Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'(businessinsider.com) |
Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service'(businessinsider.com) |
Bully for them. It's been working for them in the past, and it's nice to see a government that (at least seems) to have their act together trying out some weird and out there stuff.
we started to ask companies to give us more data. The reason is we wanted to get rid of fraud. Currently, all the companies in Estonia are declaring their B2B deals. If I’m a company and you’re a company and I buy something off you and it’s more than €1,000, we both have to declare it
e-Residency does not confer citizenship, tax residency, residence or right of entry to Estonia or to the European Union. The e-Resident smart ID card is not a physical identification or a travel document, and does not display a photo.
I know it's way too optimistic and this solution probably introduces just as many problems as it solves, but still, one is allowed to dream, right?
Shipping's been done under flags of convenience for years, but I suspect a lot of people will be deeply unwilling to walk that road for residence.
This has already happened in St Kitts[1][2]. They sold citezenship with very few non-financial requirements and now other nations have started screening travellers from there more aggressively, requiring visas, etc.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Kitts_and_Nevis_passport [2]http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/03/02/468953007/episo...
http://arcticstartup.com/article/estonian-country-as-a-servi...
Those two sites don't seem like an april fools jokes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9537551
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10407604
And Kaspar Korjus, director of the E-Residency program, gave an AMA over on the Digital Nomad forum a few months ago:
https://nomadforum.io/t/i-m-kaspar-director-of-estonia-s-e-r...
I'd say it means decent healthcare, universally free of charge.
... He adds: "I have been like a kid in a candy store. I have lots of investment money and full political support."
Yes. Someone shouldn't have to suffer in pain because they work a low paid job, or are unemployed.
> The only way to make healthcare universal is to work out serious insurance plans
It's not the only way. The other way is for our taxes to foot the bill, as we do in the UK with the NHS.
The NHS is far from perfect, with long waiting lists and varying levels of care depending on your location - but it works, and provides universal healthcare to the whole of the UK.
PS: If we spent 5% as much on back pain research as we have on Cancer there would likely be a range of viable treatments for most issues.
As above, see the UK for a good example. TBH, I don't really know how healthcare works anywhere but the UK and US, but I had sort of assumed that other EU countries had a similar universal system to that of the UK.
> people that can pay your healthcare bills are going to be scarcer and scarcer
Your point has some validity, but tax revenues do not just come from personal income tax. Corporation tax, VAT, petroleum tax, council tax, insurance tax, air tax, road tax... christ, there is hardly anything that isn't taxed!
For sales tax based systems, total aggregate turnover is enough; but to monitor VAT you'd need at least the aggregate volume grouped by all your B2B (VAT paying) customers and suppliers.
So, when it's proposed, it's unusual, and is worthy of concern.