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Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

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Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#451

Post by Nasrudith »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #217
Aeolun wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was also pretty much the only economy left standing. I don’t think that can be overstated enough.

The entire New World was left standing.

True. The US was an industrial behemoth before even formal involvement in the War and was preposterously powerful in the area. They didn't have it diminished by bombing and gained manufacturing capacity instead of losing it.

While others were unscarred they never "stood up" by the standards of the world scale even if they were also industrialized.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#452

Post by tossAfterUsing »

seibelj wrote: post #185
tossAfterUsing wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "deserved taxes", what precisely is the reasoning behind this deservedness? it seems to me that there's no reasonable way to lay claim to the work product of another person without being a total jerk... maybe i'm mistaken.

It's mind blowing to me that people get angry about moving wealth to a lower tax country like Cayman, but are totally milquetoast about moving someplace within the same country that has the same effect of lowering one's effective taxation. If you are worked up about this Cayman thing, then you should be apoplectic if your neighbor moves to Texas or Florida. What horrible, disgusting people who are leaving their forme…

Seriously having difficulty detecting whether this is sarcasm, so forgive me if I am taking some bait...

I'm not sure that I want the government to be responsible for doling out penalties for working (e.g. taxing somebody's productive efforts). I think it would be better if localities had sales taxes only. Penalizing people for visiting/living in a location (by taxing them proportionally for the rest of their lives) seems absurd, empowers a police state, and frightens me for the possible negative externalities of such a system.

Consider the case of a family that was persecuted out of a town (e.g. chased out by bigots)... should each of these individuals be penalized for the rest of their lives for having spent some amount of time "living" in that place?

Surely, that's not a good solution.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#453

Post by Keverw »

gxqoz wrote: post #50
jokoon wrote: post #21

After watching The laundromat, I think it's big news. Although I will always be curious why countries are letting those small, insignificant islands and countries manage all this wealth, and why they're trusted to do it. This can't be secure or safe. I'm curious about the diplomacy and the political implications of this. What if their office get robbed? What if the island gets attacked? What if one of those shady ban…

A recent piece in The Guardian argues that South Dakota and other US states are actually becoming the go-to place to store anonymously your illicit cash and make sure that your heirs can inherit it without taxes forever: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-amer... Partly because the US has compelled other countries to provide more transparency without joining that transparency organization itself.…

South Dakota is also popular with full time RVers and digital nomads. Many other states you have to rent or own a house to get a license etc. But South Dakota recognizes full time travelers, so you can rent a PMB and spend 1 night at a hotel and campground to be considered a resident. Which is pretty neat. So some states like Michigan or Ohio are strict along with many others, so if you sell your house to retire to travel the nation in your RV they won't accept a mail forwarder so your only option is to burden a friend or family member to handle your mail pretending you live with them when you don't. So you are stuck having to become a resident of a new state.

Texas is also friendly to RVing, then some counties in Florida too recognize this but different counties had different views. Clay County in FL said that full time RVers aren't allowed to vote, yet a homeless person can claim they live at a park bench per federal laws. So they are making millions from RVers who barely even put ware and tear on the roads, so sounds like they found a perfect little niche from themselves in that area too, plus a valuable service when your former state you spent your entire life living in ditches you because you decided to live an alternative lifestyle.

Homeless people have the same problem, but homeless shelters can help people without any ID get one... Some argue people with $250,000 Diesel Pushers are homeless too, but it seems wasteful to get assistant from a homeless shelter when you are "homeless" by choice since other people those resources would be better spent helping, plus pretty sure you have to pick up your mail instead of them sending you a package with all your mail when you are across the country or even opening items and scanning them for you if you need access to a letter faster. I know people in RV groups prefer to call themselves "houseless" not "homeless"

Some guy works remotely for a medical marketing firm, traveling full time with his family living the life people dream of checking out all the different national parks all the way to the theme parks. While you are freezing your butt off in Ohio, they are camping at Fort Wilderness (the RV park at Disney world) but technically in the eyes of different agencies they're homeless. Some banks can give you trouble too. Didn't know homeless people could afford Disney!

So kinda interesting people who own property are treated differently than people who decide to travel full time. You could own property and never even go there and you'd be treated better than someone with no property at all for some reason. Seems very backwards, I guess society never considered people could work remotely and travel full time exploring, you are supposed to live in a house you are indebted to all your life, then maybe when you are in your 60s you can explore while you can barely walk or living off the tiny bit of social security you get, if it's even still around by time you reach that age.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#454

Post by permatech »

ajross wrote: post #290
seppin wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, governments are finding new and creative ways to put new taxes on already legal money. So yeah, privacy matters.

> Also, governments are finding new and creative ways to put new taxes on already legal money. Care to cite some? That's just a silly point. There's probably no area of regulatory theory more well travelled than taxation. Imagine a trick and someone has tried it, often thousands of years ago. And it's even incorrect as a practical matter in the modern USA, where government revenue as a share of GDP has been going ste…

> Care to cite some? That's just a silly point.

Would the wealth tax currently being discussed fall into this category? https://www.businessinsider.com/wealth-tax-definition-explai...

"... pay the federal government a small percentage of their net worth each year."

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#455

Post by dredmorbius »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #390
dredmorbius wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general principle of a tax which can be levied fairly, equally, clearly, and with low costs of collection or effort, are not new: The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary. The time of payment, the manner of payment, the quantity to be paid, ought all to be clear and plain to the contributor, and to every other person. Where it is otherwise, every person subject to the t…

> Smith's preference was for a tax on land, which is difficult to move off-shore. I like the idea of land tax, but I like that statement even more. (Land tax, on paper, seems like it would be such a good idea, and transaction taxes are nowadays so invasive, that it's incomprehensible to me why we don't have them.)

Thanks. It just came to me :)

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#456

Post by post_below »

michaelt wrote: post #419
post_below wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warren Buffet is likely to buy a much more expensive car, or cars. He's spending more on everything than you are. That doesn't even things up, of course, but then neither does the current system. It would arguably be closer to even. The beauty of a universal sales tax (as an alternative to income tax), in addition to the fact that the wealthy consume more of everything, is that a transaction tax is more difficult to…

> Warren Buffet is likely to buy a much more expensive car, or cars. According to [1] Warren Buffett's house is worth .001% of his total wealth, at $652,619. And for Warren Buffet to pay sales tax proportional to someone with $500,000 in assets buying a $50,000 car, he'd have to buy the world's most expensive car - a $5 million Koenigsegg of which only 3 were ever made - 1700 times over. [1] https://www.businessinsid…

It's one of those annoying internetisms that people often pick one part of a post or idea, take it out of context, and respond to that misrepresentation.

It's a bit like a straw man fallacy.

It happens a lot less often on HN though in my experience.

Right after the bit you quoted I noted that WB buying an expensive car doesn't even things out.

The idea of sales tax as a replacement for income tax isn't new or lacking rigor. Over the years it's had a lot of support from both economists and politicians. The math, at least on the surface, does work.

Personally, I haven't spent enough time looking at it to have a lot of conviction one way or the other about it's viability.

But it's an interesting idea that isn't invalidated by comparing cars.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#457

Post by matheusmoreira »

wolco wrote: post #218
bouncycastle wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So everyone is assumed to be a criminal until proven otherwise?

If you've gone to a movie they don't let everyone in and assume they had a ticket. Doesn't mean they think of you as a criminal.

It's fine to check the ticket before letting people in. However, movie theater employees can also interrupt people in the middle of the film to check their tickets. People pay money to see a movie and are interrupted because the theater staff can't determine who has or hasn't paid.

I think that's wrong on principle but they don't see anything wrong with it.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#458

Post by ajross »

harambaebae69 wrote: post #443
ajross wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, governments are finding new and creative ways to put new taxes on already legal money. Care to cite some? That's just a silly point. There's probably no area of regulatory theory more well travelled than taxation. Imagine a trick and someone has tried it, often thousands of years ago. And it's even incorrect as a practical matter in the modern USA, where government revenue as a share of GDP has been going ste…

>> Also, governments are finding new and creative ways to put new taxes on already legal money. In addition to the soft tax of excessive inflation mentioned by the other poster, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed wealth taxes. https://www.businessinsider.com/wealth-tax-definition-explai... You can agree with that or not morally, but it is by definition a tax on already legal (and taxed during income) m…

We already have estate and property taxation, though. It's not like wealth taxes don't exist, they're just levied at specific times or on specific kinds of assets.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#459

Post by hogFeast »

pavlov wrote: post #377
hogFeast wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU has an unbelievable number of tax havens. It is one of the last places in the developed world where you can genuinely clean dirty money with ease. The last Commission President was literally the ringleader for tax theft: he was FM/PM of Luxembourg, and actively lobbied companies to domicile there, funnel revenue through Luxembourg (i.e. structuring for tax avoidance alone), and personally negotiated the 1% cor…

Juncker made for a convenient political foil in many ways, but ultimately EU policy is made by national leaders in the European Council. The shady practices of Luxembourg and Cyprus were previously of no interest to the national leaders who had bigger fish to fry. This has changed though, as certain European parties' voters have become irate about international tax evasion. For center-left PMs, stomping down on count…

This isn't the case. All the main financial institutions in the Channel Islands and IoM are global so they KYC properly. More to the point though: the information-sharing is pretty much gold standard (bank accounts have been shared for a while but now beneficial ownership of companies is shared too).

The only way to avoid tax is to permanently move there. And, if you are familiar with either of those locations, you should know that the punishment fits the crime.

Also: it is far bigger than Luxembourg and Cyprus. Malta is basically a haven for financial fraud. Ireland is basically a tax haven now. And basically all of the East European nations are targets given the weak controls of their financial institutions (and Denmark as it turned out).

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#460

Post by Mirioron »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #321
Mirioron wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax the corporation when an individual buys goods. Essentially a much bigger VAT.

VAT is regressive - that is it takes a proportionately larger chunk the poorer you are - often considered unfair. For example if I and Warren Buffet buy a car then I have spent a much larger percentage of my overall wealth than he does

Different VAT categories exist though. Not every country uses them but it's a tool in the toolbox. On the other hand, taxes in a lot of European countries are regressive.
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