Ireland Won the Global Tax Game, and Is Swimming in Money
wsj.com
wsj.com
A city of that size, importance and relative wealth should have a network of public transport comparable at least to Copenhagen.
Just drill deep below the existing homes that are hundreds of years old?
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.
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.
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.
> 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"
(Not that his father is against the rightward drift either)
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...
The fund would allow to act as a buffer and not rely on the direct corporation tax receipts to plan the budget.
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)
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.
The darkness and the rain doesn’t help either.