Humpty Dumpty and offshore tax havens 2

The ICIJ revelations are starting to ripple around the world as many nations realize they're being ripped off and are starting to react.  See my earlier post on the subject here.  The report has set off a scramble by governments to calm public anger over widespread tax dodging by the rich when governments are cutting budgets and calling on citizens to pay higher taxes.

In another announcement last week, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said his country plans to lift bank secrecy rules for European Union citizens who have money stashed in the country, ending decades of bank secrecy in Luxembourg.

“We are following a global movement,” Juncker told parliament in a state-of-the-nation address. The new transparency regime would begin in January 2015. 

The New York Times also weighed in on the issue as well as documenting how our tax policy is stacked in favor of the one percent who own about 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.

"Over the years, some of the wealthy have been enormously successful in getting special treatment, shifting an ever greater share of the burden of financing the country’s expenditures — defense, education, social programs — onto others. Ironically, this is especially true of some of our multinational corporations, which call on the federal government to negotiate favorable trade treaties that allow them easy entry into foreign markets and to defend their commercial interests around the world, but then use these foreign bases to avoid paying taxes.
General Electric has become the symbol for multinational corporations that have their headquarters in the United States but pay almost no taxes — its effective corporate-tax rate averaged less than 2 percent from 2002 to 2012 — just as Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee last year, became the symbol for the wealthy who don’t pay their fair share when he admitted that he paid only 14 percent of his income in taxes in 2011, even as he notoriously complained that 47 percent of Americans were freeloaders. Neither G.E. nor Mr. Romney has, to my knowledge, broken any tax laws, but the sparse taxes they’ve paid violate most Americans’ basic sense of fairness."