Swiss Banker Gives WikiLeaks Damning Data On Wealthy Tax Evaders
Another week, another round of WikiLeaks. Clearly there are no sacred cows and in fact it is the biggest targets who are going down fastest, from corrupt governments to cheating taxpayers. Playing the Bradley Manning role this time is ex-Bank Julius Baer executive Rudolf Elmer. AP/Yahoo News has the story:
A former Swiss banker on Monday supplied documents to WikiLeaks that he alleges detail attempts by wealthy business leaders and lawmakers to evade tax payments.
Rudolf Elmer, an ex-employee of Swiss-based Bank Julius Baer, said there were 2,000 account holders named in the documents, but refused to give details of the companies or individuals involved.
He has previously offered files to WikiLeaks on financial activities in the Cayman Islands and faces a court hearing in Zurich on Wednesday to answer charges of coercion and violating Switzerland’s strict banking secrecy laws.
“I do think as a banker I have the right to stand up if something…
Romania Legally Recognizes Witchcraft As A Profession
The Romanian government has recognized jobs such as witches, embalmers and driving instructors, as professions. The interest was in gaining income tax as an effort to recover from the nation’s recession. From The Huffington Post:
Romania has changed its labor laws to officially recognize witchcraft as a profession, prompting one self-described witch to threaten retaliation.
The move, which went into effect Saturday, is part of the government’s drive to crack down on widespread tax evasion in a country that is in recession.
In addition to witches, astrologists, embalmers, valets and driving instructors are now considered by labor law to be working real jobs, making it harder for them to avoid income tax.
For months the measure had been debated, protested by witches and mocked by the media.
On Saturday, a witch called Bratara told Realitate.net, the website of a top TV station, that she plans to cast a spell using black pepper and yeast to…
Wealthy Americans Should Give Away Their Tax Cut
A group of Ivy League professors is urging wealthy Americans to donate their gains from the controversial Bush tax cuts that should have expired at the end of 2010, only for Republicans in Congress to force an extension. At their site Give It Back For Jobs they explain:
When the Bush administration took power in 2001, it enacted massive tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthiest Americans. These beneficiaries represented the very segment of American society that had already seen their share of national income balloon over the prior generation.The cuts were defended in the name of the unexpected budget surpluses produced by the growth of the Clinton years. Even so, President Bush could not convince enough of the Senate that the cuts were affordable to make them permanent, and so they were set to expire next year.
It is now clear that the budgetary consequences of these skewed tax cuts have been…
States Plan Taxes To Comprise Up To 21% Of E-Book Price
Kindle 2. Photo: Jon 'ShakataGaNai' Davis (CC)
Those of us hooked on $9.99 ebooks had better get used to the idea of paying more in 2011. Not only are publishers and authors realizing that they are not making enough money to stay in business at that price point, but now state governments want in on the fast-growing sales. SmartMoney reports:
Taxes on e-book downloads to an e-reader, like the iPad, Kindle or Nook, could add up to 21% of the total price, assuming multiple states apply taxes to the same transaction, according to MyWireless.org , a nonprofit consumer advocacy group.
Roughly 9 million e-reader users download books. (On average, that’s three e-books a month at an average of $9 per book, according to Marketing and Research Resources and CEA, respectively.) These consumers are increasingly at risk of being taxed on those purchases by their home state and by the state where the book is published,…
The Economy of The Crow: Bird Brains Want to Throw Away $116 Billion A Year to Benefit The Richest 1.3% ‘Small’ Business Owners
There is an old folk saying that comes down from the Irish tradition: “The economy of the crow”. It’s uttered whenever some old wag wishes to describe, in a dryly pithy manner, a short-sighted and foolish resource management strategy. It supposedly is derived from the habit of scavenger birds like crows who, upon noticing an unharvested bit of carrion ripe for the picking, tend to drop whatever goodies they may currently have in their clutches in order to go in pusuit. Basically the saying is a ridicule, a chastisement of stupid waste.
While that kind of bird-brained buffoonery may be understandable in a creature with the cranial capacity of a thimble, it’s not the type of responsible management practice we expect from our elected representatives. Certainly not from the members of the party that claim in one breath to be both the party of fiscal responsibility and the party of deep business…
Do Tax Cuts for the Richest 2% Help or Hurt You? Read the Surprising Answer Here
Kudos once again to the fine team and readership at disinformation. Their comments continue to be extremely thought provoking. This article, chart and supporting calculation in the attached workbook are in resonse to their many insightful questions about inept Republican tax and economic policies.
I get pissed when some dipwad tries to pull a fast one on me, as should we all. The responsible conduct of business requires a level of trust that is decisively undermined when we’re lied to. And while there is a time and place for everything, the place for bullshit is the weekend pintfest at a local pub, not in debates about income tax policy. That’s why the fundamental dishonesty of Republican’t talking points has me so fired up.The specific steaming pile that currently has me cheesed off is EGTRRA. No, it’s not some type of horrible fat-free egg substitute; it’s the ironically named Economic Growth and Tax Relief…
Google Tax Scandal
We all know that there are some genius-level minds at Google, and now it seems they’ve applied their high-powered IQs to working out how not to pay taxes. Guys, can you create an app for that — I’d like to pay 2.4% tax too! From Bloomberg News:
Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.
Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.
“It’s remarkable that Google’s effective rate is that low,” said Martin A. Sullivan, a tax economist who formerly worked for the U.S. Treasury Department. “We know this company operates throughout…
Soak The Very, Very Rich
A sensible suggestion from the capable mind of The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki, but what are the chances that our government will implement it, one wonders (whilst thinking of all those campaign contributions made by the very rich):
The fight on Capitol Hill over whether to extend the Bush tax cuts is about many things: deficit reduction, economic stimulus, supply-side ideology. But at its core is a simple question: who counts as rich? The Obama Administration’s answer is that you’re rich if you make more than two hundred thousand dollars a year as an individual or two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year as a household, and therefore you should have your taxes raised. Conservatives suggest that this threshold is far too low, and argue that Obama would be taxing mostly small-business owners, or the people a Fox News host has referred to as “the so-called rich,” rather than fat…
A National Outrage: Our Tax Dollars Subsidize Foods That Make Us Fat And Unhealthy
Tony Isaacs for Natural News:
At the same time that our Surgeon General has declared we have an epidemic of obesity, our government is using our tax dollars to cater to special interests and to subsidize the very foods that are making us fat. Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that we’re supposed to eat less of.
Take a look at these numbers which tell how the percentage of federal food subsidies spending is allocated:
* Meat/Dairy – 73.8 percent
* Grains – 13.2 percent
* Sugar/Oil/Starch/Alcohol – 10.7 percent
* Nuts/Legumes – 1.9 percent
* Vegetables/Fruits – 0.4 percentJust 2.3 percent of subsidies go to nuts, legumes, fruits and vegetables while 84.5% goes to meat, dairy, sugar, oil, starch and alcohol. Is it any wonder that a salad often costs you more than a Big Mac?…
[continues at Natural News]
Pennsylvania Tax Amnesty/Big Brother TV Ad: “We Know Who You Are”
This Pennsylvania state government ad threatens people who choose not to pay income tax with big brother surveillance. It’s just a shame the feds cant use such tactics against people like Timothy Geithner and the myriad of other insiders who routinely evade taxes.
GE Files 7,000 Tax Returns Globally, Ends Up With A $0 U.S. Tax Bill
Annalyn Censky writes on CNNMoney:
General Electric filed more than 7,000 income tax returns in hundreds of global jurisdictions last year, but when push came to shove, the company owed the U.S. government a whopping bill of $0.
How’d it pull off that trick? By losing lots of money.
GE had plenty of earnings last year — just not in the United States. For tax purposes, the company’s U.S. operations lost $408 million, while its international businesses netted a $10.8 billion profit.
That left GE with no U.S. profit left for Uncle Sam to tax. Corporations typically face a 35% federal income tax on their earnings. Thanks to its deductions and adjustments, GE reported an actual U.S. federal income tax rate of negative 10.5%. It got to add a “tax benefit” of $1.1 billion back into its reported earnings.
“This is the first time in at least decades that GE has reported negative U.S. pretax…
Where Do Your U.S. Tax Dollars Go? (Quiz)
This is the same quiz we created on Facebook (for those of you who have already seen it today).
This quiz was created using information from the National Priorities Project.
Take the quiz by clicking MORE!
More Than 53% of Your Tax Payment Goes to the Military
I think this 53 percent number is debatable, but I don’t doubt that the U.S. government’s (i.e. the taxpayer’s) greatest expense is the military. Dave Lindorff writes on Common Dreams:
If you’re like me, now that we’re in the week that federal income taxes are due, you are finally starting to collect your records and prepare for the ordeal. Either way, whether you are a procrastinator like me, or have already finished and know how much you have paid to the government, it is a good time to stop and consider how much of your money goes to pay for our bloated and largely useless and pointless military.
The budget for the 2011 fiscal year, which has to be voted by Congress by this Oct. 1, looks to be about $3 trillion, not counting the funds collected for Social Security (since the Vietnam War, the government has included the Social Security Trust…
Nationwide Tax Day Protests
The Tea Party movement will do something today that pretty much all Americans identify with: they’re protesting taxes, an activity as all-American as … well you can name your own favorite American pastime. Glenn Harlan Reynolds reports for the Wall Street Journal:
Today American taxpayers in more than 300 locations in all 50 states will hold rallies — dubbed “tea parties” — to protest higher taxes and out-of-control government spending. There is no political party behind these rallies, no grand right-wing conspiracy, not even a 501(c) group like MoveOn.org.
So who’s behind the Tax Day tea parties? Ordinary folks who are using the power of the Internet to organize. For a number of years, techno-geeks have been organizing “flash crowds” — groups of people, coordinated by text or cellphone, who converge on a particular location and then do something silly, like the pillow fights that popped up in 50 cities earlier this month.…
Jon Stewart Rips Congressman Charlie Rangel for Failure to Pay Taxes
I can’t say if Charlie Rangel (yet) is a psychopath (see discussion), but he may belong in a jail cell for his failure to pay taxes. He recently stepped down from his chairmanship of the Way and Means Committee (you know, the chief tax-writing committee of the House of Representatives).
Oh, the irony. Thanks Jon Stewart for making government corruption funny.
Assessing the QDR and 2011 Defense Budget
By Gordon Adams at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
The new Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and the fiscal year 2011 defense budget request have arrived. Unfortunately, they miss the mark: The QDR vastly expands the military’s missions, and the budget responds in kind by expanding for the fourteenth consecutive year.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that the two documents were “shaped by a bracing dose of realism” with regard to risk and resources. I respectfully disagree. The QDR’s risk assessment piles on missions like a short-order cook stacks pancakes at IHOP, setting no priorities between near-term challenges and long-term requirements. And the budget continues to accommodate such a limitless agenda. The bottom line: This lack of discipline will broaden the country’s defense requirements and expand military spending in ways that will make establishing budget and mission discipline in the future even more difficult.
The lack of budget discipline deconstructed.
First, some context: The…
A History of American Tax Revolts (Photos)
Newsweek presents:
Nobody likes taxes. But some people really don’t like taxes. Joseph Stack, a software engineer in a long-running feud with the Internal Revenue Service, crashed his small airplane into an Austin, Texas, office building that housed nearly 200 IRS workers on Feb. 18, 2010. Stack and a man believed to be an IRS employee were killed in the crash. The Austin attack is just the latest in a long history of protests against the government’s power to tax. Before the United States even existed, patriots staged the Boston Tea Party in protest of the British crown’s taxation of the Colonies.
See the photos and read the stories of the history of tax revolt in America on Newsweek
Wesley Snipes, Joe Stack and the Growth of the Tax Resistance Movement
Federal tax authorities spend a lot of time trying to convince Americans like IRS attacker Joe Stack that paying taxes is part of one’s civic duty. But resistance – though not violence – is downright American, say tax protesters like Wesley Snipes. Patrick Johnson reports for the Christian Science Monitor:
Commenting on the suicide plane attack on an IRS office building in Austin, Texas, by tax resister Joe Stack, actor and tax protester Wesley Snipes shrugged his shoulders and said: “I think [tax revolt] was an issue even for the early colonists and the British, so what’s new?”
The Boston Tea Party. The Whiskey Rebellion. The Sagebrush Rebellion.
Since its very founding, the US has been awash in sometimes violent anti-tax movements, giving way to a strain, amid ever broader federal reach, of a particularly pervasive, and more individualistic, form of rebellion in the late 20th century: The tax-resistance, or tax-denial, phenomenon.
Mr. Stack, a software…
The United Nations’ Global Tax Plan
Remembering, please, that this story is coming from FOX News, could these proposed taxes really be the beginning of one world governance?
A member of a World Health Organization (WHO) panel of experts that is pondering new global taxes on e-mails, alcohol, tobacco, airline travel and consumer bank transactions, has charged that she was given only selective information at group meetings, that deliberations were rushed and that group was “manipulated” by the international pharmaceuticals industry.
All of her charges were strongly denied by the head of WHO’s Expert Working Group on Research and Development Financing (EWG), a 25-member panel of medical experts, academics and health care bureaucrats which is due to present a 98-page report in Geneva on Monday, after 14 months of deliberations on “new and innovative sources of funding” to reshape the global medical industry.
A copy of the executive summary of the report was obtained by Fox News on January 15…
Pentagon Spends More on War Than All 50 States Combined Spend To Operate
Sherwood Ross writes on the Intelligence Daily:
The U.S. spends more for war annually than all state governments combined spend for the health, education, welfare, and safety of 308 million Americans.
Joseph Henchman, director of state projects for the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C., says the states collected a total of $781 billion in taxes in 2008.
For a rough comparison, according to Wikipedia data, the total budget for what the Pentagon calls “defense” in fiscal year 2010 will be at least $880 billion and could possibly top $1 trillion. That’s more than all the state governments collect.
Henchman says all American local governments combined (cities, counties, etc.) collect about $500 billion in taxes. Add that to total state tax take and you get over $1.3 trillion. This means Uncle Sam’s Pentagon is sopping up nearly as much money as all state, county, city, and other governmental units spend to run the country.
Read More:…
