The 1% hide their money offshore, then use it to corrupt our democracy

Now that we have Republican candidates using this to their full advantage, it needs to be stopped.

So even a bad SCOTUS decision could stay on the books for a long time - just to save face and uphold the credibility of the institution.

They look to rock the boat the least. Even in their current hyperpartisan state.

Please don't tell me you're this naive.

They argue that the state is inherently a corrupt institution and that nobody should have that kind of power.

Basically, don't confuse corrupt power-mongers who use libertarian propaganda at times with actual libertarians.

No, the effects aren't directly measurable. But why does this necessarily need to be an academic persuit? Trust me, I completely understand why purity of information/data/research is needed, but there's a certain point where "Yep, this signed document shows they're gaming the system for money" is all that should be enough. My "anecdata" is a clear example where money and collusion directly affects the lives of 2.6 million people. When four out of five candidates are swayed by money - directly or indirectly - in a way that effects that many people, it's significant!! Yes, thinning the candidate pool is god damn significant.

Mind you, this isn't something that I saw or heard in the news. This was told to me out of the horse's mouth while sitting in Fioretti's office with his campaign manager and Amara's old campaign manager. This meeting was done about a week after two of my FOIA requests proved exactly what Hendon said over Facebook.

Want to know why you don't see anything about this in the media? They never report it since they're dumbfoundedly not interested in any of it. Chicago's newspapers are the most disinterest group of asshats I've ever had the pleasure of talking to. Of course you're not going to hear anything from them. I know you love anecdata, but I'm going to give you an example of more, anyway. After the Chicago Tribune published an article that made national news on how they were simply suing the mayor for his mail/texting records, I called them and said I was suing for mayor's phone records. The journalist who wrote the article had zero care for his own article and basically said, "I'm just doing my job" and sent me to the person who did the research. I never heard a single thing from him. If these guys are supposed to be renowned journalists and this is the shit we get, of course you're not going to get anything that's researchable.

Use your bayesian reasoning skills instead of naively throwing away "anecdata". Christ.

Lawyers does not automatically mean "partner" in the US, hence why I said "in this context". The OP is saying the majority of the 1% of income earners are things like doctors and lawyers. Not that "lawyers in general" are 1%ers.

http://imgur.com/JzUziar

The only key impact of taxes is to cancel the revenue increase of the upper class. Even the top 1%.

As he's quoting the £160k, which is from the table before tax, he must have used the before tax figures so that's not relevant.

The point is not so much that low incomes did 200%, it is that low income did much better than the rest of the distribution (relatively).

This is historically inaccurate, at least for American politics. There, the use of the phrase "top 1%" goes back at least as far as debates over then-Governor George W. Bush's income tax plan in the 2000 election[1]. Gore frequently used it as 'wealthiest 1%', but he was clearly citing studies based on the income breakdown[2].

If you want somebody who will fight for you and who will fight to have middle-class tax cuts, then I am your man. I want to be. Now, I doubt anybody here makes more than $330,000 a year. I won't ask you, but if you do, you're in the top 1%.

[1] http://debates.org/index.php?page=october-17-2000-debate-tra...

[2] http://www.ctj.org/html/bush0800.htm

For someone making $45k in the Midwest, a 3-bedroom house with a 2-car garage in an excellent school district is expected.

If the 1%er moves to a lower cost of living area, he will not be a 1%er anymore.

Well you absolutely don't know that. And whilst no doubt some people _are_ avoiding tax, many are not. And btw overall the rich pay a far higher portion of their income in tax than the poor. In the UK for example the top 1% of earners account for 30% of the total tax take (up from 20% 10 years ago). The top 3,000 pay more than the 9m bottom.

That summary jumps seamlessly from a literal use of "the richest 1%" to "A global network of tax havens" without any indication that they've suddenly begun talking about a much smaller set of people.

Or browse articles about the 1% on occupy.com or Huffington Post:

http://www.occupy.com/tags/1

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/top-1-percent/

Both sometimes use "1%" to refer to literally the top 1% wealthiest people, and sometimes to refer to the ultra rich. You can jump from a numbers-based article about where the 1% earn their money to a screed about how "the one percent" are putting out expensive videos downplaying the plight of minimum-wage workers.

It's a rare political term that actually has a pretty clear meaning. It's a bit vague in that it could refer to income or net worth, and nationally or worldwide, but it's way better than stuff like "liberal" or "conservative" or "terrorist." Using such a precise term as a lazy synonym for "the ultra rich" is ridiculous.

Confusion might not be the best word, but we should avoid perpetuating the notion that the entire 1% is to blame for average people not getting ahead.

Social assistance programs are so meager and inexpensive compared to the cut we give to the finance industry. It's ridiculous to begrudge social assistance to people who need it just because some people who receive it don't.

Frankly, I'm just not offended that some people don't work. There aren't useful things for a lot of people to do. I'm much more offended that some people are rewarded incomprehensible amounts of money which no human can possibly be worth, often for activities that are actively harmful.

That's odd. I mostly see employed people at malls and in parks. How do you tell them apart? Or do you just assume that they're unemployed, because they're in a park, doing nothing?

Yes, the middle class in America is losing people to the upper class at a 2:1 ratio to the lower class, if this continues 66% of people will be in the upper classes in the next few generations.

That's why many philosophies boil down to: you're going to be dead soon, you might as well start enjoying it, and if you're not... well... you know what to do.

Only in America would people who borrowed money to take a 4 year sabbatical be complaining about being poor.

But there hasn't been a steady improvement over 50 years. Here's what the OECD says [1]: "According to the OECD income distribution database, income inequality among total population in the United States has steady increased from 1974 to 2010."

And here's what the US Census Bureau says about poverty in the United States [2]: "In the late 1950s, the poverty rate was approximately 22 percent, with just shy of 40 million Americans living in poverty. The rate declined steadily, reaching a low of 11.1 percent in 1973 and rising to a high of nearly 15 percent three times – in 1983, 1993 and 2011. However, the 46.2 million Americans in poverty in 2011 is the most ever recorded."

[1] http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECDIncomeDistributionDataReview...

[2] https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/poverty-united-s...

I would be okay with it, yes.

But since we have mountains upon mountains of evidence to the contrary (i.e. the wealthy corrupt the political system and make it serve their own ends at the expense of others), your hypothetical is rather meaningless.

>>And if it is the case, how does this make you and me worse off in the absolute sense?

Because it goes against the "one person, one vote" principle of democracy.

For example, I wonder if Soros, a 1%er that is also known for dedicating some degree of his wealth to political advocacy last I heard. I suspect that the Guardian largely agrees with his advocacy and thus would never appear in an article like this. Their goal in suggesting wasn't to point out the likelihood of spending as a fact, but rather to suggest they would use their spending for nefarious purposes... without even the benefit of my kind of qualification: they suggest a foregone conclusion. That's not factual reporting, that's opinion making.

I think the fundamental problem is everyone talks about capital gains as some flat thing. It needs to be progressive like income tax (or at least in the US, way more progressive than current income tax) to have the positive effects economists want so long as the gains are distributed across many people than centralized in the hands of few.

I'd say the same with waged income. In a theoretical better society we would even be taking income up to the happiness threshold and would progressively tax to an absolute income limit beyond that. And that is not just for bitternesses, sake, the problem we are going to face is that automation and the private ownership of automated production will produce literal money machines, where no human labor is required but goods are made and then sold which transfers money to you, that you then never spend back out again so long as you can own the whole supply chain. That situation is not sustainable - it is money flowing uni-directionally - and the consequences of uncapped income have precipitated how in the past five years we went from a little over 300 billionaires having more wealth than half the human population on Earth to just over 50 today.

It doesn't get taxed when sold at a gain (because it's exchanged per 1031 or similar tax code provisions). If it does, it's often subject to super-advantaged treatment over and above long-term capital gains (think Qualified Small Business Stock or the like).

But it's often not sold at a gain and sometimes never will be; see various carveouts allowing for basis step-ups upon certain transfers (which might be within a family or a network).

But why even bother selling at a gain and paying even those favorable cap gains rates? Much more favorable to take out a loan against the asset for some spendable cash. You can even deduct the interest payments.

None of what I've described even requires an offshore vehicle, which parent rightly describes as usually perfectly legal -- although if you do have the right kind of setup you can keep deferring taxes for, practically speaking, forever. (It does require that there be enough money in play to make the significant overhead worth it, of course.)

"[L]ocal state income tax"? Not if you live in WA and a good number of other places.

And you really, really can't count sales tax as part of the taxes on investment income. Not least because the stuff one typically "spends" the bulk of investment returns on is, in turn, other investments, which are not taxed as sales items.

Throwing in sales tax seems disingenuous, as that is applied the same regardless of your source of income.

So does income, so you're quite literally making no point. His point is that income is taxed far higher, you can't disagree with him and not address that fact.

In fact, there are probably legitimately influential people that wield more power than those much richer to them. One need only look at political "movements" to see that they're not always run by the rich and powerful. But rather, by those that can get large amounts of individual/normal people to agree with them and follow through. The oratorical figures, I'd say.

If someone is arguing for tradeoff A, and relying on moral/emotional/somewhat vague arguments for it, whilst simultaneously their actions suggest they actually prefer tradeoff B, then that suggests their proposed weighting of the tradeoffs is actually wrong and thus that their words are not worth very much.

In this case, the Guardian loves to argue that tax avoidance is wrong, using arguments that are vague and emotional at their core (e.g. fairness), but actually engages in it rampantly themselves. Given that actions speak louder than words, that suggests that their proposed tradeoff is perhaps not the right one.

I do think it is important that those who read the Guardians moralising stance on tax are fully aware of it.

A couple of studies from Princeton https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi... https://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/idr.pdf

A biased write up on some of the findings, along with references to other sources at the end

https://represent.us/action/theproblem-4/

The statement articulated two "parts" of the explanation.

The second "part" was phrased as a matter of class self-interest, with a critical tone.

But the phrasing of the first, as being "from" economic theories, can very easily be read as giving those theories a pass, esp. in environments like HN.

If we wanted to explain with some finality, we might answer, "why do we mandate lead shielding around radioisotopes" by saying the reason is "from physical and biochemical theories [about harm from ionizing your DNA]."

Or we might answer, "why are some traits observed to be epigenetic / both heritable and environmental" by saying the reason is "from biological theories."

The appeal to science-y authority is pretty conversation-ending in technically-oriented conversation venues like HN, I find. Or more properly, it might not end conversations but it makes that piece a leaf node.

I just like to remind people that economic theories are far, far more than their hard-science counterparts, political products.