I was listening from afar a report on ABC with Charlie Gibson that the IRS is investigating that individual people are putting money in tax free havens and that it seems several billions of tax revenue has been lost as a result.
The way I see it, if corporations can claim that they are 'humans' via the Santa Clara v Southern Railroad 1886 ruling. Actually, the Supreme Court never actually ruled on whether corporations were 'people' or not, they simply ruled on the supposed unfairness of a different level of tax from one county to the next. A court reporter, J.C. Bancroft Davis, an ex-railroad executive wrote on the headnote area of the ruling that corporations were in fact people. This ruling has never had any real legal standing, but has been used since then as a way for corporations to keep getting away with more and more 'stuff'...... then we individual people should be able to do the same!
Corporations can open up a PO Box in the Bahama's or the Caymen Islands, in essence, moving their 'corporate' office there, even though physically, the building may still be in America.....
Many of the 'things' that corporations have been arguing for since that 1886 'ruling' have been argued claiming that corporations have 'human rights', no different than a living, breathing, eating, drinking human being.
Mind you, I'm quite sure that a vast majority of those individuals are within the top 2% of our society that are doing this, but I get the feeling that as this story unfolds, it will be those of us in the middle class that scraped and clawed to a savings worthy of sending it over seas that will be the ones to take the fall.
I think it might be time for America as a whole to expose not just those minor players who tax evade, but the major corporations that get away with paying billions in taxes every single year!
Anyways..... I leave you with a link to a story that covers this issue. Senator Obama? Are you reading this?
http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations/corrupt/2002/0326evasion.htm
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