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Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

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Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#101

Post by nickbauman »

cisanti wrote: post #41
mrleiter wrote: post #33

It's the wrong angle. One should not look at corporations as the moral saviours. As Supreme Court Judge Learned Hand once said: "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, n…

But corporations do like to paint themselves as moral and fighting for you! Another thing is why people believe in it... 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 t…

The terms "capitalism" and for that matter "communism" are labels that have lost almost all meaning. The USSR was a dictatorship as is Russia today. "Capitalism" was a term coined by Karl Marx as a critique of 19th century industrial England. Calling yourself a "capitalist" is like calling yourself a "alienist". It's an archaic term and imprecise at best.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#102

Post by gcb0 »

dboreham wrote: post #15

Imagining people in meeting rooms at law firms discussing if they can go back to paper-only workflow... 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..

dont have to go that far, or that up.

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.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#103

Post by haaen »

Comment from economist Tyler Cowen when the same group of journalists released the Panama papers:

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...

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#104

Post by cobookman »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #89

My parents always taught me to be honest and care about those around you. The older I got the more I realized that was mal-adaptive behavior in capitalistic society. The real goal of capitalism is exploit or be exploited.

It's possible to do both. Look at the kibbutzim of Israel. Many after 50ish years have > 1mil/resident in assets. Many are a communist society with bad actors kicked out. and sell their goods in a capitalistic way.

So you get the best of communism and capitalism. It doesn't scale for everyone but it's a good in between.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#105

Post by rsynnott »

nodesocket wrote: post #80
rsynnott wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money that you spend on buying software, hiring etc isn’t generally taxable anyway. A business is generally taxed on income, not revenue. 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…

> Money that you spend on buying software, hiring etc isn’t generally taxable anyway. A business is generally taxed on income, not revenue. But reducing my quarterly and annual tax liabilies allows me to spend more on these things because there is more cash for the business at the end of the day.

This assumes that you need to take out a constant amount of after-tax profit, which may be the case for some types of small business. However, it would be possible, and perhaps more appropriate, to introduce some form of tax credit to deal with that; this would be far, far cheaper.

It’s hard to overemphasise how expensive the proposed plans are. You’re looking at adding over a trillion to the deficit. Bush’s tax cuts are estimated to have cost about 1.5 trillion... for his entire term (plus a trillion or so make in Obama’s term when he was forced to extend most of them).

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#106

Post by dmitriid »

Remember Panama papers? The outcome of those was..? Nothing? Or close to nothing? The same will happen to Paradise Papers.

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.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#107

Post by Synaesthesia »

dmitriid wrote: post #106

Remember Panama papers? The outcome of those was..? Nothing? Or close to nothing? The same will happen to Paradise Papers. 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.

It's up to us to make a change.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#108

Post by fragmede »

tomkat0789 wrote: post #81

These leaks are juicy and all, but have our oligarchs had to change anything as a result of them? What were the big effects of the Panama Papers?

No, it didn't cause a Fight Club/Mr. Robot-style overnight collapse of capitalism, but it did force a number of politicians and business people in a number of different countries to step down and face fines. Pakistan in particular disqualified their Prime Minister, in what was called a "defining moment" for the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_Panama_Papers

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#109

Post by WalterBright »

gaius wrote: post #51
rothbardrand wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You invoked morality. The moral calculus is pretty clear to me: I’ll take the gay loving advancer of technology over governments stealing money to use it to blow up people any day. Apple has the moral high ground, and that ground is higher the less taxes they pay. Remember military spending is far more than roads.

Military spending got you the Internet, GPS, jet engines, microwave ovens and a million more things that you take for granted ...

Internet? Everybody with 2 or more computers tried to connect them together. Without the internet we'd have BIX, FidoNet, Compuserve, Prodigy, MCImail, RBBS, or any of innumerable other schemes to network computers.

Jet engines? Governments refused to fund jet engine development until they were confronted with FLYING jet aircraft. This happened in both England and Germany. The US government ordered Lockheed to stop working on jet engines and concentrate on piston engines.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#110

Post by VHRanger »

noobermin wrote: post #79

Since there are no top level comments putting this out for probably obvious reasons, here is a supportive comment for the article. 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 ru…

It's important to note that, in the US, worker __compensation__ has increased steadily. However, __wages__ have not.

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.

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