News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Children of Men: The Future Is a Mirror for the Present. Parent comment

Re:Children of Men: The Future Is a Mirror for the Present by jacquesm on Monday November 09, 2026 @10:40AM (#50427101)
Ireland's figures are wildly unbalanced compared to other EU countries because so many companies decided to formally register their headquarters there. They don't pay as much tax as they should so the income stats are way up there but the positive effects are not as you might expect from that (if they weren't actually negative).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich

This is now mostly a thing of the past but there are still lingering after-effects.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Children of Men: The Future Is a Mirror for the Present by Supernaut on Monday November 09, 2026 @10:58AM (#50427317)
> They don't pay as much tax as they should so the income stats are way up

What do you mean by "the income stats are way up"?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Children of Men: The Future Is a Mirror for the Present by jacquesm on Monday November 09, 2026 @11:42AM (#50428011)
That the GDP stats are skewed but the taxes aren't there. So it looks as if Ireland is doing much better on paper than what is happening in reality. Normally with that kind of GDP you'd also have a solid tax base to go with it, here it is the opposite, Ireland has that GDP because their corporate taxes were super low.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Children of Men: The Future Is a Mirror for the Present by swiftcoder on Monday November 09, 2026 @12:22PM (#50428548)
Yeah, I mean, all the city-states on this list are playing this game too - Monaco, Lichtenstein, and Luxembourg aren't paradises for the poor either.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Children of Men: The Future Is a Mirror for the Present by Supernaut on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:11PM (#50429221)
> Normally with that kind of GDP you'd also have a solid tax base to go with it, here it is the opposite

You are badly misinformed. The Irish state is actually in receipt of colossal quantities of corporate tax each year, which has placed it in a significantly stronger fiscal position than most other EU nations.

Whether this state of affairs is sustainable in the longer term is another question, but for the last ten years or so, the strategy of encouraging FDI has unquestionably paid off extremely well.

[ Parent | on HN ]