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Brooks Newmark was a British Conservative Party MP for the constituency of Braintree and is now a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Anyway, sales are way up on other things are tax free now, like hand sanitiser…
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Me again, via the space-time-continuum vortex recorder, it’s the middle of June now, and there have been some more … teething problems with the brilliant new simplified toilet roll sales tax. It seems that some people were cheating on their taxes by buying kitchen roll and using it as toilet paper; this has caused the kitchen roll aisles in the supermarkets to be emptied, but I think that it’s important not to give in to criminality, so the government has implemented a few moderate control measures.
Firstly, people will only be allowed to buy one kitchen roll per week, a new ID system along with kitchen roll vouchers is being introduced to enforce this. There will also be random spot checks in homes and offices, with a stiff fine for anyone found to have kitchen roll stored within five metres of their bathroom.
The toilet roll tax will be increased to €275 per roll to cover the costs associated with the kitchen roll tax evasion scandal, and the new measures to prevent abuse of the system and the extra staff to carry out inspections.
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Hello again, the space-time-continuum vortex recorder is bringing you my voice from the start of July 2023, and I’m speaking to you from the corporate headquarters of the office for the control of toilet paper, this is a new government agency that was thought to be fitting given the importance of toilet paper to the economy, and as an expert in the field, I have been appointed as the chief executive.
I can assure you that the issues with the toilet paper control website are now being addressed, and it is unfortunate that the that the toilet paper control app has not yet been finalised, I am assured that it will be working shortly, and I would urge people not to give any credit to irrelevant details like the fact that app was developed by a company incorporated last month by my 14-year-old nephew.
Once it is up and running, people will then easily be able to use kitchen roll for its intended purpose, and upload evidence of this including a photo of the QR code that is now printed on each sheet of kitchen paper, in order to claim the disposable nutritional use paper cleansing tax refund, this simple compliance system of collecting toilet roll paper tax on kitchen roll as well, and then making a refund when the taxpayer uploads photographic evidence of its authorised use in a non-personal posterior capacity.
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I’m talking to you now from August, and we’ve all heard of the Supreme court ruling in the Wotherington Gilhooley case, but you back in January may not be familiar with it. Basically, the court has ruled in favour of Maude Wotherington Gilhooley, an 83-year-old grand-aunt who lived in a small cottage in Borris in Ossory. She took a case arguing that her house was so small, that the bathroom was only 4.7 metres away from the kitchen, and that she couldn’t reasonably be required to store her kitchen roll more than 5 metres from her bathroom, and that her constitutional right to privacy meant that the order to attend smartphone lessons to be able to use the kitchen roll tax refund app was invalid, and the subsequent raid by 27 members of the Garda Emergency Response Unit searching her home was illegal. Ridiculous judicial interference. Although I would have to agree that manacling Ms Wotherington Gilhooley to her walking frame was perhaps excessive.
I am told by reliable sources that the government is about to launch an assistance fund to help inhabitants of small houses to build kitchen extensions to allow them to comply with the law.
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Hello there January listeners, me again with the space-time-continuum vortex recorder, it’s September 2023 now, and of course the airwaves have been filled with the new maxi-roll. An IFSC-based consultancy specialising in corporate tax avoidance has turned itself into a paper factory, making a toilet roll over one kilometre long, weighing nearly 40 kilos, but still only attracting one payment of the €590 tax. I am assured that proposals will go before cabinet to bring in emergency legislation to curb this clearly abusive behaviour.
There are those who are demanding that this entire progressive, simplifying reform be scrapped, but to them I say this – any complaint that you have about the toilet roll tax will be magnified 1000 times if you were to accept the crackpot idea of imposing taxes on all consumer goods.
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Well that was an eventful October. Just after King Charles … no it doesn’t sound normal now either … just after King Charles appointed his seventh UK prime minister in just over a year, and a major cross-border toilet paper smuggling ring was busted, this was a sophisticated operation, with a tunnel from Newry to Dundalk with a continuous spindle of toilet paper being sent southwards. Garda have said that there appears to be the involvement of former paramilitaries in this smuggling operation. I know that there have been setbacks, and people complain about the €750 toilet roll tax, but think of the benefits that we see all around, I’m particularly heartened by the improvement in the performance of Irish media.
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Hello again, the space-time-continuum vortex recorder is bringing you my voice from the end of November 2023, and I think that all right-thinking people will condemn the bleeding-heart Special Criminal Court judges, and their ruling that since the sophisticated cross-border smuggling was of a single continuous spindle of toilet roll, and that since its transport across the border had not actually been completed, then no crime had been committed.
On another note, em, I have to ah acknowledge an element of disappointment that the surge in the sales of Irish newspapers does not now seem to stem from an uptick in the interest of the citizens in current affairs, but that at least part of the reason for the increase of the toilet roll tax to €995 is because people have been putting um the news print to … let’s just say … other uses that it wasn’t it wasn’t intended for, and I’m absolutely not amused by the comments about this improving the quality of some Irish Times columnists.
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Hello. I’m in December 2023, and it seems that the judges have attacked the modest €1,200 toilet roll tax again, and this time it seems that they will succeed in killing this forward-looking initiative. The Supreme Court case taken by the Vegetarian Society on grounds of discrimination has been upheld. When the judges got to the point where it was proposed to have a demonstration in court involving devices to weigh and make an olfactory examination they … well they obviously had enough, and they immediately issued a unanimous ruling that under Section 39 of the constitution, that Ireland go back to the pre-2023 taxation nightmare where taxes were levied on almost all good sold. But section 39 which is about treason…
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Back to sanity, relatively speaking. The thing is, some things just can’t be simple. In particular, our taxation system can’t be simple, because our economy is very complex. And if you tax one area of the economy, and don’t tax another, you will make perverse incentives and distort economic activity.
And that’s exactly what we do in Ireland. We tax labour and economic activity much more heavily, in order to avoid taxing housing. That pushes talent, capital, initiative, effort and ingenuity into the zero-sum-game of property speculation and it deters real economic activity and punishes hard work. Why is childcare so expensive in Ireland? Because the input is almost all work, which is taxed so heavily, and childcare costs have to be paid out of parents’ taxed income, so it gets run through the taxation system twice.
And why is housing so expensive in Ireland? Because, unlike labour, you can’t make new land, so the people who have it have a huge advantage over the people who need it. And the people who have it are powerfully motivated to make sure that it is never taxed, so they can hoard it forever, for free.
And the left-wing politicians who say ‘Scrap this tax’ ‘Scrap that tax’, I just can’t understand them. Having one area of the economy taxed and another not taxed is a recipe for disaster; and at the focal point of that disaster are the people who are paying huge mortgages or rents, and paying huge childcare bills. They are probably the hardest-pressed people in the country, and they are being squeezed by the most idiotically populist policy in the country, to not have a property tax like every other developed country, and instead heap all of our tax base onto work and economic enterprise.
