TWISTED TRAIL

Price We Pay is high indeed

For complexity, there’s nothing quite like a book. But there’s a simple, undeniable reality to documentaries that can make them a more emotionally appealing foray into a topic. That inherent appeal is partly addressed in The Price We Pay, a doc directly inspired by more in-depth books on pressing social issues

Inspired by Brigitte Alepin’s book La Crise fiscale qui vient (The Coming Fiscal Crisis), The Price We Pay ventures into slightly more arcane territory. Though its undercurrent is parallel to recent discussions about growing income disparity, by aiming squarely at the shell game that is tax havens, it is necessarily more wonkish.

This is the type of doc in which it seems like every expert launches their speech with some variation of, “To really understand, you must first ...”

If it’s treading in clay, though, it at least manages to make it into convincing shapes.

Its detailed history of moving around money — it goes from the City of London to the Caribbean, and it turns out Canadian banks had a prominent role — gives way to a clean but thorough examination of the practice now: how it’s pulled off and what effect it has.

To paraphrase both a commentator and a legislator featured here, these companies don’t have to do anything illegal to end up greatly decreasing their tax burden. Doing the immoral thing of separating where money is made from where it’s claimed is more than profitable enough.

It becomes a bit more conventional, and starts taking a bit more for granted, when it gets into how this affects us. It’s actually much better at giving heft to more purely intellectual arguments than it is watching people on the street.

But it’s still remarkably cleareyed, and does a fine job of laying out how much more complicated this issue is in the digital age, when even what corporations do is as ephemeral as the way they treat their money.

Even more welcome, it’s not needlessly prone to optimism: it both knows and portrays how much more trouble we’re in if we don’t start to wrap our heads around this complex issue.