The Netherlands and Ireland are also much smaller (geographically speaking) and don't have to have as many small schools as you'll find in the US. Most likely they also don't have to worry about providing school buses for most of their students. European countries also set and collect income taxes centrally, not at a state/county/province/whatever level, and they distribute the funds more fairly so that poorer regions aren't left behind the way they tend to be in the US.

> Most likely they also don't have to worry about providing school buses for most of their students

I agree with that, but a company that does business in Romania (my country) but instead pays all of its related taxes in Ireland (as Google does) is causing my country not to provide school buses and the like (that and endemic corruption, but that's another issue). I was regarding the EU as a bigger political-economic union, more like the United States, I'm pretty sure that inside both of Ireland and Netherlands both of their governments are interested in re-distributing the taxes they collect from business-activities carried out all over Europe.

That's up to Romania to disallow that business to operate in that manner.

Good one. The EU as a whole can barely fight against Google as an entity, and you ask (relatively) smaller countries like Romania to go at it alone. Or maybe that was sarcasm?

Plus the US has an unending supply of social engineers whose mission isn't so much to educate but to tinker or indoctrinate or whatever they think they're doing.

Ireland may be where many corporations are registered but is not necessarily where the employees are located. Similar to how many companies are registered in Delaware.

There are lots of employees over there, at least in IT. I work as a programmer in Eastern Europe and half of the offers I received for working abroad came from companies physically located in Ireland, meaning I would have had to relocate to Ireland had I accepted any of said offers.