For weeks now the liberal world media dutifully has been repeating dire threats against so-called “tax havens” from the big spending, high taxing, anti-tax competition likes of Germany’s Merkel and France’s Sarkosy.
Last week’s headlines were filled with news of a historic legal crackdown on UBS, the Swiss banking giant and what a 2008 Senate hearing identified as $100 billion in annual tax evasion by American owners of foreign accounts.
O.K., so the headline isn’t exactly accurate, but it did catch your eye. And if one David Cay Johnston has his perverse way, it would be a statement of fact. Indeed, Johnston seriously calls for a U.S. declaration of war not only on the Cayman Islands, but also Bermuda and other offshore tax havens. His lengthy radical views are set out in an article (”Fiscal Therapy”) in the Jan-Feb 2009 issue of the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones, known for investigative reporting with a decidedly radical slant.
Will November’s emergency global financial summit result in a “new global financial order”? European leaders are pressing for a fundamental change in the US-centric monetary system. Jason Simpkins says a similar crisis meeting in 1944 gave birth to the Bretton Woods gold standard. But there are reasons to doubt such a major reform this time around.
The US Senate is engaged in a phony war on offshore tax havens, says Bob Bauman in The Sovereign Society. But much of this phony war consists of senators making up higher and higher numbers of how much the IRS loses to offshore tax evasion. Besides, one of the biggest tax havens in the world is the good old U S of A. More from Bob…