Summary: <br> <a rel="noreferrer noopener external" href="https://twitter.com/BrooksNewmark" target="_blank" data-wpel-link="external">Brooks Newmark</a> was a British Conservative Party MP for the constituency of Braintree and is now a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford.<br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://blog.hereshow.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Brooks-Newmark-scaled.jpg" data-wpel-link="internal"></a><br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> I’ve got a proposal for tax reform. The idea is to make tax easier and simpler to understand, simpler for the government to collect, thereby lower costs which would lower the tax burden overall.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> We have a whole load of sales taxes in Ireland, we have VAT, we have excise duty, we have VRT, we have stamp duty, and these are all complex to administer, they are difficult to comply with, so to simplify everything, I’m recommending to the incoming Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, that he start off 2023 by scrapping them all and replacing them with one simple, easy-to-understand tax that will make life better for everyone.<br> <br> <br> <br> It’ll be fairer, it’ll be transparent, and I think that people will welcome it. The idea is a toilet paper tax. I have calculated that the tax will be about €100 per roll, and this will bring in enough money to cover the abolition of all the other sales taxes, so people’s tax rates will stay the same, the €100 per roll tax they are paying will be offset by the reduction in taxes that they pay on other goods and services, and as I say its simplicity should bring down the total tax burden over time. Everybody needs toilet paper, so nobody can escape the tax, the only difference will be that it’s easy for everyone to understand and administer, and in the long run will save us all money. It’s a no-brainer.<br> <br> <br> <br> *<br> <br> <br> <br> Oh wow, hello there to you all in January 2023. You won’t believe what happened. Firstly, Leo Varadkar accepted my proposal for abolishing all sales taxes, and replacing them with a single, simple easy-to-administer €100 euro tax on each roll of toilet paper.<br> <br> <br> <br> But the really crazy thing is that some sort of vortex in the space-time-continuum was created by the ghost of Steve Jobs in an advanced Apple research laboratory; it was intended to move their corporate profits back in time to before the global minimum tax rate of 15 per cent was introduced, but just as I was coming out of a meeting with Leo Varadkar at Fine Gael headquarters to explain details of my tax plan, the Apple executive recruitment team was going in to meet him, and one of them sneezed in front of a portrait of WT Cosgrave, dropped their space-time-continuum manipulation device, and it bit my portable podcast recorder, and this somehow allows me to actually speak to you back in time in January from here in March 2023.<br> <br> <br> <br> So anyway, all those other taxes are going to be abolished from the end March, and starting on the first day of the next month, they will be replaced with a €100 tax on each roll of toilet paper. I’m sure it’s going to be a big improvement.<br> <br> <br> <br> *<br> <br> <br> <br> OK, so now I’m speaking to you through the Apple space-time-continuum vortex recorder from the future, it’s the start of May 2023, and we’ve had the new system of scrapping all sales taxes in favour of the toilet roll tax in place for just over a month, and it’s going … fine … with some teething problems obviously.<br> <br> <br> <br> There have been great advantages of course, taxes on loads of products have been reduced, that’ll be a boon to the economy, soon, but the toilet paper tax receipts are … below projections. Apparently people have made a lot of efforts to reduce their use of toilet paper, and sales are down considerably. So to make up for that, the government is setting the toilet paper tax to €200 per roll.<br>
