Agree, Mike, thanks for the input and Technopoly quote.
I can't regard a bit tax being of much use to anyone but its designers,
and of course to government. It sounds clever and innovative--and just
the kind of wasteful thing they can hire thousands of people to
undertake and police, but in the long run the tax will keep people away
who need access, will trample over privacy, will stifle literacy, and it
will cost us all billions to collect little--in the short term only. It
will also give government the excuse to police for everything else
without appearing to do so.
Such enormous effort would be better focused on a system of taxation for
all the offshore bank accounts, estimated to be worth between $20-30
Trillion in the Cayman Islands alone. The depositors of same being the
true long-term economic terrorists. But it's the common soul who tax
departments will hound, because they can more easily meet the gotcha
quotas required to protect their jobs. They can find the waitress at the
diner, the sales clerk at Sears, but the billionaire's another challenge
altogether. They'd have to change the laws, and that's not something
they'll push for because it challenges the elite--for whom some
accommodating Canadians managed to make such elitist laws possible.
*Natalia*
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2012/08/16/offshore-bank-accounts/
The New York Times reports there's more money in the banks of the Cayman
Islands than in all the banks of New York City combined. What's it all
doing there? Avoiding taxes for one. But perhaps even more seriously,
offshore banking starves the world's economy of cash at a time when it
could really use a few extra bucks.
*_Part Two of The Current_*
*Offshore Bank Accounts - Tax Justice Network, James Henry *
If you like sun and surf and hate taxes, the Cayman Islands may be for
you. It's one of the few countries in the world that has no income tax.
Finding employment may be a problem -- unless you're in the banking
business. In that case, you might be overworked.
According to a new report, the amount of money hiding in off-shore tax
havens is staggering -- between 20 and 30 Trillion dollars -- or about
10 per cent of all the money in the world.
The study also found all that money is held by just 1.4 per cent of the
world's population. Since they pay no tax on it, governments all over
the world -- including Canada's -- lose out as much as 280-Billion
dollars in lost revenues.
Chana Joffe Walt from *National Public Radio's Planet Money
<http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/>* team spent some time digging into the
world of off-shore tax havens. She found registering a company offshore
required no heavy lifting, no closed door meetings, no secret handshakes
-- just a phone call.
Chana Joffe Walt was told that once you have the company registered,
these financial institutions can open up a perfectly legal bank account
for that shell company ... confidential, tax-free and offshore.
/(Thanks to the team at NPR's Planet Money for those clips.)/
James Henry believes he knows just how much money is hiding -- tax-free
-- in off-shore accounts. He's a former Chief Economist at the
consultancy firm McKinsey and Company and the *author of a new study
(PDF) *
<http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_120722.pdf>for
the*Tax Justice Network
<http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/front_content.php?idcatart=2&lang=1>*.
<http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/front_content.php?idcatart=2&lang=1>
James Henry was in Sag Harbor, New York.
*Offshore Bank Accounts - Sociologist, *Université du Québec**
*Our next guest says Canada played a significant role in setting up
offshore tax havens. And the federal government is not doing enough
today to stop Canadian individuals and businesses from hiding money in
these offshore accounts.*
Alain Deneault is a sociologist at the *Université du Québec*
<http://www.uquebec.ca/reseau/> in Montreal and the author of
*/Offshore: Tax Havens and the Rule of Global Crime
<http://www.amazon.ca/Offshore-Havens-Rule-Global-Crime/dp/1595586482>/*. He
joined us from Montreal.
This segment was produced by /The Current's/ Josh Bloch.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.infowars.com/banks-global-elite-confirmed-to-hold-32-trillion-in-offshore-accounts/
*Anthony Gucciardi*
Infowars.com
July 23, 2012
Major banks and the financial global elite are now confirmed to have as
much as *$32 trillion in hidden assets stashed away in offshore
accounts* that are subject to little or no taxation. As a result, around
$280 billion is estimated to be lost in tax revenues. In other words,
the multi-trillion dollar banks and elite families are avoiding any
taxation while *forcing United States citizens to foot the bill*.
Amazingly, the $32 trillion stashed away represents the overall /GDP of
the United States and Japan combined/.
In order to reach the monetary figure, which many are calling quite
conservative, economist James Henry commissioned was by the Tax Justice
Network --- a group that seeks to bring tax evasion to light. Even the
Tax Justice Network was quite shocked by the outcome, with
spokesperson John Christensen saying he was ultimately startled by the
"scale" of the numbers. What's more concerning than the numbers,
however, is the entities behind them. The report revealed that major
banks such as Bank of America and Citigroup were among the many major
corporations and banking organizations to hide their assets in offshore
tax havens.
*Bank of America, HSBC, Global Elite Families Among Listed*
In an interview with the news organization Al Jazeera
<http://www.aljazeera.com//news/europe/2012/07/2012722145418435676.html>, Christensen
explains just how deep the report goes:
"We're talking about very big, well-known brands -- *HSBC,
Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS, Credit Suisse* -- some of the
world's biggest banks are invovled...and they do it knowing fully
well that their clients, more often than not, are evading and
avoiding taxes."
To find the incriminating information, Henry (the economist working
for Christensen and the Tax Justice Network) actually utilized data from
deep within the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, United
Nations, and central banks to reach his final figure. Embedded in what
could potentially be the largest and most publicized breaking story on
the subject of large-scale tax
<http://naturalsociety.com/how-your-taxes-used-by-government-produce-junk-food/>
evasion by the wealthy elite, Henry also found that the offshore tax
havens are actually quote /*attractive to entire developing nations*/
--- not just major banks and ultra-rich families.
Used by 'private elites' to hide the wealth of developing nations, Henry
found the balance sheets of*139 developing countries on record*. Since
the 1970s, he estimates that among the richest of these nations
currently disguising their true asset value had amassed around $7.3 to
$9.3 trillion. A figure that is completely unknown to the rest of the
world due to the fact that is 'unrecorded' as offshore wealth.
The findings are continuing to gain mainstream attention, and pinpoint
just how far big banks and major corporations will go in ensuring that
they do not have to pay a dime in taxes while at the same time calling
for mass tax increases for the average citizen. Furthermore, it shows
the financial mischief of the financial elite, depositing trillions upon
trillions of dollars into offshore accounts with unknown value.
/This post first appeared at Natural Society
<http://naturalsociety.com/banks-global-elite-confirmed-hold-32-trillion-in-offshore-accounts/>/
Similar/Related Articles
Canada
On 17/08/2012 11:02 AM, Mike Spencer wrote:
Arthur wrote:
At one point in my career at the Science Council I had 2 or
sometimes more research assistants. Pouring through documents,
collecting information, etc. Fast forward to the internet and
Google. I could accomplish the same output with no research
assistants. The increased productivity wasn't reflected anywhere in
published economic data. In fact all the data showed were an
increase in unemployment of two more people.
Don't take this personally, Arthur, but jeez, this is just the kind of
thinking that makes people scorn economists.
State #1: You, Bob and Alice are producing 1 groo of output per
annum.
State #2: You are producing 1 groo of output per annum.
But wait! The "system", the state of which we're observing, has been
changed by the observer. What happened to Bob and Alice? If they're
still part of the system, you have to account for productivity loss or
costs associated with their unemployment. If you exclude them from
the system, you're making a bogus measurement.
When I was in school, I worked a summer at the dairy science
department. We were running experiments on digestibility of feed
using rumen organisms in vitro -- little artificial
rumens-in-a-bottle, if you will.
My boss told me that the long-term goal of the dairy industry was a
tank of rumen organisms and a tank of bovine mammary tissue
culture. Throw hay into the rumen tank, pipe the effluent to the
mammary tank, drain high-buttterfat milk from the latter. Don't waste
any nutrients or energy on maintaining 1500 pounds of wasteful,
useless cow.
Well, that sort of thing is fine if you can leave some coal or oil in
the ground or leave some trees standing. Your "system" is a steam
engine or a paper machine and a few tweaks will make it use less coal
or pulp. That might even be okay for dairy science although it
offends me as bad art, bad karma, perverted systems thinking and
stupid in the long run.
But if you shitcan a couple of people and then say that your "system"
is more efficient due to their absence, you've committed an appalling
logical error. [1] In a purely abstract systems analysis, of course,
that would be perfectly correct. But economics isn't supposed to be
about purely abstract systems [2]. Economics is about social human
behavior. It shares with other social sciences a failure to get a
handle on what is probably the most complex system in the
universe. Worse, it tries to achieve this goal by simplifying human
behavior to just one or a handful of variables.
There are no "externalities". You can't throw anything "away" because
there is no "away". [3] Everybody is on the same bus. If we just
redefine our "system" as the million wealthiest folks and another 5 or
10 million (perhaps heavily armed) support staff, incomes will soar,
unemployment will plummet. Everything else is an externality, a black
box about which we know or care nothing except that it have specified
outputs for given inputs.
I know, I know, the notion is that if everybody does this,
"externalizes internal diseconomies", concentrates on "core
competencies", pursues "enlightened self-interest" etc. et buzzword
cetera, everything will somehow shake out for the best, to a Pareto
optimum. But I'll shingle out onto the fog here just a tad and say
that a Pareto optimum is, in a system a complex as the global (or
even, say, the Lunenburg County) economy, a dead end. An unadorned
hill-climbing algorithm leads to *local* optima and local optima may
be very bad -- very non-optimal -- indeed for many people or for
society in general.
That is, in fact (or at least in my estimation), the very problem
we're addressing here: the global financial, trade and business system
has achieved a local optimum. Contra Pareto, we've always allowed that
a putative improvement can disadvantage *some* people, a *few* people
(for rather overreaching and non-numerical values of "few") but now
we're confronted with a situation that is highly optimized for exactly
those who are in a position to control any proposed further
changes. We appear to be stuck on a local optimum hardly consistent
with socially desirable distribution of resources, equality, or the
overall well-being of society.
So: no problem with using Google and the net, just with using
"increased productivity" to describe it in the context given.
About bureaucracy "...it ceased to be merely a servant of
social institutions and became their master. Bureaucracy
now not only solves problems but creates them. More
important, it defines what our problems are - and they are
always, in the bureaucratic view, problems of efficiency."
"... this makes bureaucracies exceedingly dangerous,
because, though they were originally designed to process only
technical information, they now are commonly employed to
address problems of a moral, social, and political nature."
"... bureaucracy has broken loose from ....restrictions and
now claims sovereignty over all of society's affairs."
-- Technopoly, Neil Postman, 1992
- Mike
[1] The formal logicians must have a name for this error -- redefining
the system under consideration to allow the desired proposition to
become true -- but I don't know what it is. "Apalling error of
logic" seemed less infra dig than "flying up your own asshole".
[2] Although I infer that there are many academic economists who
think otherwise.
[3] Firing unwanted crap into orbit is not "away". It reqires
substantial computing power to keep track of stuff that has
already been thrown "away" up there and endangers orbital passers
by. Firing crap into interstellar space *might* be "away".
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