Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

Post by guelo » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 5:32 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #285

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd replace wrongdoing with illegal. If you ask me, if you're a billionaire and you're not willing to pay taxes and spend 0.0001% of your wealth on the expertise to reduce your tax bill by 99%, in legal ways that 99.99% of the rest of the population doesn't engage in, then by all means that's wrongdoing to me and I think most would be with me on that. Of course it's not necessarily illegal.

Rest of the population doesn't engage in these ways because it's not worth it for them - they do not pay enough taxes to warrant it. Some people, however, pay lots of taxes - so much that it may make sense for them to spend money and go to great length to somewhat reduce their tax bills. They most probably still pay much more tax than average person - just not as much as they could be paying if they didn't use these…

Post by aleksi » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 6:07 AM UTC

harry8 wrote: post #265

tootie wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of noise being made over the number of documents, but I'm not seeing anything actually interesting about this. Offshore banking has been extremely common for a very long time and isn't illegal in and of itself. The hidden funds need to be provably originating from from an illicit source.

Ok, I'll bite. What do you think Vlad Putin's legit source is for his billions? His paycheck? Sometimes you don't have to know all the details. Somtimes the mere fact of a bank account with billions in it is enough to know, with certainty that a politician has his/her hand in the till and is a corrupt bastard. I pick on Vlad, there's plenty more to choose from. Now the evidence exists to remove doubt from the accusat…

Post by seanalltogether » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 6:12 AM UTC

snitko wrote: post #141

cm3 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring fairness of certain taxes and issues with tax laws in general, taxes are the rent one has to pay for living in a place. If you don't have income you usually won't pay most taxes at all. It's arguable how much of the tax system works and what parts are just plain broken and favor certain interest groups, but that's an implementation detail. If you visit places where much of the population evades taxes, you'll…

> If there were no taxes, you'd probably have to buy tickets to walk and drive on roads, stroll in the park, swim in a sea Do you have to insert coins into your smartphone every time you call someone these days? And yet it's almost impossible to live without a smartphone today, so people buy them and pay for the plans. But, but, they do have a choice of which operator to use (and, frankly, US is the worst example her…

Post by tdaltonc » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 6:31 AM UTC

xbryanx wrote: post #15

Planet Money did a pretty enjoyable show about setting up shell companies, that might provide some interesting context for this news: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/27/157499893/episo... and http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/03/30/472452808/episo...

Post by ta_04032016 » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 6:38 AM UTC