Why Taxes on the Rich Should Be 99 Percent

Eric Loomis on foreign tax havens and how the rich are using them avoid taxes, thus stealing everything from the rest of us

Basically, it’s sheer greed and the only way to stop that is for the government to crack down and take the money. But it doesn’t do that. Instead, it provides incentives to keep doing it through proposing the repatriation holiday. 

Criminalizing the behavior and arresting and prosecuting the tax frauds who do this would be a lot more effective. As we see over and over, carrots do not work for the rich. Like with Volkswagen executives taking advantage of industry self-regulation to cheat the pollution standards, being nice to corporations leads to terrible policy outcomes because they are going to cheat the system any way possible. And with the chances of being caught relatively low and the government accommodating to corporate interests in most cases, the wealthy will continue with this sort of behavior.