The wealthiest people in the world have exploited loopholes in international tax rules, evading the taxman and sheltering a staggering $21 trillion or more in offshore accounts, according to a report released Sunday.
To give perspective to the scale of the offshore economy, the economic transparency group Tax Justice Network said the sum is larger than the entire United State’s economy, or enough money to entirely solve the European debt crisis.
The report, called The Price of Offshore Revisted, says between $21 trillion and $32 trillion could be hidden in tax havens in countries like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. The first details of the report were released to the Observer in London.
And most of the money hidden overseas comes from people who would make the was majority of the top 1 percent turn green with envy, economists said.
Instead, some $10 trillion that has been stashed in off-shore accounts is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001 percent of the world’s population, the report finds.
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3 Responses
There is a world of difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion. The morality of any tax, flat or progressive, is ambiguous at the very least. Let the taxman bite his fingernails and have a stroke. He didn’t earn a thing. Why should he be entitled to a dime?
Who are these people and why should we believe their numbers?
Leaving aside the fact that the numbers are entirely speculative if not outright fantasy, what is wrong with what these people are doing? They have placed their money within the sovereign jurisdiction of another country. That is all.
The imperial ambitions that the US Government has to subjugate the entire world to their tax laws is in violation of the most basic concepts of accepted international behavior. Aggression is not limited to sending troops in to kill people. Forcing sovereign nations to bow to your laws turns them into colonial entities and is only the beginning of total control.