Excerpts:
A US Senate investigative panel accused two prominent banks in Liechtenstein and Switzerland on Wednesday of helping wealthy Americans hide billions of dollars and evade taxes...
The banks help clients evade taxes by urging their American clients to open accounts in their offshore jurisdictions, assisting them in structuring them to avoid disclosure to US authorities and providing financial services in ways that do not alert the IRS to the accounts' existence, it said.
"Tax havens are engaged in economic warfare against the United States, and the honest, hardworking American taxpayer is losing," Senator Carl Levin, the subcommittee's Democratic chairman, said in a statement.
Long time readers probably already know where I'm going with this. Right to the "disconnect" switch...
See, these banks are
technically doing nothing wrong. They are advising their clients how to evade taxes - how is that different from what every CPA in America does on a daily basis? Loopholes are left in the Tax Code for just such a purpose. It would be easy to make the Tax system simple, but that isn't what the big contributors want. It's much more desirable to have Congress attack foreigners than to acknowledge the underlying problem.
The most laughable, self-serving bullshit comment comes from The Moron From Minnesota:
Senator Norm Coleman, the panel's ranking Republican, said that by "exploiting gaping loopholes, these foreign banks are enabling felony tax evasion."
A Republican complaining about someone exploiting loopholes? Hell's weather forecast
must be calling for snow...
You
KNOW it's an election year when a rubber-stamper like Coleman walks out on this flimsy a plank. He has not done his job on the
oversight committee, and I searched for a comment from Ol' Norm condemning
KBR when they moved their "headquarters" (on paper) to a tax haven country in order to evade taxes. Couldn't find one; not surprising.
I would ask any Senator on this panel, Democrat or Republican, why are you going after foreign banks instead of the Americans who are actually evading the taxes? How can they charge these banks with "
enabling felony tax evasion" without charging the
Americans who are using the services? The obvious answer: Foreign banks don't donate to campaigns on the level that the people who are rich enough to HAVE their money offshore do.
Grandstanding, pandering, call it what you will - this is just another Grand Distraction to take the focus off how bad a job Congress does in representing America - and the polls prove that we AREN'T so stupid as to not recognize what a horrible job they are(n't) doing.
Phil Gramm would recognize the preceding as "whining." I admit it, I'm complaining yet offer no real solution because there really isn't much I or anyone else can do. The system is set up to keep reelecting the same people who aren't doing anything to fix things; it's no wonder we're frustrated with our "leaders."
But I am open to suggestions. How do we get Congress to do the things we send them to D.C. to do? What recourse do we have in a system that is rotten from the roots up? How can we get the mainstream media AND the alternative media to focus on the local and state elections instead of the "Mr America" popularity contest day after day which is the Presidential race?
posted by MedfordTim 
