant support for their children. There will be forms to fill out, payslips and bank accounts to submit, inspections to suffer through. Easier just to say to people, as the Minister did, that if they don’t need the money they can send it back.
She’s completely right, there, in – I say this with some pride – injecting a little bit of Monaghan Presbytarian common sense into a discussion which often lacks it.
Indeed, I think it would be churlish for critics of the Government on child supports in general not to admit that this budget was a step in the right direction. Pro-natalists often call for more monetary supports for parents and a reduction in the costs of having children. In this budget, Government moved strongly in that direction not only with the child benefit increase, but with a newborn baby payment, and a significant childcare package which – they assert – could save families up to €1,000 per child annually. Saying and delivering are two different things, but you’d have to be a rank partisan not to give some credit where it is due.
She had a good budget, did Minister Humphreys. And her reputation as one of the “safest pairs of hands” in the current Government will not emerge from this in any way diminished. Whatever the fate of the Government at the election, she will be one of the few senior ministers to emerge from this Dáil with her reputation amongst her peers, and the wider electorate, enhanced.