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marmar

(76,984 posts)
Mon Jul 23, 2012, 08:08 AM Jul 2012

Mitt’s Offshore Shenanigans: The Bigger Story


from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



Mitt’s Offshore Shenanigans: The Bigger Story
July 21, 2012

All those official government stats on the maldistribution of wealth in the United States — and the world — vastly understate the actual extent of our contemporary inequality, says a landmark new study on global tax havens.

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.

Average incomes for the nation’s top 0.1 percent, over that same span, more than tripled, and at the tippy top of America’s economic summit — the top 0.01 percent — average incomes more than quadrupled, to $23.8 million in 2010.

And what about the rest of us? After inflation, average incomes for America’s bottom 90 percent actually fell — by 4.8 percent — between 1980 and 2010. Americans in this 90 percent averaged $31,337 in 1980, only $29,840 in 2010. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/mitts-offshore-shenanigans-tax-havens/



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Mitt’s Offshore Shenanigans: The Bigger Story (Original Post) marmar Jul 2012 OP
Tax havens host over 3.5 million paper companies, thousands of shell banks .... Coyotl Jul 2012 #1
recommended Bill USA Jul 2012 #2
 

Coyotl

(15,262 posts)
1. Tax havens host over 3.5 million paper companies, thousands of shell banks ....
Mon Jul 23, 2012, 09:42 AM
Jul 2012

From the article

These havens, notes Henry, host over 3.5 million paper companies, thousands of shell banks and insurance companies, and “tens of thousands of shell subsidiaries for the world’s largest banks, accounting firms, and energy, software, drug, and defense companies.”

This vast web, aided and abetted by weak and poorly enforced government regulations, has enabled, notes Henry, fewer than 100,000 people — just .001 percent of the world’s population — to “control over 30 percent of the world’s financial wealth.”

Americans make up, according to various previous surveys of the world’s ultra rich, almost a third of the world’s super wealthy. That would put the American share of unrecorded offshore private assets as high as $10 trillion.

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