Paul Sagar, whose a great blogger, and a fairly new member of the Tax Justice Network team wrote a classic blog on Friday. He said:
Quite often people stumble across this blog after putting “Why are tax havens bad?” or “Why should I care about tax havens?”, or variations thereof, into search engines.
Accordingly, I thought it would be good to have a handy — though by no means complete — summary of why one might care about tax havens.
And he proceeded to offer ten reason why tax havens are bad. He explains them all in great detail. I’ll just give you the headings: please go read his justifications, it’s worth the time:
1. If you care about the current global financial crisis, then you care about tax havens.
2. If you care about undermining the domestic tax revenue authorities of your country — which means undermining hospitals and schools and all the other good things that tax makes possible — then you care about tax havens.
3. If you care about a fair tax distribution, then you care about tax havens.
4. If you care about Government hypocrisy and inconsistency, then you care about tax havens.
5. If you care about the plight of developing nations, then you care about tax havens.
6. If you care about international terrorism, then you care about tax havens.
7. If you care about international drug running — and the vast amounts of power and wealth it puts in the hands of international criminal gangs — then you care about tax havens.
8. If you care about human trafficking, then you care about tax havens.
9. If you care about fighting corruption, than you care about tax havens.
10. If you care about democracy, then you care about tax havens.
As Paul says “The above is not intended as a complete or comprehensive list. But it should serve as introduction to a basic fact about the modern world: tax havens are at the nexus of all that is going wrong with global financial capitalism. And because global financial capitalism affects everyone, everyone should care about tax havens.”
Hear, hear
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Oddly enough all on your list also apply to the UK, US, EU in fact any nation on earth, lets see
1)The poor regulations on banks in the UK and US started the global downturn.
2)Poor efficiency, wasting tax payers money leads to undermining these services, the fact of the effective 2% rise in NI, a few years ago didn’t even touch the sides of the NHS mess proves this
3)UK resident Non-Doms????
4)Complaining for legal tax minimisation while diddling your expenses is hypocracy
5)Government subsidies to undercut developing nations, political bullying and US, UK multinations stripping deveoping nations resources.
6)Most Tax havens have far better anti money laundering proceeduresthan on shore, as onshore feels this would be too expensive. Wnat proof try and open a Caynman Islands bank account and tehn try it in the UK or Delaware
7) See above and also Mr Murphy, where does placement of the dirty money occur in the first place??
8) as 6 and 7, and where are all those human being traffiked end up? in Bermuda. In fact who was behind the traffiking of all millions of Africans over the last 300 years
9) Again look to your back yard, who does the corrupting? didn’t one corrupt dictators money end up in Germany?
10) Yep most “tax havens” are democracy’s. While the UK try to make it more difficult for these havens to do business while passin fund laws to steal their business undermining their democracies?
11) Are not the US and the UK also tax havens
mmm did some one say Witch hunt???
Creg
As ever, you’re playing the game of ‘race to the bottom’
It suite our corrupt view of life, doesn’t it?
Ever thought of aspiring to do the right thing?
I’d try it some time
Of course some of what you say is true – but those issues also receive our attention – you just use them as excuses for perpetuatiion of abuse
Richard
Richard – would it not be more accurate if you had referred to “secrecy jurisdictions” rather then “tax havens”?
I would suggest that the first step in stopping the undermining of national tax regimes should be for those regimes themselves to be cleaned up. It is somewhat hypocritical, particularly in the light of recent revelations, for politicians to castigate tax avoiders or even evaders. The offshore centres may play a part in the various nefarious matters referred to but if the demand wasn’t there the supply wouldn’t exist either. Task No. 1 therefore is to deal with the problems at their true source – in the major jurisdictions themselves.
Clarke
How this suits you! yes, we’ve had problems. Some have abused. But there’s a massive difference from what you guys do. The system may have been abused but it was not set up to abuse – and that’s what yours was intended to do, and does do
That’s why you’re wrong
And at least the response here is to get rid of those whi have abused and create transparency in future
What’s your response? More abusive structures
Richard
“as 6 and 7, and where are all those human being traffiked end up? in Bermuda. In fact who was behind the traffiking of all millions of Africans over the last 300 years”
Oh, you’ve got me there. Pointing out past injustices perpetrated by the UK certainly nulifies modern injustices! As i’ve always said with great enthusiasm – two wrongs make a right!
“It is somewhat hypocritical, particularly in the light of recent revelations, for politicians to castigate tax avoiders or even evaders.”
Perhaps it is hypocritical for *some* politicians to do this – but then, not all politicians were implicated in the expenses scandal. But then, neither Richard nor I are politicians.
And let’s suppose it is hypocritical – what follows? If what the politicians advocate is *right*, then does it really matter whether they are hypocrites in advocating it?
But then, I see what’s going on here – it’s our old friend, the “two wrongs make a right” argument! If politicians did something wrong, and tax havens do something wrong, then we put the two together and everything is right! Whoopee!
Ah, the joys of the Under-4’s Plagroup School of Moral Thinking. But be warned, I hear it’s nearly nap time for tax havens…
Paul – both Richard and yourself have missed my point. If you simply remove a supply of something e.g. tax havens without doing something about the demand then, the world being what it is, someone else will spring up to meet the demand. Remove the demand however, and the supply withers on the vine.
@Clarke
The only way I can see of removing demand for tax havens (from businesses and the super rich) is to abolish taxation for them. Is this what you wish? In order to maintain some public expenditure, albeit, at a far lower level you would no doubt recommend shifting all taxation onto labour.
We could make a shift of the tax base to the immobile factor and reduce the tax rates on labour and capital. Even then the greedy ones (companies are owned by people!) will not want to pay their air share.
So how do you think we should ‘remove the demand’ for tax havens?