The movie was simplistic bullshit where every situation was nefarious broken people instead of the everyman that uses and would use these entity structures
Sure, non-wealthy people own stocks. But right now, the richest 10% of American households own 84% of the value of all stocks owned by Americans [1]. It is clear that the wealthy benefit massively from these structures and have much more use and access to them than the "everyman", who in the U.S. probably lives paycheck-to-paycheck. The fantasy that the "everyman" is this cowboy investor and broker is ridiculous and only makes sense if you define "everyman" as an upper middle class American who has a high-paying job and owns significant investments. Compared to the wealthy, most Americans see no benefit from these global networks of moving money around because they aren't rich enough to make the effort and investment worth doing, much less have the connections necessary to even access them.
But they absolutely will drive to the next county to get cheaper gas or lower property taxes and it is the same concept.
Eventually you get to level up to the place of tax deferral that is infinite. You can do it onshore you can do if offshore. It is only hubris for some people to think some governments of their own choosing should have a piece of that. We are talking about the distinctly non corrupt activities.
I think the actual best course of action in general is to deport the rich that cheat on taxes and let them go enjoy being rich in some other country, or in international waters. The idea that we should tolerate big parasites because they'd take their money elsewhere both undervalues everything else about a region and it's people that might keep them there and overestimates the value of being home to greedy wealth.
It's stupid to play in the race to the bottom of governing power versus concentrated wealth. It's something captured/self-interested regulators do, not honest ones.
An infinite tax deferral would be too compliant to fit in your tax cheat rubric as deportation would have to a consequence of a criminal tax evasion charge and conviction in a court.
Revenue services are not worried with how much you pay them, they are only concerned with compliance.
> It is only hubris for some people to think some governments of their own choosing should have a piece of that
It is not hubris. It is pragmatics. Moving to another county does not fully avoid contributing to the community where you live; you aren’t leaving the state, so state taxes still apply. The point is that rich people should pay their fair share of taxes and not be able to just buy their way out of it with fancy lawyers and accountants, thereby depriving governments of billions in taxes. This analogy just isn’t on the same order of magnitude.
However, I think our philosophies are too different for you to accept my argument because it rests on the premise that rich people should pay taxes, which I don’t think you believe. It seems to me that you believe that individuals can and should avoid contributing to their communities through taxation as much as they possibly can. No matter that this money is often used for social services and other non-profitable activities that help people in need.
I think the atomized, “I got mine” attitude meshes deeply with the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” attitude that tries to justify the Panama Papers stuff as on the same order of magnitude as getting cheap gas in another county. The concept of community doesn’t exist in this mindset; only a group of dragons sitting on their hoards whose sole interactions with each other are business transactions exists. I hope that changes.
As someone that knows exactly what the “fancy lawyers and accountants” do, I think your argument is just far too simplistic and I think you could never get an effective public policy change because you don’t know whats really going on in the implementation, you react to the results.
To me the argument is “I’m mad we arent getting hosed equally” and rationalizing a phantom role of the state as if the state’s revenues would really improve and as if they would fund that infrastructure properly and that the infrastructure really had a meaningful effect on that wealthy person’s ability to do business reliably - or even keep the area safe and productive via improved social services. To which I would say thats all overestimated, and the state’s revenue sources should be reevaluated.
