I’m sure the TPP will fix this whole Cook Island thing
Hold on… So today the US applying its laws outside of its borders to former citizens would be a good thing?
Tax havens suck, but I think they’re the price we have to pay for allowing different countries to apply different laws, some of which we are certain to disapprove of.
[Edit: Oops - meant to address the original article. Sorry.]
Do you think there should be no extradition treaties? The same rationale would apply.
Maybe I’ll work with Cook Island to set up a murder haven, where there’s no extradition treaties with other nations. If they want, a nation can try the case on Cook Island, in a Cook Island court. Of course, in those cases, the maximum punishment is a $100 fine. (Also of course, murders committed on the island are punished with deportation.)
Nah - but irony never goes out of style.
There’s absolutely no chance that the TPP will apply in a fashion that even marginally limits the privilege of the .01%.
Most tax avoidance strategies have nothing to do with off-shore accounts. It involves buying tax free government debt (which we have been manufacturing for them at an unprecedented …no… unimaginable rate for the last 7 years. It involves sinking money into investment schemes favored by the government or backing politicians who want to expand government spending. The unproductive activity of tax avoidance is incentivized by tax law that tries to social engineer: Ramp up the base tax rate and then hang up signs at the offices of the White House, Senate and Congress saying 'Let’s make a deal!"
Whatever, we aren’t going to stop water running downhill or capital from running to the most profitable avenues. Socialists are walking irony. Their desired policy objectives can’t exist in the actual world.
For Cory, the government stretching the bounds of what US law permits is terrible, except when it isn’t. He was in this vein a few weeks ago when he advocated using RICO laws, which were intended to break up the Mafia and other organized crime enterprises (using well-defined predicate crimes such as wire fraud), to prosecute think tanks that fund global warming denialists.
One of the most pervasive bad analogies I keep encountering about capital is that - rather than an actual technology devised by people - it is obviously some uncontrollable real-world force like the elements or the weather. Naturalizing it as something which must exist for its own sake doesn’t make for a compelling argument. Not only is capital not the real world, it functions precisely to obscure values and exchange. If you can’t change reality, then symbolize it, and change the symbols! But the sunk costs are so great, it will need to work eventually, right?
I am sure that some of them are irony. But any policies can exist, and absurdity has never been a barrier. I prefer people deliberately creating a society - even if it’s a challenge - rather than people going along with systems they know are dysfunctional for no reason.
Disappointed by the article. The meat of it is in Cory’s quote. Most of the rest is just the author talking themself up and some generic stealth wealth stuff about offices and clothes. I realize the author is probably saving the best stories for their upcoming book but come on. If the Atlantic gives you column inches, put some solid stuff in. Also, if we’re talking 30M fortunes wouldn’t that be higher than the 1%? I thought the 1% was 250-350k a year at the base. It’s a quibble, sure, but now I’m curious.
Hell, the way most people who get utility out of offshore accounts function, thinking of it in terms of yearly income is probably missing the point on my part.
Reading stuff like this about the 0.01% makes me appreciate just how much hard work it must be… to hire someone to manage your money for you.
On changing nationality…Didn’t one of these guys have a public hissy fit when he discovered that if you don’t have a US passport, the US doesn’t have to let you into the country?
When Mitt Romney was running for president, we had dinner at a friend’s house. He is a tax lawyer in Manhattan. He said that the reason Obama’s people were pushing so hard for Mitt to show his taxes was that, while they didn’t know exactly what was there, they knew that if any average American saw how the very wealthy do their taxes they would be appalled. It was a calculated bet that the previous year’s filing he had released had been prepared with an eye toward his presidential run, but that older taxes had not.
Reading about how offshore havens are used, I suspect there are dirty options being considered such as “terrorist” attacks, mysterious cutting of Internet cables, and so on.
…And the fact that none of those earlier returns got leaked is a sign that contrary to accusations, the IRS actually ISN’T the political pawn of the administration in power.
For some reason seeing Renfield nouned like that made me smile. It’s just so right. Now verb it!
Very clever - however, extradition treaties are usually for crimes committed in one country where someone has fled to another. Both countries want justice for crimes committed on their territories, hence the treaty.
Except here, no law-breaking has occurred. What is being demanded here is change in internal tax and banking policy of independent countries.
This gets tricky. If you accept the moral right (or even moral obligation) for us to intervene when we find governance of a country reaches certain levels of immorality, then we implicitly accept that moral right for others to interfere with us when they consider our behaviour immoral. And given by democratic measurement we are likely in the global minority in our moral judgements, you’re opening a whole can of worms.
Now realistically, we simply say that might makes right, and we can interfere with their immoral affairs because they can’t stop us, and that seems to be what the original post implies. But I’m not sure that’s the banner I would want to march under, even if it’s only by implication.
Not seriously? Cory’s way too bright for that. That’d be up with saying that the only problem with civil forfeiture laws is that they’re not confiscating the assets of the right people. Next it’s not that the principle of HUAAC was wrong, it was that it defined un-American incorrectly.
Of course, if the primary symbol of the Reign of Terror is getting likes here, then perhaps he’s playing to this crowd :-). Still, I think I prefer his somewhat more nuanced commentary on issues relating to the digital rights.
In fact it will make life easier for the 1%, as it is intended to. Instead of just avoiding law that inconveniences their wealth accumulation and asset protection strategies, they will be able to petition a “court” of sorts to sue for damages when a nations laws inhibit their profits with nit-picking things like environmental protection or safety considerations or consumers rights.
You know where that one’s gotta go, right? 
