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True this is bullshit. The government has a direct policy of wealth transfer from the population to itself and banks, who have "foreign" (except of course not r
by spwa4 1y ago
True this is bullshit. The government has a direct policy of wealth transfer from the population to itself and banks, who have "foreign" (except of course not really, for the worst example look at the board of the "gift to Ireland" national wealth fund and how the very young board members have no qualifications or experience and DO have family in government ...) ownership. Which, conveniently, isn't counted in the Gini coefficient.
But if you count household wealth in houses in Ireland, household wealth in Ireland in 1986 used to be 3 average Irish houses, and now it's 1/3rd. This was, just like anywhere else, deliberate government policy, amongst others to allow banks to invest in housing stock, preferential tax treatment and guarantees for property ownership, government buying of specific (mostly politician owned) housing, non-enforcement of both Irish and non-Irish tax law ... the list goes on.
Ireland prides itself on creating prosperity by lying and cheating other EU countries out of their tax income. Surprise! A government that lies on international treaties (they promised to enforce minimum tax since 2008, then ... didn't, then claimed credit for the "unseen in history prosperity boom"). Surprise! A government that does that ALSO lied to it's constituents and instead of delivering prosperity took 2/3rd of every euro you own.
"Oops, who could have seen this coming"
- derriz 1y agoAgain, the statistics and numbers completely contradict this narrative. We have a statistic - income redistribution - which effectively measures government policy in this regard. For example, Ireland's redistribution of income from rich to poor does more to reduce inequality than any other country in the OECD. The numbers are here: https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality-before-and-after-taxes https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality-before-and-afte... or look at Figure 1 on page 10 here: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2019/02/income-redistribution-across-oecd-countries_f2d12a2b/3b63e61c-en.pdf https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report... And in figure 3, page 11 of the above report, Ireland has seen the 3rd highest growth in income redistribution in the OECD with redistribution from wealthy to poor growing by 40% in the space of a decade So as far as I can see the facts indicate that Irish government policy is the exact opposite of what you claim.
- spwa4 1y agoClearly, it redistributes mostly from normal people to the government, not so much from the rich to the poor. Wouldn't it produce exactly those graphs if anyone actually counted became a lot poorer, then the rich just need to get not counted (Isle of Man perhaps?). I don't know why the rich in Ireland are somehow not on that graph, but when you walk around in Dublin for 10 minutes you see that this just isn't the real situation. It absolutely isn't the case that there aren't very rich people in Ireland and obviously they're not getting their wealth redistributed ...