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Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

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Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#81

Post by ur-whale »

jussij wrote: post #34

It is not just the super rich running this scam but almost every multi-national. Just take Apple as one example. Apple is sitting on close to $300+ billion in cash in some offshore tax haven, just to make sure that cash is located outside of the USA to insure it does not attract any tax. This wide spread multi-national tax avoidance has been running at epidemic levels for many decades now. From what I recall Google s…

What you call a scam, I call healthy competition between nation-states, with the fringe benefit of keeping everyone honest.

The only thing that's sad in the story is that this kind of deal is only accessible to large corps and HNWI, and not to the middle class of each country.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#82

Post by [deleted] »

ppseafield wrote: post #79
rb808 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top 1% of the world is 80m people, I think the book is rather about the top few thousand families.

The article also mentions the folks who are made wealthy by working for those few thousand families. > A class of enablers has arisen to help Moneylanders perform parts two and three of what Bullough describes as their eternal cycle: “steal-hide-spend”. London overflows with lawyers, bankers, accountants, estate agents, public relations advisers, luxury-goods sellers, restaurateurs and art dealers who make their livi…

[deleted]

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#83

Post by goatinaboat »

anovikov wrote: post #56
lkschubert8 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to 1% of wealth or 1% of income? I think you are correct in regards to income as it is mid six figures[0]. But I think the general complaint about the 1% is in reference to wealth which has a cutoff of about 10 million[0]. Also I was skeptical of your claim about the 1% (of income earners) paying that much (at least in terms of income tax) but this[1] does seem to support that you are at least in th…

Top 1% of capital owners are just mostly very old people with comparatively little income. And their capital is passive and brings no or almost no profit (having 10M of capital and making 350K of income only 17% of which is income from capital - rest is from work - means abysmal 0.5% average return). It is in fact even less because most people who are top 1% by capital aren't top 1% by income: top 1% by capital is ty…

Top 1% of capital owners are just mostly very old people with comparatively little income.

Indeed. Someone who bought their house in the 70s or 80s and has now paid off their mortgage and also been contributing to a pension fund for a 40-year working life could easily retire with a “net worth” of $770k. It would be a stretch to count them as “rich”.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#84

Post by goatinaboat »

nicoburns wrote: post #41
sprafa wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder. I.e. I met a software guy from Sachs who told me about what he did there. Essentially he built automated software to flag “suspicious transactions”. So ie if 200…

> The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder. It's the one single thing that makes me most pro-EU. I don't see how we can fight tax evasion on a country-by-country level. But a economic and geographical blo…

But a economic and geographical bloc as big as the EU has enough clout to have real enforcement power.

The EU gave us the double-Irish and the Dutch-sandwich and other tax evasion schemes used by large corporations. They want the exact opposite of “real enforcement power”.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#85

Post by lacker »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #15
whatshisface wrote: post #4

This article is painting mobility as a bad thing, but it also has a good side. China's capital controls are a big part of how it oppresses people: if they could just leave, China would have no ability to make itself into a productive dystopia. The ideal situation would be if countries had to compete for everyone's presence, but as it stands limitations on mobility mean that only the very powerful can leap over the bo…

You seem to be talking of closed borders, not capital restrictions. Britain and some other Western nations had capital controls until around the 1980s, without using them to oppress people. The millions who fled revolutionary China, without their capital, seeded Hong Kong and Taiwan with the huge population growth that made them what they are today.

Western nations have used capital controls to oppress people. The Nazis, for example, used capital controls to both oppress people and to help fund their war machine via monetary policy.

e.g. https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqr...

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#86

Post by m-p-3 »

jussij wrote: post #66
situational87 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but you're missing the half of the equation where everyone who is a senior employee gets granted or grants themselves large amounts of stock options, then decides to funnel this tax free hoard of wealth into stock buybacks. It's the most direct and massive transfer of wealth from normal and poor people to rich in the history of any society. It's disgusting and despicable, anyone who owns equities in 2019 needs t…

> Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter. This sort of tax avoidance has been going on for decades. As just one example see the link below to see how Google has been avoiding it's tax responsibility here in Australia: https://www.smh.com.au/business/google-paying-a-fraction-of-... If that same level of tax avoidance was perpetrated by an individ…

Imagine all these uncollected taxes that could be used to properly fund public services like healthcare, etc.

These businesses are actively stealing the citizens from their essential services.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#87

Post by somecontext »

ClutchBand wrote: post #6
whatshisface wrote: post #4

This article is painting mobility as a bad thing, but it also has a good side. China's capital controls are a big part of how it oppresses people: if they could just leave, China would have no ability to make itself into a productive dystopia. The ideal situation would be if countries had to compete for everyone's presence, but as it stands limitations on mobility mean that only the very powerful can leap over the bo…

Mobility is great but when on .001% of the entire global population gets to do it, and they get to do it much easier than anyone else would have (sometime skirting laws and requirements that normal people would). The rich and elite get special treatment, when they should not. It leads to more unfair conditions.

For some context in case anyone was curious, it seems that approximately 1 in 30 of people worldwide live outside the country of their birth. (Of these, approximately 1 in 10 are forcibly displaced.) Also, "the largest international migratory flow from a single country of origin to a single country of destination is the 12.7 million Mexicans living in the United States"; this flow alone is approximately 1 in 600 people worldwide.

https://lif.blob.core.windows.net/lif/docs/default-source/de... https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/internation...

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#88

Post by sprafa »

goatinaboat wrote: post #84
nicoburns wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder. It's the one single thing that makes me most pro-EU. I don't see how we can fight tax evasion on a country-by-country level. But a economic and geographical blo…

But a economic and geographical bloc as big as the EU has enough clout to have real enforcement power. The EU gave us the double-Irish and the Dutch-sandwich and other tax evasion schemes used by large corporations. They want the exact opposite of “real enforcement power”.

The EU didn’t do that, states did that.

And if I’m not mistaken part of the reason why it went away was the EU kept giving them advice to stop it.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#89

Post by NeedMoreTea »

lacker wrote: post #85
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be talking of closed borders, not capital restrictions. Britain and some other Western nations had capital controls until around the 1980s, without using them to oppress people. The millions who fled revolutionary China, without their capital, seeded Hong Kong and Taiwan with the huge population growth that made them what they are today.

Western nations have used capital controls to oppress people. The Nazis, for example, used capital controls to both oppress people and to help fund their war machine via monetary policy. e.g. https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqr...

Capital controls don't rule out freedom, nor rule in oppression. I doubt you'd suggest Switzerland, the US, Britain and the rest were oppressive by mere dint of having capital controls before Bretton Woods was destroyed.

Giving the Nazi example of an oppressive regime being oppressive doesn't change that - they were oppressive via nearly all the other tools of free democracies too. Property seizures and taking away all freedom of movement was far more symptomatic of being oppressive. OP's China example is a place that is oppressive in many ways, but far from being one of the main means of oppression, capital control has been liberalised hugely in recent years. Freedom of movement, to emigrate, to demonstrate, etc on the other hand...

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#90

Post by petre »

einhverfr wrote: post #61
petre wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pointless. One can have multiple temporary residences. The Swiss have already solved this. You pay the same amount of tax regardless if you keep the property empty, live in it or rent it. It's calculated as a percentage of average rent in that area which gets updated with market prices every 6 months or so. They also have low VAT and corp taxes.

But the Swiss make you pay an income tax on rent you would have made if you had rented it. Land value taxes are probably better than that.

Not really. One could graze cows on land, or run a casino.
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