5 ms·

Ireland Won the Global Tax Game, and Is Swimming in Money

45 points by Bostonian 3y ago

theodric 3y ago
The Irish government may be swimming in money, but the Irish people I know - not in Dublin - are scraping by. Don't be fooled: it's a corrupt, poor little Dublin-centric mafia nation in many ways, and desperately wants to be a progressive authoritarian surveillance state with the vaguest of laws allowing individual police to decide what constitutes an Offence. Anecdata: I recently wrote to Justice to inquire about the legality of slingshots, for example, and their response boiled down to "not defined in law, but if it's too good, it will probably be considered a Firearm; ask your local Garda office." The coming hate speech laws contain similar levels of vaguery enabling selective enforcement for those the government wishes to harass. But it's not all bad, just different. There is some freedom to be found in the sparsely-inhabited wilds of the west, south, and south-west. Property tax is so low as to hardly register. Barter and neighborliness are alive and well. The old ways continue for those who want to continue them, although from what I see around North Co. Cork It's increasingly eccentric blow-ins (immigrants) doing that continuing. Which reminds me, I need to get up to the bog and collect the turf I cut and stacked, before it all rains out...
extraduder_ire 3y ago
I love the photo they used of the apple campus down in cork, with the cows in the foreground.
serverlessmom 3y ago
Wow it's awesome that a number on a spreadsheet is so big, now to kick back in Ireland's affordable housing, convenient public transport, generous social safety net, and high quality healthcare system.
Bostonian 3y ago
https://archive.ph/FweOp https://archive.ph/FweOp
latexr 3y ago
Original title is full on clickbait: “This Country Won the Global Tax Game, and Is Swimming in Money”. I’m surprised they didn’t add “you won’t believe what happened next”.
- atestu 3y ago
  WSJ has a new top editor... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/business/media/emma-tucker-wall-street-journal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/business/media/emma-tucke... > At least 15 veteran editors and writers have left the paper in recent months. Long-held stylistic practices, such as the use of courtesy titles in articles, were disposed of overnight. EDIT: for fun I asked GPT4 for a headline "in the style of the WSJ": "Ireland Capitalizes on U.S. Tech and Pharma Profits, Establishes €100 Billion Rainy-Day Fund Amid Global Tax Shifts"
  - master_crab 3y ago
    WSJs hard right editorial bent has been slowly drifting into its news coverage. Not very surprising considering Lachlan doesn’t have as strong a sentimental attachment as his father to the old days when WSJ has a stronger business reporting rep. (Not that his father is against the rightward drift either)
pshirshov 3y ago
It doesn't look like "Swimming in Money" from inside. The country is wealthy but not extremely wealthy. The healthcare system is so-so, the public transport is far from perfect as well. Many countries, like Switzerland and Australia have lot better public infrastructure.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  I find the fact that Dublin has no underground rail system and mere two tramlines positively horrendous. A city of that size, importance and relative wealth should have a network of public transport comparable at least to Copenhagen.
  - pizzafeelsright 3y ago
    It's very wet. And old. Just drill deep below the existing homes that are hundreds of years old?
    - DoughnutHole 3y ago
      They did it in London - old homes aren’t a problem if you dig deep enough with modern technology (and London’s tube was built with much older technology). The bigger problem is bedrock. London is built on clay, very easy to tunnel through. Limestone is tougher, and the granite of Dublin’s southside is painfully slow to carve through. And the biggest issue is timing. We only started to become wealthy in the late 90s. By the time we put together a plan for our first metro the economy tanked. We’ve dug (part of) the plans back up so let’s see if we can hold the country together long enough to actually build it this time.
    - inglor_cz 3y ago
      "Just drill deep below the existing homes that are hundreds of years old?" The centers of Prague and Rome aren't particularly new either. And IDK what is the geology under Dublin, but under Prague it is fairly bad, broken layers of stone mixed with powerful springs of water. And all this could be managed in the 1970s already. Cities need transport.
illwrks 3y ago
To frame it... one fifth of GDP, or all of the projected government expenditure in 2024.
sublimefire 3y ago
Ireland was courting international investors/corporations/etc for more than 50 years. It is easy to say that it is swimming in money but it is very temporary, hence the fund. The gov wants to protect itself from the economic shocks to the budget in case corps like Google leave. For the context, after the 2008 crisis the country was bailed out so it was not swimming in money forever, it is a recent phenomena. The fund would allow to act as a buffer and not rely on the direct corporation tax receipts to plan the budget.
dagurp 3y ago
I was in Dublin recently and it definitely didn't feel like they were swimming in money. Everything was expensive though.
- dagurp 3y ago
  I should add that I loved it there and recommend going for a visit. I just think that the wealth is not very well distributed.
bananapub 3y ago
meanwhile in reality, Ireland is still not a very rich country, cost of living vs incomes in Dublin is ridiculous to the level of London, and the DART extension to the airport remains 40 years away, as it has been for 40 years.
I_complete_me 3y ago
I'd re-phrase it as "Ireland Won the Global Tax Game, and Dublin Is Swimming in Money". The Pale still exists even though it's gone! I live in rural Ireland and the Economic Crash of 2008 still hasn't washed through, not to mind the effects of Covid, drug infiltration to the non-urban settings and the influx of immigrants. Great that we can accommodate the Ukrainians and all but this win smells very, very ephemeral from where I stand.
anotherhue 3y ago
Massive housing crisis means few people born after 1985 or so will ever afford a home. Add to that the ultra centralisation on Dublin and you have a recipe for a bad quality of life. The darkness and the rain doesn’t help either.
Detrytus 3y ago
No, Ireland is not swimming in money. All they did is they artificially raised their GDP per capita to ridiculous number of $120k, but the tax rate on all that revenue is like 0.001%, so average Irishman is no better off from it.
- DoughnutHole 3y ago
  No, the government is absolutely swimming in money separate from GDP shenanigans. We have an unprecedented budget surplus. This is a direct result of the OECD forcing us to raise our corporate tax to a higher minimum. Big tech stayed put so we’ve seen a massive boon to the public purse.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  Eventually, you get used to the country being a statistical outlier and make your peace with charts using GDP per capita instead of GNI*, and news articles about something that's not really been news for the past couple of years. We also have the most leased planes of any country, make a plurality of all contact lenses, and produce all the botox branded botox. (we also made all the viagra-branded sildenafil until those factories were needed for other things in ~2021)
canucker2016 3y ago
This YouTube video talks about the population of Ireland and how it hasn't changed much in 200 years - the potato famine and the resulting emigration out of Ireland have dampened the country's fortunes, while nearby countries have increased by 2x-5.4x. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wViBPPjEdD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wViBPPjEdD8

45 points by Bostonian 3y ago

The Irish government may be swimming in money, but the Irish people I know - not in Dublin - are scraping by. Don't be fooled: it's a corrupt, poor little Dublin-centric mafia nation in many ways, and desperately wants to be a progressive authoritarian surveillance state with the vaguest of laws allowing individual police to decide what constitutes an Offence. Anecdata: I recently wrote to Justice to inquire about the legality of slingshots, for example, and their response boiled down to "not defined in law, but if it's too good, it will probably be considered a Firearm; ask your local Garda office." The coming hate speech laws contain similar levels of vaguery enabling selective enforcement for those the government wishes to harass. But it's not all bad, just different. There is some freedom to be found in the sparsely-inhabited wilds of the west, south, and south-west. Property tax is so low as to hardly register. Barter and neighborliness are alive and well. The old ways continue for those who want to continue them, although from what I see around North Co. Cork It's increasingly eccentric blow-ins (immigrants) doing that continuing. Which reminds me, I need to get up to the bog and collect the turf I cut and stacked, before it all rains out...

extraduder_ire 3y ago

I love the photo they used of the apple campus down in cork, with the cows in the foreground.

serverlessmom 3y ago

Wow it's awesome that a number on a spreadsheet is so big, now to kick back in Ireland's affordable housing, convenient public transport, generous social safety net, and high quality healthcare system.

Bostonian 3y ago

https://archive.ph/FweOp https://archive.ph/FweOp

latexr 3y ago

Original title is full on clickbait: “This Country Won the Global Tax Game, and Is Swimming in Money”. I’m surprised they didn’t add “you won’t believe what happened next”.

atestu 3y ago
WSJ has a new top editor... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/business/media/emma-tucker-wall-street-journal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/business/media/emma-tucke... > At least 15 veteran editors and writers have left the paper in recent months. Long-held stylistic practices, such as the use of courtesy titles in articles, were disposed of overnight. EDIT: for fun I asked GPT4 for a headline "in the style of the WSJ": "Ireland Capitalizes on U.S. Tech and Pharma Profits, Establishes €100 Billion Rainy-Day Fund Amid Global Tax Shifts"
- master_crab 3y ago
  WSJs hard right editorial bent has been slowly drifting into its news coverage. Not very surprising considering Lachlan doesn’t have as strong a sentimental attachment as his father to the old days when WSJ has a stronger business reporting rep. (Not that his father is against the rightward drift either)

pshirshov 3y ago

It doesn't look like "Swimming in Money" from inside. The country is wealthy but not extremely wealthy. The healthcare system is so-so, the public transport is far from perfect as well. Many countries, like Switzerland and Australia have lot better public infrastructure.

inglor_cz 3y ago
I find the fact that Dublin has no underground rail system and mere two tramlines positively horrendous. A city of that size, importance and relative wealth should have a network of public transport comparable at least to Copenhagen.
- pizzafeelsright 3y ago
  It's very wet. And old. Just drill deep below the existing homes that are hundreds of years old?
  - DoughnutHole 3y ago
    They did it in London - old homes aren’t a problem if you dig deep enough with modern technology (and London’s tube was built with much older technology). The bigger problem is bedrock. London is built on clay, very easy to tunnel through. Limestone is tougher, and the granite of Dublin’s southside is painfully slow to carve through. And the biggest issue is timing. We only started to become wealthy in the late 90s. By the time we put together a plan for our first metro the economy tanked. We’ve dug (part of) the plans back up so let’s see if we can hold the country together long enough to actually build it this time.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    "Just drill deep below the existing homes that are hundreds of years old?" The centers of Prague and Rome aren't particularly new either. And IDK what is the geology under Dublin, but under Prague it is fairly bad, broken layers of stone mixed with powerful springs of water. And all this could be managed in the 1970s already. Cities need transport.

illwrks 3y ago

To frame it... one fifth of GDP, or all of the projected government expenditure in 2024.

sublimefire 3y ago

Ireland was courting international investors/corporations/etc for more than 50 years. It is easy to say that it is swimming in money but it is very temporary, hence the fund. The gov wants to protect itself from the economic shocks to the budget in case corps like Google leave. For the context, after the 2008 crisis the country was bailed out so it was not swimming in money forever, it is a recent phenomena. The fund would allow to act as a buffer and not rely on the direct corporation tax receipts to plan the budget.

dagurp 3y ago

I was in Dublin recently and it definitely didn't feel like they were swimming in money. Everything was expensive though.

dagurp 3y ago
I should add that I loved it there and recommend going for a visit. I just think that the wealth is not very well distributed.

bananapub 3y ago

meanwhile in reality, Ireland is still not a very rich country, cost of living vs incomes in Dublin is ridiculous to the level of London, and the DART extension to the airport remains 40 years away, as it has been for 40 years.

I_complete_me 3y ago

I'd re-phrase it as "Ireland Won the Global Tax Game, and Dublin Is Swimming in Money". The Pale still exists even though it's gone! I live in rural Ireland and the Economic Crash of 2008 still hasn't washed through, not to mind the effects of Covid, drug infiltration to the non-urban settings and the influx of immigrants. Great that we can accommodate the Ukrainians and all but this win smells very, very ephemeral from where I stand.

anotherhue 3y ago

Massive housing crisis means few people born after 1985 or so will ever afford a home. Add to that the ultra centralisation on Dublin and you have a recipe for a bad quality of life. The darkness and the rain doesn’t help either.

Detrytus 3y ago

No, Ireland is not swimming in money. All they did is they artificially raised their GDP per capita to ridiculous number of $120k, but the tax rate on all that revenue is like 0.001%, so average Irishman is no better off from it.

DoughnutHole 3y ago
No, the government is absolutely swimming in money separate from GDP shenanigans. We have an unprecedented budget surplus. This is a direct result of the OECD forcing us to raise our corporate tax to a higher minimum. Big tech stayed put so we’ve seen a massive boon to the public purse.
extraduder_ire 3y ago
Eventually, you get used to the country being a statistical outlier and make your peace with charts using GDP per capita instead of GNI*, and news articles about something that's not really been news for the past couple of years. We also have the most leased planes of any country, make a plurality of all contact lenses, and produce all the botox branded botox. (we also made all the viagra-branded sildenafil until those factories were needed for other things in ~2021)

canucker2016 3y ago

This YouTube video talks about the population of Ireland and how it hasn't changed much in 200 years - the potato famine and the resulting emigration out of Ireland have dampened the country's fortunes, while nearby countries have increased by 2x-5.4x. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wViBPPjEdD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wViBPPjEdD8