Remember the Panama Papers? The April 2016 scandal exposed shell corporations, anonymous owners, and the practice of keeping corporate profits offshore to avoid high taxes. All perfectly legal. But it set the left into a tizzy (because it doesn’t take much) whose head-spin produced calls for national registries of company owners and all sort of new laws regarding transparency.
The real goal of government intervention while sold as consumer protection or crime-fighting was to figure out how State’s might profit by taxing that “hidden wealth.”
Obama’s opening Salvo went something like this.
“There is no doubt that the problem of global tax avoidance generally is a huge problem,” Obama told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “The problem is that a lot of this stuff is legal, not illegal.”
The US president said the leak from Panama illustrated the scale of tax avoidance involving Fortune 500 companies and running into trillions of dollars worldwide.
“We shouldn’t make it legal to engage in transactions just to avoid taxes,” he added, praising instead “the basic principle of making sure everyone pays their fair share”.
As opposed to making it legal to steal the product of other people’s effort?
That’s exactly how the ‘you didn’t build that’ party sees things. They are also a bit jealous. Here are a bunch of rich people using the law to keep their own stuff out of the hands of their respective governments while Democrats ignore the law for the same ends.
The solution (obviously) is to force them to follow new laws the globalist left will happily skirt, returning to them the money-laundering advantages they’ve come to know and love. Take it from those who make it. Collect a finders fee. Hand it out to allies and progressive activists by every means possible. Just like any good cartel but hey, they made a law so it’s legal when they do it.
While that reality knocked around inside their empty heads it reignited an old progressive public perception campaign. We don’t care if our corporate taxes are the highest in the world. Offshoring is bad. We need to find a way to punish those who legally evade taxation.
President Barack Obama’s fiscal 2016 budget will seek new taxes on trillions of dollars in profits accumulated overseas by U.S. companies, and a new approach to taxing foreign profits in the future, but Republicans were skeptical of the plan on Sunday.
We made offshoring jokes for months leading up to the Panama Papers story after which I wrote,
Finally, (finally), if Obama & Dem Inc., really want to keep more fiscal resources in the country, the only “loophole” they need to address is the one where every other nation has a more favorable corporate tax rate. Fix that. Money will come back, get invested, and create plenty of taxable wealth. Works every time it’s tried. The fact that you never do it just reinforces what a bunch of pragmatic-socialist morons you all are.
The Trump Tax Reform package did just that and as Skip reported last week, over 300 billion in offshore money has already found its way home to the U.S.
Media “Experts” are not prepared (unwilling?) to give that tax cut the credit but back up a few paragraphs and read Prophet Obama The Smartest Guy in Any Room’s sage words. “We shouldn’t make it legal to engage in transactions just to avoid taxes.”
Thanks to Republican Tax reform they don’t have to: “Trump’s 21% tax rate is now lower than the current OECD average corporate tax rate of 25%.”
The fastest way to make your money make more money is to put it to work someplace. Mr. Trump made America a great place to park your cache of cash. With its huge labor pool and exceptional work ethic – I think we still put in longer hours in a week than any other nation on earth (cuz we like to have our own piles of stuff) the opportunities for growth are better than leaving it in a Caribbean bank account or Panama for that matter. Something the media experts told us was a dream with which we should not get to comfortable.
That’s true in at least one respect. If democrats get back into power they have promised to raise taxes on everyone and ‘big business’ has to be at the top of that list.
