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Saturday, February 09, 2013

A Tale of Two Taxing Cultures

"All idealization makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity--it is to destroy it."
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

In competitive capitalism with its sharp elbows and lack of human trust, the members of the NSW Parliament seemed to have all those intangibles we longed for.  Some of us would watch, with a longing which mirrored an ache, their simple lives of peace and harmony

Of course we can all guess how many participants in Libor fraud have gone to prison for it. (Clue: it’s a very round number.) The “whore’s drawers” and the Libor scandal – a tale of two cultures; RBS fined £390m for manipulating rate, with five more financial firms under investigation Greed and dishonesty laid bare as scale of Libor rigging revealed

State and local governments lost $39.8 billion last year because corporations and the wealthy shifted profits to offshore tax havens, an amount roughly equal to what they spent on firefighters in 2008, according to a new report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). The federal government lost $150 billion in revenue to the same practices. The Hidden Cost of Offshore Tax Havens

The plaintiffs, and the other members of the class—who number in the thousands—are American citizens who had bank accounts in UBS in 2008 when the UBS tax evasion scandal (of which more shortly) broke. The accounts of the three plaintiffs were large—$500,000 to $2 million each. The plaintiffs had not disclosed the existence of the accounts on their federal income tax returns, as they were required to do. ... Call Suit by 'Tax Cheats' a Travesty Posner: Tax Cheats Suing UBS for Not Stopping Them From Cheating Like Suing Parents for Not Raising Them to be Honest

Federal income taxes are up, and some state taxes are too. That can create a double whammy. One of the most noted state increases is in California. In November, it enacted a high 13.3% income tax rate on top earners Tax exodus

Anyone who has had sufficient contact with lawyers knows that the business of law has more than the average rate of psychopaths.  So, there was no need for Kevin Dutton to confirm in his book "The Wisdom of Psychopaths" that law ranks as the line of work with the second largest number of psychopaths.  BUSINESS INSIDER sums that up nicely. 20 Signs That You Are A Psychopath