Bill O’Reilly, the host of Fox News’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” is threatening to flee the country if Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — the self-described democratic socialist who is running for the Democratic Party nomination — is elected president. As quoted in the Huffington Post, O’Reilly said:
“If Bernie Sanders gets elected president, I’m fleeing … I’m going to Ireland. And they already know it. … I shouldn’t say it publicly because that will get Sanders more votes,” he said. “But I’m not going to pay 90 percent of my income to that guy. I’m sorry. I’m not doing it.”
O’Reilly is proud of his Irish ancestry (as a recent emigrant from Ireland and current U.S. citizen, I heartily approve of these sentiments). But he probably doesn’t know very much about what Ireland is like these days. From the perspective of its Western European neighbors, Ireland is a small, market-friendly, right-of-center country. But from the perspective of American conservatism, Ireland looks like a hellhole of socialism.
Can O’Reilly easily flee to Ireland?
It may be tougher than he thinks. 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.
Ireland is not a conservative paradise: Look at the taxes
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.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.