It is not about whether we want to pay taxes or not. No one does !? The real issue is whether certain members (including off-shore corporations) of society should be permitted to avoid paying taxes because the system has been set up for them to legally get away with it.
Although this linked article is about the questionable financial background of Mitt Romney what is equally eye opening is that Tax Havens around the world might really exist to get (dirty) money into the US and not the other way around! For me this implies that there is a continuous stream of support for US dollars by all the bad guys around the world that ultimately contributes to global inequality but certainly keeps the demand up for the Global Reserve currency.
From the article
Page 1 For all Mitt Romney’s touting of his business record, when it comes to his own money the Republican nominee is remarkably shy about disclosing numbers and investments. Nicholas Shaxson delves into the murky world of offshore finance, revealing loopholes that allow the very wealthy to skirt tax laws, and investigating just how much of Romney’s fortune (with $30 million in Bain Capital funds in the Cayman Islands alone?) looks pretty strange for a presidential candidate.
Page 3 In the years since then, almost unknown to most Americans, the United States has turned itself into a giant tax haven for foreigners, just as the memo suggested. Federal and state tax laws have been deliberately shaped to give foreigners special tax exemptions unavailable to Americans, plus financial secrecy and exemptions from regulatory restraints. “We have criticized offshore tax havens for their secrecy and lack of transparency,” said Senator Carl Levin. “But look what is going on in our own backyard.”
In this grand scenario, tax havens such as the Caymans serve as feeders of foreign savings into Tax Haven U.S.A. from abroad, providing foreign investors with additional ways to skip around tax, disclosure, and regulatory requirements that they might trigger if they invested directly.
The money sucked into Tax Haven U.S.A., often via the “feeder” tax havens, is frequently tax-evading and other criminal foreign money, in the spirit of Hudson’s 1966 memo, and it is predominantly channeled not into productive investment but into real estate and financial business.
One cannot properly understand Wall Street’s size and power without appreciating the central role of offshore tax havens. There is absolutely no evidence that Bain has done anything illegal, but private equity is one channel for this secrecy-shrouded foreign money to enter the United States, and a filing for Mitt Romney’s first $37 million Bain Capital Fund, of 1984, provides a rare window into this. One foreign investor, of $2 million, was the newspaper tycoon, tax evader, and fraudster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht, and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange circumstances, after looting his company’s pension fund. The Bain filing also names Eduardo Poma, a member of one of the “14 families” oligarchy that has controlled most of El Salvador’s wealth for decades; oddly, Poma is listed as sharing a Miami address with two anonymous companies that invested $1.5 million between them. The filings also show a Geneva-based trustee overseeing a trust that invested $2.5 million, a Bahamas corporation that put in $3 million, and three corporations in the tax haven of Panama, historically a favored destination for Latin-American dirty money—“one of the filthiest money-laundering sinks in the world,” as a U.S. Customs official once put it.
Our Mystic may have avoided certain income taxes over his lifetime but Mitt appears to have not only done that (on a really grand scale) but managed to do it using questionable investor seed money and questionable ethical business pursuits. I only assume our Mystic was not a French hedge fund invested in Bain Capital ?! Hey but it’s all legal or have the statues of time limitation simply expired ?!
Here is the entire Vanity Fair article.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts
