This is what people feel in their guts when they drive out on tattered roads and avoid going to the hospital even though they are sick, when they don't have a real increase in wages but are working longer hours. They have the sense that something isn't right, that there are two sets of rules and they got the shaft when it comes to that. Where police forces are cashstrapped and turn to civil forfeitures and ticket quotas while they see famous celebrities and politicians get off for things magnitudes more illegal than what they've done, whether it's smoking a joint or driving while black.
People already have a sense that things aren't fair. There's a reason why tax reform is polling so poorly. There's a reason why most of the country thinks taxes should be higher on the wealthy and corporations. They have a feeling that they are not seeing the rise of productivity in their own life, and they want justice.
My SO lives in SG. She is lower middle class (going to school, father works in a factory) and I asked her about income inequality, for there it's quite extreme. She says it's not that bad because people there have a reasonable standard of living; they can go to school, they can go to the doctor, they have access to affordable food, etc. Income inequality I think isn't a bad thing as long as the poorest among us have some basic level of livelihood. The problem is that in the US, that isn't true, and so, people clamor for justice.
There's also just the sheer sense of stagnation. I get mildly enraged every time I look at America's idea of a middle-school and high-school curriculum, then compare it to what people learn abroad. How is it that "everyone else" has more leisure, suffers less stress, and still winds up doing harder things than Americans more easily? America has started thinking like a less developed country, that productivity arises from suffering.
Can you elaborate?
A lot of this has to do with employer provided health insurance and ballooning healthcare costs, which are fairly specific problems to the US.
Housing and education costs have also increased much faster than overall worker compensation.
Are we going to argue then that worker compensation in all the many countries with universal government-paid health insurance is also going through the roof? But my health insurance is identical whether I work or not...
The USA has similar areas - often much larger, usually with very similar outcomes. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per... and compare it to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... and you can see that if all the state where their own country, the USA would have the richest by GDP PP per capita (DC), as well as Mississippi, a state that would hover around Slovenian levels of wealth.
That's the thing that as an Australian I never understood. The USA - the United States of America - varies so greatly by state. We don't have that - most countries don't. Even when there is variance, UK with London, north and south of Spain and Italy, it is not quite so dramatic.
Back to the example of Singapore, I expect most everyone in Connecticut (GDP PPP per capita of $64,511, population 3.576 million) to have very similar results to Singapore. I don't expect South Carolinans (GDP PPP per capita $37,063, population 4.961 million) to have anywhere near the same results.
The angst in America is a uniquely MASSIVE country phenomenon - hits somewhere north of 100 million mark would be my guess - maybe even higher. People in Milan don't compare themselves and their outcomes to those in Berlin, even though they share an economic zone, but people in Idaho do compare their lot to Silicon Valley.
I don't have an answer BTW, just a vague notion that large countries have it tough - and that China will likely face similar issues in the very near term, as first world level economies like Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin are compared with the outcomes for Gansu (which has Ghanaian levels of GDP PPP per capita - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative...).
I'd argue otherwise. Greater London had a GVA per capita of £42,666 in 2013. Several counties had a GVA per capita of less than £19,000, with the least productive (Northumberland) having a GVA per capita of less than £15,000. Excluding Washington DC (which isn't technically a state), that's a significantly greater disparity than between the most and least productive US states.
The UK has seen a huge rise in populism in recent years, I think overwhelmingly because of this stark inequality. Just as in the US, people from less prosperous areas feel marginalised and ignored.
America has Trump, we have Brexit - a decision by the electorate that has shocked the political establishment to the core. Few commentators saw it coming, the overwhelming majority of educated people think that it's a terrible idea, but it still happened. In both cases, the most reasonable interpretation is that a large part of the electorate have rejected the status quo outright, regardless of what the experts might say and regardless of the consequences.
I think that something needs to be done urgently about inequality, or things are going to get ugly. Too many people have lost all faith in the establishment. Too many people feel that they have nothing left to lose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ceremonial_counties_in...
If you are poor, however, forget about it. Those states are openly hostile to you and generally opt to find the minimum number or services allowed by law. They are so bad that many people establish false residency in states with better systems.
The way these programs are funded, it makes little difference to state balance sheets — it’s all about appealing to particular political bases, and keeping certain taxes (typically property taxes) low to keep the old money people happy.
I'm curious about that. IIUC, Australia's wealth is concentrated in the cities on the coast, but all of Austrailia's states are made up of coastline and a big chunk of interior space.
What would happen GDP-wise if you divided Australia's states into interior/exterior areas?
The US is better thought of as an empire. It is carved up into a large number of territories (states), 50, as compared with Australia's ... well, it's complicated, but let's look at the six principal states: NSW, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Northern Territories, Queensland, and Tasmania.
Each major Australian state is comprised, largely, of a single principal city, and ... everything else. Australia has, unlike the United States, relatively little inland settlements: the land tends to be arid, there are no major river systems. The result is ... a rough parity between Australian states, though you'll find a tremendous variance within them.
If you consider other large countries: Russia, Canada, China, Brazil, Indonesia, or India, you'll find that there are in fact large variations in wealth across territory. Or the EU, if considered a single state, ranges from Germany and France to Portugal, Greece, and the Balkan states.
It does show how bad things in the US have gotten though...
I think the point is not that Singapore is a paragon of equality, but rather that its rulers have had the sense to provide adequate comfort for their subjects, rather than trying to take absolutely everything.
However, in spite of that, the PAP has done a very good job of ensuring there's just enough by way of public services and subsidies to keep enough people happy that the government continues to command the people's respect and the opposition will never quite have enough fuel to build a viable political movement.
...and it's still better in many ways than large parts of the US.
Its obvious something fundamental in governance changed in the late 70s that has directly led us here.
While technology, progress, wealth are important the magic is always people and humanity that elevate life beyond the mundane and brings happiness into lives.
There is no point being wealthy if most around you are suffering and and in desperate conditions. This can't make anyone happy, except sociopaths. You have to care for other people and society beyond just your immediate interest and benefit.
Their reasoning: "Why delay the inevitable? How else to wake up the country but to elect a disaster? As things get worse we're ready as we'll ever be."
(FYI: I'm in Michigan where enough of us held back our Clinton vote to send a message that we need a progressive non-corporatist. Margin of victory for Trump was smaller than empty presidential sections. It's over in Michigan for the DNC.)
Politico covered his work in August: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/20/trump-bombshells-ro...
His website is here: Weird money in, weird money out https://ragepath.org/weird-money-in-weird-money-out
And below is his working hypothesis:
We've documented Trump's relations with a variety of Soviet and Russian individuals and organizations in the attached bullet book. Financial crimes and money laundering explain a large part of Trump's wealth.
Trump's basic grift seems to be one that he learned from his father. A loan is just a tax-free transfer of cash. So don't pay yourself income when you can loan yourself cash instead. Whether it's embezzled FHA mortgages, Mitchell-Lama funds, NJHFA funds.... it doesn't matter. Borrow way more than you need, live off the borrowings, use the loan payments to offset gains from other legitimate sources of income.
40 Wall Street in NYC would be a great example of this. Trump bought the building for $1 million cash in the latter half of 1995 (a time of many highly suspicious cash transactions for a man who was allegedly $900 million in the red). He borrowed $35 million supposedly to renovate it (maybe). Let's imagine that it loses money, let's go wild and say it's losing $1 million a year (an overestimate) for 20 years. Overall, Trump's out of pocket by $56 million. But he's borrowed $160 million against the building. That means his net cash position is $104 million. And many of his deals are structured in a similar way.
This looks to us like a classic money-laundering scheme known as a "loan-back." Let's say Trump's brother Robert loans a company $500k which it then uses to open up a $5 million account offshore (Financial Performance Corporation) and another company affiliated with Robert (Management Technologies) spends nearly $13 million buying a shady group of international companies called Winter Partners... which Midland Associates (a Trump family partnership) then loans an unknown sum secured against all their future accounts receivable. Management Technologies would later write off its Winter Partners investment as a complete loss.
So we can show that Robert Trump was shoveling money overseas in 1995. And just when Trump needed it, investors from Hong Kong showed up and bought the mortgage on Riverside South, overing him insanely generous terms. When they sold the mortgage later for a billion dollar profit, Trump freaked out (even by his standards) - a reaction that makes more sense if you realize that the loan was originally Trump's money, and the Hong Kong investors were only supposed to act as nominees. After they cashed out their profit, they ended up selling their 70% stake, which found its way into the hands of Trump's friend at Vornado Realty, Steve Roth.
So that's the core of the insight we've had. It's an explanation that seems to hold up well when we examine individual deals that Trump's been involved in. So many of his ventures lose money because the loans themselves are just part of a money laundering show - a tax free way to legitimately receive a pile of cash you're not otherwise entitled to. And the lender has access to an offshore asset as security, so even if you eventually default, they'll be made whole. We're not sure how much of it is Trump's money.
Here's a quick dash through the overall timeline of Trump's life that we think we see:
1974-1987: Trump comes up in New York real estate rubbing elbows with various mobbed up figures (Cohn, Salerno, Tomasello, et al.) and working as a kind of front man for the Genovese, Gambino and Scarfo crime families. A lot of his early projects are just classic mob grifts. Borrow a bunch of money to build something, hire a bunch of mob contractors, pay too much... Trump's being taken care of but not enormously so
1988-1990: Trump borrows $3 billion in the course of 2 years, $650 million of which is mean to finish construction of the nearly completed Taj Mahal. Within two years the money is gone, despite the fact that many of the construction contractors hadn't been paid. So this is the period where we think Trump embezzled the money, got a cut, and had to hide it offshore until the statute of limitations had cleared.
1991-1995: Trump's laying low. The Soviet Union collapses. Tamir Sapir, Sam Kislin, Eduard Nakhamkin ... three (at least) Russian figures suddenly leap from working-class Russian immigrants to international financiers in control of huge sums of money. Our working theory is they were ex-KGB, after the Soviet Union's fall they began collaborating with American counter-intelligence officials at the FBI and CIA, and they used their positions in New York to help their former associates back home embezzle billions of dollars in state-owned assets out of the former Soviet Union.
1995-2005: Trump begins repatriating his own money in some of his most bizarre business deals. Trump perhaps realizes he can syndicate this model and also begins facilitating loan back schemes for Russian investors by putting his name on their buildings (the whole Bayrock period)
2006-2015: Most of Trump's money has come back to him by now, and he's basically running a money-laundering syndicate for Russian oligarchs (though there are still some Italians and Asians in the mix) - some of whom are in favor with Putin and the state, others who are decidedly not.
If we're right, it's an audacious scheme that he's managed to pull off right in front of our faces. He's managed it by exploiting our preconceptions about debt and net worth. All the fights over Trump's wealth have been about his net worth - what's the value minus the liabilities? And we look at a debt as a zero-sum transaction. But the Trump enterprise really seems to be operating on net cash flow.
This is where your argument collapses. The building dramatically increased in value - that's why he was able to borrow so much against it. That's the real estate game - and it's legit.
a telling hypothesis, now we know who to blame Mr Trump on. I am sorry to tell you but your friend is doing it on the dime of someone pushing the current hysterical Russophobia. Either that or he is delusional.
it's been many decades of the same issue, people work, people share, things go weird, they get angry (and rightly so).
let me blame the victims slightly (barely at all, it's mental exercise). Isn't the problem in the tax -> action function ? it's a big black box. That's always the case when people get angry about anything, it's because they have to deal with an unpredictable and costly black box.
Solution: no more big, no more black. We need a more tractable and open system that can be more efficient.
More questions: should people be able to see all what their money does ? or would it backfire into micromanagement and critics ?
people don't look, don't have time to understand it, and usually don't think, they just demand.
However, the problem is not the rich. This is a classic case of [tall poppy syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome).
There indeed are a two sets (or multiple striated on your lobbying power) of rules. The rich lobby to get exceptions, we don't 'cause we can't (afford it).
TL;DR It's the government which is to blame here for the rich stashing their wealth in tax havens rather than deploying them productively in the economy.
Details:
- The rich don't like stashing their wealth in tax havens. I'm not rich myself to have first hand experience, but let's logically think this through.
- If you've capital, you want it deployed and earning money for you. And you'll choose the best risk adjusted ROI you can get (you'll be especially rational about this if you have the means to hire consultants like the rich do).
- Therefore, we can reach the poignant conclusion that stashing it away in tax havens, which in fact costs money to do, is the best option you've. There is a lot of cost involved even if you want to re-route money to invest it via tax havens - 1) Risk of government(s) confiscating your money 2) Cost of setting up and operating complicated corporate structures.
- Why #1: Government is a bad monopoly. The ditches on the road you referenced, is because you can't stop paying govt for doing a bad job on roads and enlist an alternative vendor. The reason why it's _bad_ is because it's forced upon you - you cannot stop paying taxes to enlist someone else to make your roads better, you'll be put in jail. Google is a good monopoly, because we all voluntarily use google. If something better comes around, you can use it and google wouldn't (shouldn't) force you to use theirs. They can persuade, but not force.
- Why #2: Government (policy makers) are humans. They put their self interest above yours (just like you do) and make bad public policy as a result. Paying them money (tax) blindly is silly.
- Why #3: Government (policy makers) don't understand (or perhaps deliberately mislead everyone on) economics. We still think public roads are good, public healthcare is good, public police, public (fiat) money, rent control, import tariffs, export controls and more are all good. They are all patently bad for reasons which you can google out. This distortion is a wealth destroyer and distorts & cripples the economy. Paying them money (tax) when the policies don't benefit you is insane.
- Why #1: They're ethically, morally superior to government. All transactions in an economy are voluntary and involve no force. Force is immoral, and unethical. Every action that government does implies force - if you don't pay taxes, you get jailed => force; etc.
- Why #2: Good monopolies. Everyone competes to be a monopoly by providing the best service at the lowest cost, which is a benefit to society, if they don't, you can choose an alternative. Note: Monopoly here rarely means the strict definition of just one compnay providing a good, there are usually alternatives.
- formatting
That indeed demands justice.
> I think isn't a bad thing as long as the poorest among us have some basic level of livelihood. The problem is that in the US, that isn't true, and so, people clamor for justice.
That is not a demand for justice, but charity.
Words have a meaning, please don't misuse them.
Don't we all have the right to a basic level of livelihood? Why should the family I was born to determine wether I have clean water to drink or not, for example?
Please don't use this kind of argument to turn HN into reddit.
"Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing 851*851 sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant."[1]
Rather, it is the governments of the world we should be going at if we want this behaviour to change. But then again, it is always easier to find a fat scapegoat with a shiny appearance.
[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=628482160657957... (last paragraph)
Let us pretend that corporations have no influence over laws and governments, and merely play a game they had no hand in designing.
What we should be doing is insulating the government from outside influence.
Some people are playing by a more effective set of rules. You were sold a moral paradigm to stuff government coffers and bought it without even questioning how public services could be funded. Others see the moral relativity and aspire to adapt and do.
Spending thousands of dollars to avoid their moral tax obligations instead of paying is in my view fraud and corruption; the fact that it is possible with an army of accountants and massive resources dedicated to tiny loopholes is really of no importance when we weight the ethical or moral judgements of these actions: if you spend millions on lawyers to devise a clever loophole that lets you murder someone legally you are still a murderer. There's a (bad) argument to be made that for consistency's sake we cannot prosecute you under the current laws, but there's no argument that you're not a monster.
Refusing to pay taxes is stealing from the poor (and the general public) who rely on government services; you are destroying the roads, parks, annihilating schools and universities, preventing people from getting healthcare they need to survive, stealing from children, the homeless, the elderly and the disabled, helping criminals by defunding the police and helping burn people and property by defunding fire departments.
If your job is to find tax loopholes for corporations, you are committing fraud even if our current legal system is written by people who think fraud is okay so long as it's a CPA on behalf of a massive corporation doing it. The fact that some judges have decided this is okay does not mean that it actually is.
How about let’s raise taxes instead.
I also find it interesting that you say:
"Corporations are made up of people, and people are fully capable of not committing rampant constant fraud."
What are our local, state, and federal governments made up of, then - the same organizations that don't close loopholes and set tax code properly to serve the greater interest? Are these organizations not made of people?
When it comes to reporting information obtained from "secrecy jurisdictions", I think a standard of "if it's not illegal to report, it's OK to report" is reasonable.
After all, that's the same standard you're advocating for managing your tax affairs.
It's too late. You're arguing a return to the past, "money is just money, corporations are just doing what's in their self interest."
That's still the dominant ideology, but it's on the wane.
It will be replaced when cash is replaced. Cash will be replaced by bonds. I won't pay McDonalds in cash for a burger, I will pay them in a bond specifically to be disbursed according to how I want the money to be disbursed. Yes more burgers. Yes advertise all you want. No, this money may not be spent on rainforest destruction. If they misuse funds, the bond will be broken and they'll be subject to penalties. Intentionality will reach forward and back across the disbursement boundary. Cash will die.
Capitalists have always talked about cash as if it had the color of a bond, "vote with your dollars" and that kind of thing. And repeat purchases do start to act like a bond. If I'm a large repeat customer and I complain, the business is likely to respond.
But that setup, where the bond is just implicit in the revenue stream, inevitably caters to the wealthy. If you're a big fish, your cash is treated as a bond. If you're a small fish, it's treated as cash.
Digital currencies will allow us to actually pay for small transactions with microbonds, giving much more power to small purchasers.
Sounds unfixable in general; the only thing you can adjust is severity of the phenomenon (e.g. less complexity in tax laws == less loopholes to exploit == cost/benefit curve on tax evasion grows slower).
All in all, there are many things that are not illegal to do, but definitely immoral. Such tax schemes sure are immoral in my eyes, I'm a hard-core capitalist, but no way your average Joe stands a chance at "optimizing" taxes. People need to call out these companies more, but it's easy to deceive the people. Apple felt the clock has shifted and its beneficial to them and say supportive things of LGBT issues and people truly believe they are fighting for the average man.
This rather shows that the tax system is far too complicated, so that only really rich people can "afford" (i.e. pay the necessary apparatus of lawyers, tax experts etc.) to use the loopholes. Rather tell your government to radically simplify it with the long-term goal that one even can formulate "correctness proofs" that some kinds of loopholes simply do not exist etc.
Apple has the moral high ground, and that ground is higher the less taxes they pay.
Remember military spending is far more than roads.
Others, for whom this connection may not be so clear, take a more exploitative view of the public sphere, in which their own role is all take and no give. They may see taxation as forced extraction, but that view is hardly shared by everyone. Moreover, were they allowed to act on this view freely, the public sphere would surely collapse - which a clear majority clearly recognizes.
In this regard, tax law is no different from laws against, say, murder. Most people are internally resistant to the thought of killing others. But the law still exists because "most" isn't "all". In cases of extreme anti-social behavior, the few - if allowed to run riot - really can secure tyrannical domination of the many (classic example: the mob in Sicily).
I would say the latter, which is why it's the correct angle in this case.
Tax law is terribly verbose to not miss a cases, which is a good thing for the intention of giving everyone a fair warning so to speak, and it is frequently changed to cover it's bases.
If the comment really amounts to an attack on case law, I fully agree. And it's an understandable thought insofar he's in the position to have to sift through it the most, or at least a lot, I guess.
edit: only if the frequency of changes is not enough or not exact, for whichever reason, that might introduce impedance mismatch here and there.
The carried interest tax credit is noticeably absent from the House plan.
The problem with any kind of true reform is that every exception and rule benefits someone and they'll lobby hard to defend it.
As for the corporate tax cut, I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to it if it came with enforcement against the offshoring (via transfer pricing) of profits in low tax regimes. But of course it doesn't.
Bringing this back to the Paradise Papers and other similar leaks, the problem I have is there's increasingly an ultra-rich class who benefitted greatly by the political stability in places like the developed world but have somehow convinced themselves that they shouldn't have to pay for it.
There was a time in my life when I was against the estate tax on philosophical grounds. That time is long gone. It really is a silver spoon tax. If anything it should be higher.
I really wish I understood why someone with $5b thought themselves above paying for schools, roads, hospitals and police. What really is the practical difference between having $5b or $10b?
Luckily the House plan is pretty much DOA in the Senate.
I am a small business owner setup as a LLC single member company and the new cap will be a positive for me. It will reduce my tax burden allowing me to buy more software from companies, hire, expand, increase advertising spending, etc. I am a very real case, and there are lots of other small business owners like me who are certainly not billionaires. In fact most bay area tech company employees make more than I do. I find it somewhat hypocritical that employees at Google and Facebook that are making 200K+ are complaining about tax reform.
Instead of supporting this irresponsible piece of legislation, how about getting in touch with your local representatives and let them know that you believe that the tax burden on small businesses needs to be addressed, but that this particular piece of legislation is not the way to do it.
You also have to ask, where is the money coming from? In this case, it would appear to be through radically increasing the deficit. There will ultimately be consequences to that (for instance, in a few years, as the US’s credit rating comes under pressure, increased repayments may have to be met with increases on income tax, which you will pay).
Small businesses were being held back by their tax burden. They wanted to invest more capital in their businesses, to scale up and hire more people. They had untapped opportunities in the market that they could not pursue because they didn't have the money that they would have if their taxes were lower.
Here's how that worked out: http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/336684-kansas-legisl...
Ratings agencies downgraded Kansas's bonds, forcing the
state to pay more in borrowing costs. Funding for state
school programs fell, and the Kansas Supreme Court ruled
the state government was not adequately funding schools.
Earlier this year, legislators grappled with a budget
deficit of almost $900 million.
In 2016, voters kicked out a handful of anti-tax
Republicans, in favor of challengers who backed higher
taxes, despite Brownback's opposition.So the GOP bill comes off as a "fuck you" to a lot of us, since they kinda want to double-tax us for which state we live in.
1. The Clinton stranglehold (first Bill then Hilary) on the DNC was absolute to the point with Hilary off the stage there's a vacuum and no real leadership contenders. That I think was largely by design. Hilary didn't want a repeat of the 2008 nomination;
2. Obama seemed to either not care of was ineffective in shaping the party. After eight years in office it was still Clinton's party;
3. The Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is really the Democratic senator from Wall Street and is one of the biggest defenders of the carried interest tax credit for hedge fund managers.
4. The Democrats have an ageing and increasingly out-of-touch ruling class. As just one example, Diane Feinstein has announced plans to seek reelection... at age 85. This means she'd be 91 at the end of her term.
5. I'm still ot sure the Democrats fully appreciate the anti-establishment wave that swept Trump into office and almost swept Sanders into the Democratic nomination.
Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?
Let’s say a group of criminal defense lawyers kept a database of their confidential conversations with their clients. That would include clients charged with murder, robbery, DUI, drug abuse, and so on. In turn, a hacker would break into that database and post the information from those conversations on Wikileaks. Of course a lot of those conversations would appear to be incriminating because — let’s face it — most of the people who require defense attorneys on criminal charges are in fact guilty. When asked why the hack was committed, the hacker would say “Most of those people are guilty. I want to make sure they do not escape punishment.”
How many of us would approve of that behavior? Keep in mind the hacker is spreading the information not only to prosecutors but to the entire world, and outside of any process sanctioned by the rule of law. The hacker is not backed by the serving of any criminal charges or judge-served warrants.
Yet somehow many of us approve when the victims are wealthy and higher status, as is the case with the Panama Papers. Furthermore most of those individuals probably did nothing illegal, but rather they were trying to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal shell corporations. Admittedly, very often the underlying tax laws should be changed, just as we should repeal the deduction for mortgage interest too. But in the meantime we are not justified in stealing information about those people, even if some of them are evil and powerful, as is indeed the case for homeowners too.
Once again, politics isn’t about policy, it is about which groups should rise and fall in relative status. And many people believe the wealthy should fall in status, and so they will entertain the morality of all crimes and threats against them. These revelations will of course lead to some subsequent cases of blackmail, against Chinese officials for one group.
I had tweeted “Are your views on privacy and #PanamaPapers consistent? Just asking…” and my goodness what a response, positive and negative. Most interesting of all, many people had never pondered the question before. Somehow “good things” such as “privacy” and “transparency” cannot stand in such conflict because all good things, like all bad things, must come together.
(...)
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/04/the...
Of course we do. What does, exactly, the level of wealth and status we are talking about entail?
Owners and executives of a large multinational firm can wield more than enough power to influence governments. Some of these people of wealth and status are the governments. (The names revealed in the Panama papers toppled the government of Iceland.)
That's at least one order of magnitude different power dynamics than in case of your regular person charged with robbery or DUI. (Also, we might view the case of hacker revealing conversations of people charged with DUIs if the conversations constitute evidence about that particular part of machinery of justice system not to be working as intended.)
The author also assumes that there would be a de-facto backlash against the "hacker"'s behavior. I don't think so. If the justice system is "innocent until proven guilty", and these people are proven guilty in a court of law by evidence (even if such evidence is blasted to the world by this 'hacker'), there is no difference between whether they make $10 or $10 million per year.
This does invoke a bit of a quandary as referenced earlier over whether certain victimless crimes should actually be classified as crimes, but I believe that is orthogonal to the conversation to some extent.
The stronger argument was mentioned below: Do you as a citizen strive to minimize your tax burden to the most extent it makes sense and is legal? If yes, then why should it be any different whether you make $10 or $10 million in a year? Is there some sort of arbitrary monetary amount where you are supposed to make this moral decision "oh I made enough money now, it's time to pay more taxes than I am legally required to". If so, when is it? If not, then the tax code and subsequently the government are the systems you need to look at if legal lowering of the rich man's tax burden is something you find reprehensible.
The problem is that regular citizens do not have access to means of minimizing their taxes to the extent that the wealthy have. It's been shown over and over again that corporations and wealthy individuals can shrink their tax rates to be as low as 2%. Nobody else can get that low. That is the fundamental problem: that in practice there is a law for the rich and one for everybody else.
This is not unlike the sort of privileges European aristocracy used to enjoy up to the XVIII century. It took a number of violent uprising to change that state of things, let's hope it won't be necessary this time.
This seems substantially different than breaching attorney–client privilege. Unless the attorneys involved were actively helping their clients to plot ongoing or future crimes, in which case I say haul the bastards in.
There might be isolated rich people who did nothing strictly unethical or unlawful, and get caught up in scandal by the mere appearance of shady dealings. I can’t bring myself to feel too deeply sorry for them though. Nobody forced them to park their money in secret offshore banks famous for extralegal activity.
Suppose that same public defender got his client off, and in their last conversation his client tells him "thanks! I'm going to go rob a bank." Now that public defender would be both legally and ethically obligated to report said crime.
Why? Because the default state is this - if you know of a crime, you are obligated to report it. The public defender example is the exception we carved out because we as a society believe it's required for a fair trial. Not so for money laundering.
He believes that when people are trying to minimise their taxes, the only question is whether what they do is legal; "we" are supposed not to disapprove so long as that is the case.
But when journalists report information they have obtained, the idea of ethics is suddenly back. For some reason he doesn't expect "us" to think "We should expect journalists to publish things that will sell newspapers; so long as it isn't illegal we shouldn't disapprove".
Wrt the lawyer-privilege example, we have a good idea of what would happen if attorneys couldn't speak in confidence to their clients: everyone would be worse off when seeing a lawyer.
I can't see that being the case with these stashed money leaks. If everyone could see who was putting money offshore, would everyone be worse off? Hard to make that case.
I know the starting conditions can be unfair, but we kinda need people at the top to make the whole thing work. If the world runs on money, then there will always be a poorer place that wants to attract the rich, and so havens are born. Let's not forget the rich spend a lot of money in their own country too, which is an essential part of a thriving economy.
I don't agree:
1. Capitalism inevitably results in some people being wealthier than others. But it doesn't need to be these people. Cutting taxes for the wealthy entrenches the current wealthy people, as if they have some claim to the position. What about tax policies that promote social mobility of others to become wealthy and fill that role? Let's cut taxes for the up-and-comers.
2. If the distribution of money were flat, there would be just as much money in the world. We don't need uber-wealthy.
3. Inequality is at record levels; the economy ran fine (or better) before, when there was less inequality.
4. The same idea fueled Reagan's 'trickle-down' economics, the idea that if the government cut taxes for the wealthy then the benefits would 'trickle down' to everyone else. Ignoring the implicit idea that the non-wealthy were like serfs waiting for their feudal lords to lift them up, rather than capable economic agents themselves; and ignoring the incredibly self-serving nature of the idea; it didn't work at all (see #4). The surprising result is that cutting taxes for the wealthy benefits ... wait for it ... the wealthy.
5. Since Reagan's tax cuts, the wealthy have grown far more wealthier while the other classes' incomes have been flat - that's over decades. (The exception is the last year or maybe two of the Obama administration.) During the prior era, when taxes were much higher, middle class Americans experienced probably their most rapid period of economic growth in history.
Before that it was built on the game known as feudalism, and that seemed equally inevitable to most of the participants. You might find it interesting to look at the percentage of GDP in different countries from the financial services sector, and how that has changed over time. Also look into the work of the late Mark Fisher who does a good job contemplating alternative paradigms in an accessible and non-dogmatic way.
There any a great many reasons why it’s important to know what the latest strategies are. Few of the people concerned here are passive capitalists looking for ROI.
Even if they were, politics is ultimately a contest over resources. Information is power.
These oligarchs have no problem killing people wholesale. You want to give them a positive ROI on their investment? WTF?
http://archive.li/2Lv1b#selection-549.14-549.39
...and got fired from Forbes Magazine for writing about it...
The only issue I find distasteful is how the oligarchs got their money. I wouldn't want to personally make them richer, but isn't it of a nature where you can't point fingers if other people do so? Who am I to stop some startup from taking investment from them?
Facebook might not like it now, but at the time, you could be quite certain they didn't care.
Ask yourself who benefits from perpetuating this unique goal post for Russia to maintain McCarthy era paranoia?
The US plutocracy is no different. Also a lot of evidence: the actions of the NSA, CIA, War on Drugs, police militarizarion, military-industrial-congressional-complex... All cannot be explained otherwise.
I think in the US, they're just a lot more clever at it. However cooky it might seem, there is some evidence coming out that extremist rallies have been organized by unknown powers, possibly sometimes Russian. A lot of the racial tension is probably not by accident. I saw this on the reddit conspiracy sub, and frankly I think it's a good point to be made: https://i.redd.it/lgdyy6dpjyfz.jpg
The real question we should be applying our intellects to is "how do we fund the things that are currently funded by taxation, which are actually necessary / desirable, without using violence or the threat of violence?"
The reality is that violence existed way before any government or society. For millions of years, it was, and very often still is, the normal way of dealing with conflict for human beings.
Human society emerged as an attempt to contain this violence and avoid human suffering. In other words, without governments or any social structure, we would return to what we call the "law of the jungle", and that's not desirable at all.
We absolutely need a set of common rules that everyone follow, otherwise human society would collapse, that's a fact. However, those laws are by definition limiting individual power (taxation, etc) and therefore very often resisted by those individuals. That's why there is, as far as we know, no other way than violence, or threat of violence, to enforce those rules.
In other words, taxation is not theft, it's a key component of a desperate attempt to control human violence and limit human suffering (including yours).
> how do we fund the things that are currently funded by taxation
One method, in polite society, would be to willingly pay the (minimum, of course) taxes require.
We delegate use of force to the State because we don't personally want to have to clobber our neighbour for being a moocher.
So the real answer is: it's complicated. Any system so far devised has been imperfect. We learn to live with the trade-offs.
How is taxation theft exactly?
"how do we fund the things that are currently funded by taxation, which are actually necessary / desirable, without using violence or the threat of violence?"
C'mon, we're hackers... we can do better than relying on violence and aggression. What happened to the idea that we could apply our intellects, reason, logic, and rational thinking, and improve on the old way of doing things?
I mean, if you want to abdicate and just accept things the way they are, that's fine. But some of us still believe in progress.
The real goal of capitalism is exploit or be exploited.
The real goal of capitalism is to increase the amount of capital available. This fundamentally is not possible via exploitation alone. Capitalism - nor the economy - is not a zero-sum game. This type of simplistic thinking makes people dismiss real criticisms over the real-world implementation of American capitalism.
The south built an entire economy based on 'exploitation alone' in the early 1800's....
You need to qualify your statement: 'The real goal of capitalism is to increase the amount of capitalism available'. Available to who? humanity at large? Nope. Capitalists don't share their wealth. Capitalism increases capital for the people who control the capital. See every economic study made in the past ten years. The middle and working class exist to serve the capitalists aims. Slavery in a pretty package.
Can you tell me why you think this? It seems pretty fucking zero-sum to me.
So you get the best of communism and capitalism. It doesn't scale for everyone but it's a good in between.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_Panama_Papers
(And honestly, I am also surprised that something like this shows up on hackernews. (In 2007:) Why does Apple come up with a touch screen mobile phone, those did not make profit the last time they come up. (Early 2010s:) Why does Musk invent an electric car, those things disappeared after the 20s for a reason.)
https://youtu.be/r28674tI3uE < From 2008
I don't understand why that would be the case.
...and the journalist who triggered the investigation got killed! Global elites, fuck yeah!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb...
If I earn an amount of (x+y), I would get taxed on (x+y), but if I donate x money, I would get taxed on y, but I've already paid x in donations, so unless there is something fishy going on with the x donations part, it would make sense for someone to not donate, as they are already being taxed on y, and the taxes on x would be less than x.
So how are the rich making these donations out of my wallet?
What worries me a bit though, is the fact that heaps of confidential information is just thrown online, without significant filtering. Even completely legal situations are published, but since the average joe has no understanding of tax law, he'll assume these people are doing illegal things. Attorney-Client privilege?
Also, this I guess confirms the policy I heard from several heads of accounting depts in the 90's that they did not want their computers connected to the Internet..
head of IT for a french firm that does business over here had to contract with some small company for a invoice system because the regional manager claimed the centra one from HQ didnt accommodate the local laws. it was a lie, because the other vendor has even less compliance. nobody but the regional manager has any idea of the real reasons. but I bet its not in the interests of the company, or tax compliance.
Jeffery Carr wrote about Milner's ties to the FSB/KGB in 2011
http://archive.li/2Lv1b#selection-549.14-549.39
...and got fired from Forbes Magazine for writing about it...
https://twitter.com/JamesFourM/status/915361529012289536
Theres certainly a major back story here.
There will be a "public outcry", there will be multiple opinion pieces, someone will create a nice website to show you cool infographics based on data.
A year from now everyone will forget about this ever happening. Which is a shame.
Civil society and citizens are working behind the scenes to put pressure on the remaining good people in the system. This information could help. Thanks.
https://www.applebyglobal.com/news/news-2017/media-coverage-...
