THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Sure, he has promised to move to Ireland if Bernie Sanders is elected (Great reason to vote for Bernie). but as Henry Farrell rports in the Washington Post, Ireland is not all that Muttonhead might believe.

It would seem that O’Reilly’s nearest Irish ancestor was his great-grandfather. This means that he misses the cut-off for automatic Irish citizenship by one generation. If you have one Irish grandparent, you qualify for Irish citizenship — but unless O’Reilly’s grandparent or parent formally applied, he’s out of luck. He does have a second possibility though — paying to become a citizen. Ireland, like many other countries, provides citizenship to individuals who are willing to invest or donate a large sum of money to the benefit of the Irish economy.

What would O’Reilly get in return for his money? First off, a tax system that is not all that different from the U.S. tax system for top earners, and arguably a little less favorable. The effective top Irish income tax rate is a little over half of income.

In the rather unlikely event that Sanders was elected president in a landslide of socialist enthusiasm, turning the Senate and the House socialist, and introducing punitive taxes to impoverish rich Fox News opinionators, O’Reilly would still be in trouble. Even if he lived in Ireland, he would have difficulty avoiding U.S. taxes unless he renounced his U.S. citizenship. The United States continues to regard U.S. expatriates as taxpayers, no matter where they reside. Ireland and the United States have a double taxation treaty, to prevent people being taxed twice for the same income — this might provide some loopholes for royalties and the like, but probably not enough to make an enormous difference. O’Reilly would likely find himself paying to support Sanders’s socialist American utopia from overseas...

The Irish attitude to guns is going to be a serious culture shock. First, he’ll be far worse off than he would be in rural Oregon. While there will surely be cops closer than 40 miles away, those cops will almost certainly be unarmed. In Ireland, police only carry arms under special circumstances. Most Irish police officers don’t even have firearms training.

Furthermore, gun ownership is highly restricted in Ireland. People have to apply for a license to own a gun, and are likely to be refused under many circumstances. Furthermore, there are heavy restrictions on kinds of guns that they are allowed to own — roughly speaking, guns for sport and hunting (sports pistols; shotguns; some kinds of rifles) are okay, but handguns of the kind that O’Reilly could use for “self-defense” are not, let alone automatic weapons. Gun rights are not a topic of political debate in Ireland — Ireland’s most conservative party, which is now the majority party in the government, has just introduced new restrictions, without any significant public opposition.

Poor Muttonhead, his dream country is just that, a dream.