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Comment by cheph | Hacker News Reader

Is Ireland not a democracy? Can't they vote to change their own tax laws if they have a problem with them?

I am from Ireland and from talking to friends and family most people are pretty happy with it. We give them a pass on taxes and they employ thousands of high end engineers here. We then collect large income tax revenues from these workers and subsidise the rest of the country.

Perhaps all countries should adopt 0% corporate tax then, if it's so beneficial.

That would probably level the playing field between small companies and big companies, TBH.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

You joke, but some types of taxes are objectively worse than others. An ideal tax would have to generate sufficient revenue, be non-distortionary, inexpensive, and fair.

We can argue about what's "fair" all day, but "inexpensive" is more objective: some taxes hamper more economic activity than others. A $1 tax on a stock trade will reduce exactly $1 of economic activity. It's so expensive, it's basically pointless. A land value tax, on the other land, is almost free. (And in some cases, negative!)

Most taxes fall somewhere between these two extremes, but corporate income taxes are one of the most expensive, which is why economists aren't big fans of them.

Yes, skim off trillions of potential tax revenues of other countries to earn a billion or two as a single country. Effectively a Prisoner's dilemma on an international scale.

Countries like Ireland and the Netherlands are nothing more than tax avoidance puppets of a few big companies. And the sad thing is that their governments think it's good what they do while it's a downwards spiral instead.

The problem is not that Ireland gives a good deal to companies in Ireland, the problem is that Microsoft can falsely pretend that their Irish branch is the one making all the profit and then not having to pay any tax elsewhere.

It's not the citizens of a pirate nation that are unhappy with piracy. It's the rest of us.

Actually, no. The Apple case [0] is still pending some more layers of appeals, but both sides accept that Ireland doesn't have complete carte blanche to set its own tax laws. The EU gets to participate in setting them too.

Of course, Irish citizens could vote to withdraw from the EU and set their own tax that way, but that's not likely - they generally accept that the benefits of participating in the EU are worth giving up a little sovereignty.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_v_Commission

I'd love for Ireland to withdraw from the EU - that would make it much, much likelier that the rest of us could get a consensus on anti-profit-shifting tax reform with the biggest tax haven out of the union.

This is you assuming "democracy" actually works to empower average people to make these types of changes, instead of being co-opted or controlled by these same corporate behemoths.

They don't want to. These companies employ thousands and thousands of people in Ireland and pay them pretty well. In the bigger picture it's probably in their collective interest to tax them more but there's a pretty strong individual incentive to maintain the attractive tax environment.

Why would they do that ? The light tax they require from those entity still benefits them immensily, because those entity choose to pay them there instead of elsewhere. If Ireland introduced more taxes those big corps would move away, so they would actually receive less...

You can't receive less than zero

Income taxes from employees of these megacorps is where Ireland makes the money back.

The definition of a parasitic economy. Other countries are well in their rights to pressure Ireland as hard as they can to end this theft.

I agree other countries can do what this wish but realistically what's the carrot for Ireland though?

As opppsed to the german economy?

You seem to have a very strange definition of theft. Other countries are perfectly entitled to do similarly, as Netherlands does.

Why is there not a focus on countries such as Bermuda here? They are the "tax havens" who make this possible in the first place.

>Why is there not a focus on countries such as Bermuda here? They are the "tax havens" who make this possible in the first place.

There is. Two wrongs don't make a right. The topic at hand is Ireland.

> Other countries are perfectly entitled to do similarly, as Netherlands does.

If every country acted the same way, there would not be a single functioning nation on earth. Their benefits only exist because other countries are losing out, which makes them parasites.

> there would not be a single functioning nation on earth

Holy hyperbole, Batman.

No, it would just mean that there would be a homogeneous corporate tax system, which is what people seem to always argue for.

'Parasites' is also a ridiculous description.

It's a representative democracy so no not really. We can vote on representatives but then they do whatever they want same as any other democracy.

Representative democracy is a kind of democracy. So yes really.

We can and there is a huge swell of support for Sinn Fein a nationalist left wing party (the political arm of the IRA). The two centre right parties FF & FG (FFG) that have held power since Ireland gained independence are very pro the current taxation policy and have up until now had an iron grip on power due to a culture of voting for whoever your parents voted for. This is slowly changing. Loads of Irish people don't want this. The only problem I see is that we have structured our whole economy around FDI and there are no realistic proposals to revamp our economy to a similar level of wealth through different means. Enough people in Ireland will continue to vote for FFG because they get preferable tax treatment on investments as landlords, backroom deal etc. Ireland is a corrupt mess tbh.

Perhaps they continue to vote for 'FFG' on the grounds that unlike SF, they're not apologists for mass murder and terrorism?

If you think that you don't know very much about recent Irish history. They all have significant blood on their hands, mostly due to their relationship with the Catholic Church.

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