Tax Credits Are Subsidies

Imagine you’re a landlord. Once the nausea has passed, imagine you receive €1000 per month from your tenants, or €12,000 for the year. You pay a ten percent tax on your rental income, so at the end of the fiscal year, you should owe the state €1200. However, there is a tax credit for landlords, so you fill out that part of the form. Your bill is reduced by €500 to €700, and you walk away with €11,300.

Now, imagine there’s no tax credit. At the end of the year, you hand over the entire €1200. However, there is a grant for landlords, so you apply and receive it. The state sends you €500 and you walk away with €11,300.

This is obviously a simplistic hypothetical, but I think it illustrates quite clearly there is zero meaningful difference between the state voiding €500 of your tax bill and the state giving you €500 in subsidies. Either way, you started with €12,000 and a tax bill of €1200, but you ended up with €11,300 and the state ended up with €700. Whether the state let you off the €500 or gave it to you, it’s €500 more in your pocket and €500 less in the public coffers. The only difference is where the numbers go in a ledger.

Yet this difference is treated with profound metaphysical significance in the official logic of capitalist politics. When I get my disability benefit every week, it’s a handout, but a landlord who gets tax relief on his mortgage interest is getting, well, relief. Tax credits and other ways to reduce your tax bill are the state cutting you a break on the burden of tax, whereas welfare benefits are the state giving taxpayers’ hard-earned money to the lazy and unproductive. But if you don’t care about the route the money takes, just where it ends up, a tax credit is at least as much of a “giveaway” as my weekly pittance for the becrippled and mentally strange. It’s a distinction that should only matter to accountants, but it’s used to shovel huge amounts of public money into the private sector via tax write-offs for business expenses while pretending it doesn’t count as spending.

Ireland is a country particularly afflicted by the paradoxical whims of an electorate that wants good public services, but doesn’t want to pay for them with taxes. It’s no surprise we’ve ended up one of the world’s premier tax havens for giant corporations, though the audacity of our government appealing a court judgement that ordered Apple to pay back billions in dodged taxes still staggers me. But issues like the government giving tax relief to landlords during a housing crisis or giving everyone electricity credits to help pay soaring power bills instead of forcing the companies the lower their prices seem to have raised the public consciousness a bit when it comes to just how much the Irish state exists to subsidise the private sector, not just in our country, but around the world. I’m not necessarily optimistic about the possibility of a reforming government in the near future, but there’s still something heartening in seeing the outrage grow.

The End of Neutrality is the End of Peace

The Irish government are planning to hold a series of “public forums” on the question of Ireland’s military neutrality later this year. These forums and their expert panels have been given the reins on this issue, rather than a Citizens’ Assembly, because the Irish government has a preconceived answer to that question it wants our political processes to arrive at. I am not saying these public forums will necessarily be “rigged” in some way, per se, just acknowledging what anyone can see, but no one in support of ending Irish neutrality would ever admit: that they were very blatantly chosen in lieu of a Citizens’ Assembly because given the two options on the table, one is more likely to produce a more supportive result for their preferred future vision of Irish foreign policy. I am 100% confident that is the case, for the simple reason that support for maintaining Irish neutrality remains consistently high and support for Ireland joining NATO remains consistently low, so even if a panel is only composed of an equal number of experts for and against neutrality – however expert is defined! – it’s still more likely to produce a result favourable to the government than a group drawn from the citizenry. I don’t think that means these forums aren’t worth engaging with; if anything I encourage everyone in the country to look into the process for making submissions to them whenever that’s announced and do whatever else you can to fight for maintaining our neutrality.

Prolegomena to Any Future Posts

I haven’t written on this blog in over five years, and I’ve turned most of what I did write private because it’s embarrassing. I want to start writing on it again soon, so I thought it might be good to contextualise it a bit. People tend to assume context if you don’t provide it and I really don’t enjoy being misunderstood.

My name is Dean Buckley, and I’m just some guy. I’m not a pundit or activist or commentator or whatever. I write and edit pop culture criticism for The Sundae, a website I co-created with my friend Ciara, and I co-host and edit our film podcast, The Sundae Presents. I want to write about social, political and philosophical topics on this blog because I enjoy doing that, not because I am trying to convince anyone of anything. I did competitive debating for eight years and studied philosophy in college and one of the things I liked most about both those things was just picking apart logic and rhetoric and arguments and ideas, for what I imagine are the same reasons other people like to tinker with machinery. I’ve noticed a lot of people online seem to think if you write a post about something, you must think it’s a very important topic and that you are making a very urgent intervention into it. They especially think so if you do a blog about it in an era when, frankly, who even fucking blogs anymore? After all, the only reason to post on the Internet is for attention, so if you’re posting you must want attention, which means you must think what you’re posting is attention-worthy.

So, with all that in mind, I want to say: unless I say that what I’m writing about on this blog is important, please presume I merely find it interesting. I know I can’t actually make anyone do that, but if something I post here does get attention for some reason, I thought it would be handy to have this already written.

Stitches May Strain, but Sutures Don’t Split: In Defense of Gotham’s Gothic Identity

Gotham is not a perfect show, and maybe not even a good show. I’m not going to defend the crazy pacing of Penguin’s rehabilitation/relapse storyline, the utter waste of Tabitha or pretty much any of Bruce’s dialogue, at any point, ever. I’m not going to pretend I’m not disappointed by the ways in which its second season has failed to live up to my highest hopes.

But there’s this notion about Gotham, most abrasively trumpeted by The AV Club, but parroted elsewhere as received knowledge, that Gotham is a show that struggles with its identity, and particularly that it’s “two shows, and never knows which it wants to be at any time” or some variation thereof.

This is not true now, nor has it ever been true. Gotham has a perfectly coherent identity, possibly one of the most rigidly-defined identities of any show on television right now.

Congratulations, Nerds, You’ve Finally Ruined Everything

(Author’s Note: This is a bad article that makes a bad argument, and I only keep it up because I link to it in a better article refuting the argument of this piece. I strongly advise reading that article before or after reading this one, or better yet, not reading this one at all.)

In the very near future, all four superhero shows that will be airing on The CW as of this autumn – Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow and Supergirl – will have a four-way crossover event, as announced by the network’s president, Mark Pedowitz.

Congratulations, nerds, you have finally crossed the line from merely damaging the properties you claim to love to actively destroying them.