Over the past ten years Ireland was able to attracted a bunch of low life human and corporate weasels from the EU and America who think rich people (and rich corporations) should not pay their fair share of taxes.
Well, the party is over and Ireland is busted, but Steve Forbes still thinks everybody should make like Ireland and “Tryckl” the GOP magical unicorn will descend from heaven. Confronting that GOP lunacy, Sadly No! says…
Ireland’s bubbleburst, from my equally-as-inexpert-as-Steyn’s opinion, will be worse than ours. It’s true their economy boomed, but only because of a sort of Cayman Islands effect by which so many wealthy jackasses moved money from lands of higher tax rates. Cumulative incidental investment from a mass of weasels shirking their responsibility did the trick, not ‘higher returns’ because of the alleged infallibility of the Laffer theory.
Ireland was like the Delaware of the Western World: it only worked not because it was right or because its particular structure was better or even sound, but because it was such an outlier. (The Times piece implies the relationship between Ireland and America and the EU was symbiotic; I think the better word is parasitic.) In effect it cheated its neighbors; now it’s ended up cheating itself. It too will get drastically Keynesian as it surveys the rubble, and the wealthy criminal class will then move like locusts to some other country whose government it can bribe or co-opt, unless… everybody gets together and agrees not to tax the bastards at any rate less than a certain amount.
In your face Governors Carper, Castle & DuPont.