Timo wrote:If anyone is interested, the average interest rate on any savings account at any Panamanian bank is around 7%. No shell company required. Just use your own name, and get a 7% return on your invested savings. That sure as hell beats any rate you could get from any CD account you could get from any American bank. It also beats what i'm losing on my ETFs right now, too! Panama also uses dollars as their currency, and i do assume US taxes on interest gained does still apply. Sorry. You'll have to set up a shell company in the Virgin Islands if you want to avoid paying any taxes. Either that, or spend a night in bed with Vladimir Putin.
We should all be able to agree: no one should be poor in a nation as wealthy as the US. Yet nearly 15% of Americans live below the poverty line. Perhaps one of the best solutions is also one of the oldest and simplest ideas: everyone should be guaranteed a small income, free from conditions.
Called a universal basic income by supporters, the idea has has attracted support throughout American history, from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King Jr. But it has also faced unending criticism for one particular reason: the advocates of “austerity” say we simply can’t afford it – or any other dramatic spending on social security.
That argument dissolved this week with the release of the Panama Papers, which reveal the elaborate methods used by the wealthy to avoid paying back the societies that helped them to gain their wealth in the first place.
Roads and transportation infrastructure. Educated workforces. Courts and legal systems. Innovations sparked by government funding, such as the internet. No one – no matter how smart or hard working – joins the American or global elite without making use of these shared resources.
But while working and middle-class families pay their taxes or face consequences, the Panama Papers remind us that the worst of the 1% have, for years, essentially been stealing access to Americans’ common birthright, and to the benefits of our shared endeavors.
Worse, many of those same global elite have argued that we cannot afford to provide education, healthcare or a basic standard of living for all, much less eradicate poverty or dramatically enhance the social safety net by guaranteeing every American a subsistence-level income.
Because the truth is that we have all been robbed, systematically, by the world’s wealthiest people, for decades. They have used those stolen dollars to build yet more wealth for themselves, and all the while we have been arguing with ourselves over what to do with the leftover pennies.
Enough. We have the money to solve our problems. The first step is to stop the global elite from hoarding and hiding it. Cracking down on tax evasion alone will not fund all our priorities, but the Panama Papers do put the lie to the politics of austerity.
Cid_Yama wrote:Someone on Twitter claimed that and ZeroHedge posted what the twitter poster said. Some anonymous person on the internet or on twitter makes an unsubstantiated claim. That doesn't make it true.
All you are doing is promoting unsubstantiated nonsense said by an unknown someone.
Pointing to a blog repeating an unsubstantiated claim by an unknown person does not confirm it.
As for the article itself, the accusation is ridiculous. The Data is the archives of a law firm who acted as a shell but also as a Law Firm for the past 40 years. Much of that data has nothing to do with hiding assets or laundering money and is just the normal activity of a law firm, who's innocent clients have a legal right to protection of their data.
A data dump would result in law suits for sure and perhaps criminal actions against those that released it. Thus it will take a long time to sort through it all.
No vast liberal conspiracy. No matter how much you would like there to be.
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