Exhaustive Study Finds Global Elite Hiding As Much As $21 to $32 Trillion Offshore

Newly updated report reveals how wealthy individuals and their families have between $21 and $32 trillion of hidden financial assets around the world in what are known as offshore accounts or tax havens.  The actual sums could be higher because the study only deals with financial wealth deposited in bank and investment accounts, and not other assets such as property and yachts.  The inquiry was commissioned by the Tax Justice Network and is being touted as the most comprehensive report ever on the "offshore economy."  It also finds that private banks are deeply involved in running offshore havens, with UBS, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs handling the most assets.  The report’s author, James Henry, a lawyer and former chief economist at McKinsey & Company, explains more in this video. 

We must remember that this information about offshore tax havens and the $21 to $32 Trillion dollars covers "individuals", not enterprises doing the same thing, which may add anywhere from $50 to $80 Trillion dollars or more. 




All too often people deliberate about taxation, tax codes, scaled taxation and such, yet there may be wholly fresher possibilities than shuffling round the way things are done now without making any truly substantial progressively sustainable choices and actions. 

PROUT offers an alternative perspective on this relatively necessary concern of taxes, which may also include some suprising factors.  Explore PROUT's perspective here

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism?  Explore the answers HERE

GOP Supercommittee Member Admits Bush Tax Cuts Didn’t Create Jobs, Can’t Explain Why

By Pat Garofalo on Dec 4, 2011  

Republicans this week filibustered a Democratic plan to extend a soon-to-expire payroll tax cut, objecting to the fact that the extension was paid for by implementing a small surtax on income in excess of $1 million.  To justify their objection to taxing the wealthy, Republicans have revived their false claim that taxing the rich amounts to taxing small business owners and job creators.

Bloomberg’s Al Hunt asked Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) — who represented the GOP on the fiscal supercommittee that failed to craft a deficit reduction package — to explain this viewpoint, considering that more jobs were created under the Clinton administration and its higher taxes on the rich than were created following the Bush tax cuts.  Upton admitted that “I don’t know specifically the answer to that question,” nonsensically pointing to Friday’s jobs report instead of trying to argue the premise of Hunt’s question:

HUNT: Why under those pre-Bush tax cut tax rates did the economy do so well in the ‘90s?  And why under the Bush tax rates, less for the wealthy, to do so poorly in this decade?

UPTON: Well, a couple things.  One, spending went up, Al, the wars.  I mean, that’s trillions of dollars.  And also there was no change in the entitlements.  And we also know -

HUNT: But that shouldn’t hurt the economy.  That shouldn’t hurt economic growth.

UPTON: Yeah, but that impacts the debt and the deficit.

HUNT: But I’m asking, why did the economy grow a lot?  Why were more jobs created in the previous decade under higher taxes than in this decade under lower taxes?

UPTON: I don’t know specifically the answer to that question.  I can – I can maybe merit a guess.  But, I mean, in large part is because our job – we lost jobs.  I mean, look at the jobs report that came out this last week, three-hundred- some-thousand people actually stopped looking for jobs.

Watch it:

As Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden found, “in the past 60 years, job growth has actually been greater in years when the top income tax rate was much higher than it is now.”  In fact, “if you ranked each year since 1950 by overall job growth, the top five years would all boast marginal tax rates at 70 percent or higher.”  The GOP, as Upton displays, simply has no explanation for these facts.

In a Bloomberg op-ed, wealthy investor Nick Hanauer also blew a hole in the GOP’s line of thinking, writing, “I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people.  But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.  That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs.”  The GOP would do well to take note.

FAIL: Super Committee Comes Up Empty

Brian Beutler  November 21, 2011

A whirl of last minute meetings and shuttle diplomacy weren’t enough to help the 12-member deficit Super Committee reach agreement on anything.  Late on Monday, co-chairs Jeb Hensarling and Patty Murray put the panel to bed in an official statement.
 

“Despite our inability to bridge the committee’s significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation’s fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve.  We remain hopeful that Congress can build on this committee’s work and can find a way to tackle this issue in a way that works for the American people and our economy.


“We are deeply disappointed that we have been unable to come to a bipartisan deficit reduction agreement, but as we approach the uniquely American holiday of Thanksgiving, we want to express our appreciation to every member of this committee, each of whom came into the process committed to achieving a solution that has eluded many groups before us.  Most importantly, we want to thank the American people for sharing thoughts and ideas and for providing support and good will as we worked to accomplish this difficult task.


“We would also like to thank our committee staff, in particular Staff Director Mark Prater and Deputy Staff Director Sarah Kuehl, as well as each committee member’s staff for the tremendous work they contributed to this effort.  We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to Dr. Douglas Elmendorf and Mr. Thomas Barthold and their teams at the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation, respectively, for the technical support they provided to the committee and its members.”

The Super Committee itself was part of the tarnished legacy of this summer’s debt limit fight — a GOP-initiated legislative debacle that harmed the country’s economy and further soured voters on their dysfunctional Congress.  Much of the bad will that fight created between Democrats and Republicans — and the stain it left on the institution as a whole — bled through to the negotiations that failed today.  For days before it became official, members of both parties were parceling out blame, both to each other, and to the various interest groups that helped stymie progress.  Republicans’ favorite culprit has been President Obama, whom they now fault for failing to involve himself in the process, after asking him to stay out of the process when the Super Committee was first put together.

But the actual root of the failure lies in the GOP’s strict unwillingness to increase taxes on wealthier Americans.  Over the course of the negotiations, Democrats have put forward multiple proposals that include fairly significant cuts to programs like Medicare — but conditioned on the idea that the GOP would agree to similar dollar figures in new tax revenue from top earners.  One GOP counter proposal reportedly did include modest new tax revenues — about $250 billion over 10 years — but those would have been taken largely from middle income Americans, while providing tax cuts to the rich.

Monday’s outcome doesn’t exacerbate the country’s debt forecast, which may explain the ratings agencies’ silence in the days leading up to the deadline.  But that will change if and when Congress takes steps to exacerbate deficits — something scores of members have already pledged to do.  The catch is that Democrats and Republicans will now have to fight through the regular, ugly order — through filibusters and amendments — to protect their interest and pursue their goals ahead of a number of hard budgetary and economic deadlines.

In about five weeks, a payroll tax holiday for workers, and extended benefits for long-term unemployed Americans are both set to expire.  So is a temporary patch to prevent Medicare physicians from taking a big automatic pay cut.  At the end of next year, all the Bush tax cuts are set to expire, and, simultaneously, the penalty for the Super Committee’s inaction — across the board cuts to security programs and Medicare providers — is set to kick in.  Members of Congress from both parties are deeply invested in preventing all of those things from happening.  But in almost all cases, they don’t agree with each other about how.

These fights will loom large in 2012, and will provide openings for any inclined members or group of members to pursue their own 10-year deficit reduction plans — to create room in the budget to prevent all of the consequences of inaction from happening.

But that will be an excruciatingly heavy lift.  There’s little appetite in the Republican-controlled House for any deficit plan that includes higher tax revenues.  And until that changes, Congress will gridlock every time it turns its attention to fiscal issues.  President Obama and Congressional Democratic leaders say they will resist any effort by the GOP to dismantle or alter the penalty between now and January 2013 — a strategy meant to pressure Republicans to come to terms with the unsustainable nature of their anti tax pledges.

That assures a brutal political fight over the possibility that the defense budget will be slashed — automatically and indiscriminately — while the country remains at war.  Simultaneously, Republicans are threatening to block all significant job-creation measures — including the payroll tax and unemployment extensions — unless they’re paid for with program cuts elsewhere in the budget.  With unemployment at 9 percent, these are high-priority initiatives for Democrats and President Obama and both will keep hounding Republicans for blocking economic growth measures — indeed, for allowing an automatic tax increase on workers — until something gives, or voters decide for themselves at the polls.

Taxation and Exploitation

PROUT advocates the abolition of income tax. When there is no income tax, nobody will try to accumulate contraband money. All money will be legitimate money. As a result there will be economic solidarity, an increase in trade and commerce, more investment, more employment and an improvement in the position of foreign exchange. Intellectuals should demand the abolition of income tax, for everybody, especially humans, of which corporations are not.  

Tax Meister Mikey sets things straight about taxes and values in our current economic dilemma. 

Human intelligence is subtle and sublime, a threshold of excellence in evolutionary continuum reaching a zenith, perhaps, in human birth, so far, on Earth.  While this progress is extraordinary, it must also continue, progressing from crude toward subtle with maximum utilization and rational distribution in every realm of life.  Material longings are constant while the materiel desired by humans is finite and less sublime than achieving human birth, and can never satisfy humanity's longing for infinity. 

Our rational minds, so evolved and growing, have overcome many obstacles through our evolutionary history, our rationality dispelling misconceptions born of fear, misinformation and misunderstanding, better managed by our evolving rationality, though that same rationality, an extraordinary feat when contrasted to animality, is subordinate to even subtler realms, intuitional realms anchored in conceptual centricity, i.e. subjective approach, while properly utilizing less subtle realms, including the resources of this vast Universe in fair and equitable manner. 

Predator consumptionists and accumulators hinder the evolution of humanity, and all too often other life forms, by their insatiable greed and avarice while treating, at first objects then life forms and finally, humans, as objects of consumption, negating their deservedness, in their own right, of life, their pursuit of happiness, and exploring their lives and this Universe as the mystery that it is, and as the umbilical envelopment of our perpetual and pervasive home, whatever the original reason for life may be. 

PROUT acknowledges the subtleties of life, particularly well expressed in human life, and encourages people and the enterprises within which they work to facilitate personal and collective evolution in subtler, more limitless realms of human endeavor and development, treating such as both a birthright and a responsibility, both personally and collectively. 

The operative structure of contemporary capitalism, industry or production is governed by the profit motive, whereas in the Proutistic structure production will be governed by the motive of consumption.  No need?  No production.  No shoving hyper-titillating anxieties upon society for people to consume things they really don't need. 

More about PROUT's progressive continuity can be found at links on either side, and a more detailed account of PROUT's tax structure contrasted with contemporary practices can be found here:  http://Taxes-in-PROUT-Economy.shows.it [then click on "File" to download]. 

Across America people of conscience, just like you, are banding together proclaiming solidarity and demanding that corporate and other tax cheats pay their fair share.  Monday, April 18, in particular is a day of demonstrating this moral fortitude. 

Join others in your community HERE, simply enter your Zip code into the box to share in planned events or start your own and announce it to further a more ethical America and more ethical tax code, expected of all entities.