Some years ago I gave a talk in the Cayman Islands. On the bit tax. In preparing for the talk I looked into tax havens. I was amazed at the number of them and equally amazed that nothing was being done to control them. Lots of rhetoric but little or no action. My takeaway feeling on the matter was that powerful forces around the world want it this way.
To get to your point my feeling is that we can try for a global solution to the issue of distribution and fairness and someday, someday we may see results. Or we can do what we can with the tools at hand and do something (not everything) to help. I opt for doing something. arthur From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of D & N Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 5:53 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Futurework] Arthur's 5th belief 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 <http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_120722 .pdf> author of a new study (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 <http://www.uquebec.ca/reseau/> Université du Québec 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. Whats 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: Were talking about very big, well-known brands HSBC, Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS, Credit Suisse some of the worlds 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-fo od/> 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". _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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