Doing nothing has a cost. The absence of action carries consequences for our society, and our debate today is all about costs. Not only what costs should be paid by people able to contribute to our society, but also the cost of not doing more to forge a fairer society, because the tax system in Wales neither adequately reflects the income and societal profile of our country nor our country's needs. There is an opportunity here to change that if we choose to take it. An opportunity and a cost, and economists would see a lesson there.

So, let's look at the detail. Only a minority of people in Wales pay income tax—roughly 43 per cent of our population—because so many people either don't earn enough or are past retirement age. Almost all, as we've heard, the income tax that's raised is raised at the basic rate, and the system and the bands we have at our disposal don't allow us the flexibility to better equip our communities with the funds they so desperately need. Because taxes are a force for good. It shouldn't be radical to say that, but the tired cliché of the tax 'burden' is accepted as the norm. Tax is only a burden if we live in a society where services are not funded enough to provide a decent quality of life to all citizens. Here's a quotation, Llywydd:

'I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.'

Those words are attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, Associate Justice to the US Supreme Court in the early twentieth century. And taxes do buy us chances to do things differently, to build something better for all.

If we look at the powers transferred to Scotland, both of the 2012 Act and subsequent to it in 2016, it's been able to set a lower rate for those who just creep into the bracket of paying income tax to buffer the support for those who need it most. The extra powers buy their communities hope. And the very fact that we don't have those powers in Wales has meant that revenue has to be raised through other, more regressive means. Wales has allowed council tax to go up significantly for years and, as the Wales Governance Centre and the Bevan Foundation have made clear time and again, council tax increases put more pressure on household budgets. It is simply not a fair or progressive way of raising revenue.

What's more, a higher share of revenue is raised in Wales from value added tax than income tax. It’s the reverse in England and Scotland. Why does that matter? Well, lower income households pay proportionately far more in indirect taxes like VAT than they do in income tax, so the people least able to afford it are once again shouldering more weight. Now, that is a burden we shouldn't be seeing. But doing nothing has a cost, a consequence. If we throw up our hands or sit on them, that cost doesn't disappear; it accumulates, and the quiet misery of millions continues. But, Llywydd, we could instead choose to lend a hand, to intervene, to create a more progressive schedule of income tax, to see tax as a means of creating the society we want. We have this opportunity to throw off the constraints of the Treasury-imposed straitjacket, to demand powers that will allow us more freedom, more flexibility, and create a system that truly works for Wales. Yes, I'll take that intervention.