Back in the late 1990s when, as Ireland’s Minister of Finance, I started cutting taxes, many people feared that the loss of revenue to the Exchequer would be massive and that the policy would have to be abandoned. But the opposite happened. Far from the policy causing an erosion of the Exchequer’s revenue stream, reduced tax rates generated higher economic activity, greater taxpayer compliance and a surge in the tax take for the Exchequer.
