Mitt’s Offshore Shenanigans: The Bigger Story
Published on Sunday, July 22, 2012 by Inequality.org - by Sam Pizzigati
Are America’s rich getting richer? They’re certainly making much more than ever before. Every official income measure we have shows that America’s most affluent are upping their incomes at a much faster clip than everyone else.
How fast? Between 1980 and 2010, notes an analysis of IRS tax data this past spring by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, incomes for America’s top 1 percent more than doubled, after inflation, to an average $1.02 million.
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But that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least not according to the best official wealth stats we have, the household wealth data collected by researchers at the Federal Reserve Board.
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So what can explain the disconnect between the extraordinary income gains of the rich and the modest rise in their share of national wealth?
The London-based Tax Justice Network has an answer. The world’s super rich, the international group has just reported, are stuffing — and concealing — phenomenal quantities of their cash in secret global tax havens.
The Network’s new global tax-dodging study, the most detailed ever conducted, “conservatively” computes the total wealth sitting in these havens, as of 2010, at $21 trillion. That total could plausibly run as high at $32 trillion.
complete article at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/07/22
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