Excellent, plain-language explainer on corporate and 1 percenter tax evasion, with a simple solution

If this grand experiment is to continue in its intended framework, it would be better that people actually vote for the candidate that they choose rather than getting caught up in the myths of the machine which prevent change.

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But that’s the point, as former U.S. president Barack Obama noted: “The problem is that a lot of this stuff is legal, not illegal.”

The entry price for these offshore structures means that they’re beyond the reach of everyone except those whom the industry refers to as UHNWIs — ultra high net worth individuals. In fact, the majority of wealth in tax havens belongs to those worth more than $50 million. These legal offshore tax shelters reserved for the elite create a two-tiered tax system — where the wealthy stockpile their cash tax free and everyone else pays to make up for it.

What we’ve got is a bunch of rich squatters who don’t pay for all the benefits of living in an orderly society where they can amass wealth without a mob at their door to take it away and eat them.

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Currently companies pay around 15% of the taxes people pay to the yearly budget - when income tax first came out it used to be 50/50. Profit is up around 10,000,000% from that period of time - and wages are down around 30% (adjusted for inflation). This means that we are (we being the people) floating the bill for the budget on top of our wonderful less money making backs.

Frankly that sucks. Whatever we do - the tax on business needs to go up around 2000% (no not a typo) in terms of real tax paid so that companies are at least paying into the system as much as private individuals.

Should that happen you’d find that tax relief to the people is possible, and that we wouldn’t need to fight over paying for food stamps because we’d have the cash - and we’d be able to repair our infrastructure. Instead we fight over the fact that this scum sucking piece of crap garbage that is pulled is legal (as if playing fucking games isn’t cheating - there isn’t a rule in monopoly that the banker can’t skim off the top - but you’d still bust his ass if he did so).

This is cheating - it puts undue burden on us as a country - it’s why we fight over stupid table scraps in the federal budget when we are the richest country in the world.

It needs to stop.

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On Tuesday, Americans created what must be the most diverse set of new politicians in the history of this country, and that was in an odd-year election. Sikh, Trans (white and black), a huge number of women and a DSA-endorsed socialist. They’re all now Democrats. If you have some revolutionary ideas, please run, but run as a Democrat. Save your purity, because this week showed real change.

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This is not evasion - which is illegal. It is avoidance -like your 401K. And it’s legal.
The way to stop it is one all-powerful world government - but that does come a couple of downsides.
The fact is if you’re rich then the amount of tax you pay is a conscience issue. And the intersection of ‘people who have become very rich’ and ‘people who have a massive social conscience’ is small. And those that do have a social conscience prefer philanthropy where they can pick and choose what they pay for.
For MNCs, it is actually a director’s duty to maximise shareholder returns, not pay as much tax as you can.

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Just because something is legal, doesn’t make it good.

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Yes - and the politicians we voted for did that, and it is LEGAL, not cheating, when companies pay tax at whatever the prescribed rate is.

Yes. Legal. My point. Not cheating. Avoidance is legal, but what you call cheating seems to be legal avoidance, as I see it. We need to change the rules so that much of it becomes clearly defined as illegal evasion, instead - the only fix is to make legal shenanigans illegal. Google/Apple/etc should not be able to legally say “my domestic subsidiary here licenses the Google/Apple/etc brand name from that subsidiary there in a tax haven and it happens that the licensing fee exceeds that domestic subsidiary’s profits, so no tax is due” but they can, legally, 'cos them’s the rules.

I suspect (well, I am pretty sure) that you and I are in violent agreement on this generally. (Your use of the term ‘cheating’ was what was problematic, so I used ‘shenanigans’ instead.)

Sort the rules first, not the way the players play to the rules. Making the rules simpler and having fewer of them would make it harder for players to exploit (‘game’) the system to the detriment of society at large.

(But having said all that, I’ll just note that much of the ownership of many of these corps is in fact in our pension investments, so must we expect to need to save more for retirement, as profits and dividends and capital growth slow (perhaps) once the shenanigans stop and corps pay more tax? But if govt has more revenue, can it spend more to support us all? And so it goes …)

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LOL - you perhaps summed up themadpoet’s position (as it seems to me) very pithily, as I was laboriously writing my response above. And the corollary to your comment is “so if it is bad make it illegal”, which sums up my response above, rather better.
:wink:

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Yes, but to cure this, you’d have to have an all-powerful world government. which has downsides. As I pointed out in my original post…

That’s not the only solution. Greater actual, local democracy would be a great start for one, which would facilitate a move away from the strangle hold that neoliberalism has on the nation-state.

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No. No, that’s utterly and completely irrelevant to global financial flows.
It doesn’t matter how excellent your local representative is. Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, Singapore and Monaco give not a jot or tittle to what you and your locale think.
You could however start with Delaware…

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Okay. Have a nice day.

Have a nice passive aggressive day. FTFY

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Whatever man.

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And meanwhile, in America, if he wants to use any of the money stashed in Cyprus, he can simply go to an ATM and make a withdrawal from his offshore account.

Ironically, the laws against so-called structuring, executing transactions in and out of US bank accounts in sums under certain amounts, was theoretically intended to fight the various forms of money laundering. But because real money launderers, most especially tax evaders, have legal resources to fight most such criminal suits brought by the Federal justice department on behalf of the IRS or FBI or other agencies, in practice it winds up being used to confiscate the income of the self-employed or workers and small businesses who get income mainly in cash, because those people don’t have the resources to fight it and are easily pressured into signing guilty pleas to get a fraction of their confiscated income back, even when they’ve done nothing illegal.

When the government is prevented by lawmakers from taxing large corporations and wealthy individuals at their fair share, it turns on the working class who have no political clout to protect themselves.

The onus here is on the United States and the European Union. Why do we allow criminals, tax evaders and kleptocrats to ultimately use our financial and real estate markets to launder their wealth?

Because we, or rather a majority of us who vote, vote for candidates with the most visibility, which is bought with campaign funds, which are raised by corporate lobbyists who organize fundraisers in return for special treatment under the law. One of two things must happen to change this. Human nature must change so a majority of voters take a careful rational interest in holding candidates accountable, which may entail time they literally can’t afford. Or campaign finance laws need to be seriously reformed, not the toothless, loop-hole filled reforms enacted periodically for show. That might sound impossible, like getting the fox to vote to limit it’s access to the hen house, but there is one thing it has going for it. Politicians hate fundraising. It’s not a great lever, but it’s something.

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The answer isn’t vote for the Democrats.

The answer is join the Democrats, get involved in the party and change it, THEN vote Democrat.

They’re a big tent party who claim to represent the left, they shouldn’t have a problem with left wing entryism.

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Couldn’t be said better! This was part of the problem I always had with Bernie. He wanted their support and structure, but didn’t want to endorse the party by actually joining it for real. The Republicans thought they were co-opting the tea party but it ate them from the inside. There’s no reason the left can’t do the same, if the Democratic party is as rotten inside as they believe.

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It’s even worse than that. Because so much wealth is concentrated in so few hands, going after the working classes can never hope to balance the budget. But tax collectors do it anyway because when it’s so obvious revenue falls short of what it would amount to if the wealthy weren’t dodging taxes, their jobs depend on being seen going after people, so they go after the common people who can’t fight illegitimate prosecution rather than the moneyed class who can fight legitimate prosecution and, even if they don’t win, make the tax collectors’ jobs much harder.

And because tax collectors go after so many working class people with bullshit suits the targets can’t afford to fight, you get wealthy propaganda outlets such as Fox News telling their viewers it’s the poor and working classes that are tax dodging. Those viewers, overwhelmingly blue collar rural Americans and retirees on fixed income, believe that lie and vote against their own interests to support tax breaks for rich assholes like the one they put in the White House. Which is pretty damn ironic for a voting bloc that largely distrusts the government and especially tax collectors, but are blindly willing to accept the lie that perverse incentive creates within tax revenue services.

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… corporate and 1 percenter tax evasion, with a simple solution

I’m guessing the solution is not “Elect Trump.”

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