[PAULYPOKER]

Global elite hide up to $32 trillion in offshore tax havens: report


By Stephen C. Webster
Monday, July 23, 2012 12:06 EDT





Topics: offshore tax havens ♦ Tax Justice Network


Nations’ problems of debt and deficit could be easily solved by applying taxes to profits held in offshore tax havens, where the global business elite have hidden up to $32 trillion to skirt their responsibilities to tax agencies all over the world, the liberal-leaning Tax Justice Network reported this week.
The Tax Justice Network said that its estimates of wealth held in offshore havens ranged from $21 trillion to $32 trillion — the lowest of which is still massively larger than the roughly $11.5 trillion held in those same havens in 2005. The latest report refers to the practice of hiding wealth as “the dark side of globalization” — and shows that practice is still growing rapidly.
Activists noted that this disparity affects studies of income inequality because most researchers measure the gap between rich and poor within the boundaries of individual countries, instead of factoring in the massive stores of treasure hidden abroad.


For perspective, the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of the U.S. economy for 2011 was $15.9 trillion, whereas U.S. public debt (household debt plus government debt) stands at about $15.8 trillion. If $32 trillion were dolled out evenly to every single American citizen, each person would receive about $102,698.
But the profits don’t just come from U.S. shores: all over the world, business elites are sending their money offshore and away from government taxing authorities, a phenomena the study’s authors say is making social inequality much worse.
From a global perspective, the figures are even more staggering: with $32 trillion, the Euro crisis could be solved and portions of Africa could become more habitable. Diseases could be eradicated. It could literally end world hunger.
“These estimates reveal a staggering failure,” the Tax Justice Network’s John Christensen toldThe Guardian. “Inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people. This new data shows the exact opposite has happened: for three decades extraordinary wealth has been cascading into the offshore accounts of a tiny number of super-rich.”
Most of these offshore havens are legally permitted, but that could soon be changing in the U.S., where tax looholes have become a major political issue thanks to the discovery of offshore accounts held by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, himself a multi-millionaire.
President Barack Obama has proposed eliminating tax breaks offered to wealthy people,pegging millionaires’ tax rates at 30 percent and closing big business’s favorite tax loopholes to bring more wealth back into the U.S. financial system. He’s also proposed cutting the top corporate tax rate to make the U.S. a more attractive place to do business.



Romney’s plan is quite different from President Obama’s. The former Massachusetts Governor recommends up to $600 billion of cuts to federal revenues by 2015, which includes massive reductions in social safety net programs like food stamps and unemployment insurance. A big part of that budget cut is accounted for by maintaining historically low tax rates for the wealthiest Americans — program launched by President George W. Bush and originally intended to sunset in 2010, but kept on life support by Republicans who threatened to shut down the U.S. government if they didn’t get their way.
Romney also supports plans that would turn Medicare into a coupon program and move Social Security out of the government’s hands and onto the stock market, where banks would take mandatory retirement savings from Americans’ pay and place it in private accounts. An estimate by the Center for a New American Security also said that Romney’s budget plan would see the U.S. spend an additional $2 trillion on the military over the next decade.
The vast majority of Americans, including a slim majority of conservatives, favor higher taxes on the wealthy, according to a Washington Post poll published last August.

[marcojuiceman]

Another reason Romney will lose

[PAULYPOKER]

If releasing his tax returns is more damaging than hiding them, there must be something worth concealing

Mitt Romney

(Credit: Reuters/Jason Reed)

Ed Gillespie got the most attention for telling CNN’s Candy Crowley that Mitt Romney “retired retroactively” from Bain Capital in 2002, seeming to acknowledge that he remained as CEO after February 1999, which the Romney campaign denies. But the Sunday-show drumbeat for Romney to release more than two years of tax returns may be equally damaging — especially because it was led by Republicans.
George Will made a point that Democrats have made before him, but his conservative credibility and capacity for pronouncements from on high gave it special resonance: Romney’s older tax returns must contain more damaging information than what we already know, since he’s so intent on hiding them.
“The costs of not releasing the returns are clear,” Will said. “Therefore, [Romney] must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.” The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol and Bush-Cheney advisor Matthew Dowd also joined the chorus of supposed allies asking Romney to release more returns.
“You’ve got to release six, eight, 10 years,” Kristol said, calling Romney’s reluctance to do so “crazy.”
So what would be more damaging than what Romney’s 2010 and 2011 returns told us? We already know that he’s insanely wealthy, that he’s got his money in offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, and that he paid an obscenely low 13.9 percent tax rate because he made his money from investment, not work, a result of the way our tax system privileges the investor class over even rich people who have to labor for a living. If that’s the kind of thing that outrages you, you’ve got enough to be outraged about.
But what if Romney had years where he paid no taxes at all? The New Yorker’s John Cassidy surveys the list of possible reasons for Romney to hide his returns and seems to think that’s the most plausible explanation. Cassidy admits he’s in the realm of “speculation” – but that’s where Romney has left the electorate with his refusal to release more than two years of filings.
Other explanations Cassidy considers include even higher income, even more offshore accounts, and investments in businesses or industries that might be politically embarrassing. But since we already know Romney is ridiculously rich and that he has damaging offshore accounts, the first two don’t seem a reason to hide his returns. The third is possible, but as Cassidy observes, since we know Bain Capital invested in businesses that ruthlessly laid off workers and even one that disposed of aborted fetuses, it’s hard to imagine many more politically damaging revelations.
“But there may have been a year in which Romney’s federal tax rate was in the single figures, and possibly even close to zero,” Cassidy posits, since the two years he was willing to release are when he was the nominal front-runner for the GOP nomination and was probably more cognizant of the political risks to aggressive tax-avoidance. Romney’s accountants might have written off a big loss or used other legal ways to minimize or even eliminate his tax burden. To be fair, I should note that although Cassidy seems to think that’s the most likely reason for Romney to conceal his returns, he calls it “pretty unlikely.” I don’t. As Will says, there’s got to be a cost-benefit calculus behind Romney’s stonewalling, and I can’t think of a better one.
Taken together, Romney’s shady “retroactive” retirement, his Bain Capital profiteering and his low tax rate add up to a big problem for the presumptive GOP nominee, because the white working class has become the bedrock of the Republican base. David Frum puts it this way, in a CNN piece headlined “Mitt Romney’s painfully bad week”:

Romney’s core problem is this: He heads a party that must win two-thirds of the white working-class vote in presidential elections to compensate for its weakness in almost every demographic category. The white working class is the most pessimistic and alienated group in the electorate, and it especially fears and dislikes the kind of financial methods that gained Romney his fortune.

So maybe this is the year white working-class voters wake up to the real agenda of the party they’ve come to support. Democrats have hoped that before and been disappointed. But there’s never been a GOP candidate so perfectly tailored to expose the party’s real base, the top 1 percent.

CONTINUE READING

[DwightShrute]

the clueless bring up the % the top earners paying taxes. let me put things into perspective so that the poor like yourself will understand. 0.1% which is roughly 15,000 people in the us made $700,000,000,000 last year. if i made that much i wouldn't mind paying 60% of my income. wake up and smell your dentures. you aren't one of them, it's not all about how much % one pays in taxes.

when it comes down to it us, the middle class, are willing to pay more taxes but we want the income to be distributed fairly and equally. the rules right now do not favor the middle class period!

asking anyone to pay more taxes when the government has a spending problem is insane. I don't care if you make a trillion dollars a year. It's the principal. Fix the problem first, then you have EARNED the right to propose new taxes if needed. This is common sense and common decency.

[dodger33]

Do the libs really want to bring up this whole not providing tax returns issue with Romney?? Obama hasn't provided a real birth certificate, any school records from grade school through college, a passport, any reasons for associations with known communists, etc. It's quite funny how they can make a big deal about that when Obama has been the least transparent president in US History.

[dodger33]

asking anyone to pay more taxes when the government has a spending problem is insane. I don't care if you make a trillion dollars a year. It's the principal. Fix the problem first, then you have EARNED the right to propose new taxes if needed. This is common sense and common decency.

Anyone that can't understand this has mental retardation or is completely blinded by their bleeding heart.

[ACoochy]

Do the libs really want to bring up this whole not providing tax returns issue with Romney?? Obama hasn't provided a real birth certificate, any school records from grade school through college, a passport, any reasons for associations with known communists, etc. It's quite funny how they can make a big deal about that when Obama has been the least transparent president in US History.

Prove it

[Snowball]

its at least 32 Trillion.

Super rich hold $32 trillion in offshore havens

[rkelly110]

asking anyone to pay more taxes when the government has a spending problem is insane. I don't care if you make a trillion dollars a year. It's the principal. Fix the problem first, then you have EARNED the right to propose new taxes if needed. This is common sense and common decency.

The problem was 911 and congress giving Bush a blank check. Yes, it was the govts fault, but we have to pay
for it. Either more now or more later. Give me one good reason why the rich deserve tax cuts?

[DwightShrute]

The problem was 911 and congress giving Bush a blank check. Yes, it was the govts fault, but we have to pay
for it. Either more now or more later. Give me one good reason why the rich deserve tax cuts?

Taxes are too high as it is. Everyone should pay less tax. I doubt there would me much resistence for the rich to pay more if they government were fiscally accountable and responsibe. I doubt we would be talking about this if government were. The problem is government spends too much. Everything else is just spin. Lower personal and corporate taxes and implement a small goods and service tax/national sales tax that everyone pays when they. That's fair.

[rkelly110]

No one had a problem with the taxes they were paying, until Bush cut them. Where did the cuts come from?
Medicare, according to the Repubs, that was broke to begin with. Who's suffering because of that? The elderly.

Ooooo, we get a whopping $20 a week before taxes, an inkling of what the rich get.

Yes, I remember when we went to war, people bitching about how we are going to pay. The big dick said,
deficits don't matter. They cut taxes and gave everyone money. $300 single, $600 family.

[ChalkyDog]

Raising taxes in a recession is a disaster.

As a general blanket sentiment, sure. Depends where the taxes are raised, and what those dollars go to. Raising taxes isn't the disaster, it is usually what those taxes pay for that become the disaster.

[paranoyd androyd]

Do the libs really want to bring up this whole not providing tax returns issue with Romney?? Obama hasn't provided a real birth certificate, any school records from grade school through college, a passport, any reasons for associations with known communists, etc. It's quite funny how they can make a big deal about that when Obama has been the least transparent president in US History.

[ChalkyDog]

Do the libs really want to bring up this whole not providing tax returns issue with Romney?? Obama hasn't provided a real birth certificate, any school records from grade school through college, a passport, any reasons for associations with known communists, etc. It's quite funny how they can make a big deal about that when Obama has been the least transparent president in US History.

The funnier part would be Mitt Romney providing them, and then a group of dems not believe they're real, and have been "cooked" - and making a lot of noise due to the full-retard part of the media.

[therushishere]

Do you think the 18-32 trillion held in banks offshore banks is all american money?

Or does the use of the term offshore bank make that connotation?

[ACoochy]

Do you think the 18-32 trillion held in banks offshore banks is all american money?

Or does the use of the term offshore bank make that connotation?

U r aware that 32 trillion dollars equates to more than entire global GDP??

And ppl talk about debt like its a problem.

Generally, ppl that hold these offshore funds have invited authorities to investigate them. Why then do u think the authorities do not??

One hand washes the other and the squeaky wheel will continue to get the grease...

[therushishere]

U r aware that 32 trillion dollars equates to more than entire global GDP??

And ppl talk about debt like its a problem.

Generally, ppl that hold these offshore funds have invited authorities to investigate them. Why then do u think the authorities do not??

One hand washes the other and the squeaky wheel will continue to get the grease...

Just asking a question seeing as the two wealthiest men in the world aren't American.

[chico2663]

that's bullshit! my uncle builds most the oilrigs that are used. he was offered 10 mil back when bush got in office. He is worth a hell of alot more than i will. I pay a higher tax rate than him or my cuz because they put everything in the business name. Than they depreciate it. i get hit with A.M.T. EVERY ******* YEAR AND I DON'T MAKE SHIT!