When Irish Eyes Are Crying - Democratic Underground

stockholmer

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Wed Feb-09-11 05:48 AM
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When Irish Eyes Are Crying

First Iceland. Then Greece. Now Ireland, which headed for bankruptcy with its own mysterious logic. In 2000, suddenly among the richest people in Europe, the Irish decided to buy their country—from one another. After which their banks and government really screwed them. So where’s the rage?

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/03/michael-lewis-ireland-201103?currentPage=all

bonus videos
Most Unparliamentary Language
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD-xxoQwOo4

An Irishman abroad tells it like it is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koY6kXhQDQo

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Fumesucker

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Wed Feb-09-11 06:01 AM
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1. An interesting paragraph here..

How did any of this happen? There are many theories: the elimination of trade barriers, the decision to grant free public higher education, the persistent lowering of the corporate tax rate, beginning in the 1980s, which turned Ireland into a tax haven for foreign corporations. Maybe the most intriguing was offered by a pair of demographers at Harvard, David E. Bloom and David Canning, in a 2003 paper called “Contraception and the Celtic Tiger.” Bloom and Canning argued that a major cause of the Irish boom was a dramatic increase in the ratio of working-age to non-working-age Irish brought about by a crash in the Irish birthrate. This had been driven mainly by Ireland’s decision, in 1979, to legalize birth control. That is, a nation’s fidelity to the Vatican’s edicts was inversely proportional to its ability to climb out of poverty: out of the slow death of the Catholic Church arose an economic miracle.

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xchrom

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Wed Feb-09-11 06:23 AM
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2. recommend

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