The truly scandalous Paradise Papers

The Guardian

We’ve always known that rich people “parked their money in offshore tax havens,” said Thomas Frank. Yet thanks to a trove of leaked financial documents known as the Paradise Papers, we now know that tax havens “aren’t some sideshow to Western capitalism; they are a central reality.” Everyone seems to be in on it: Russian oligarchs and billionaire CEOs, as you’d expect, but also “our favorite actors and singers,” colleges, and charities. The hidden billions squirreled away from the tax man “are like an unseen planet” whose mass and power we are only now beginning to grasp. We’re currently being told by Republican lawmakers that cutting taxes is the key to “making the

American economy flourish.” But let’s first acknowledge that the ultrarich clearly “prefer not to do what it takes to support” a functioning society. “They’re happy to haul billions out of our economy, but maintaining the machinery that keeps it all running—that’s on us.” Think about what we might have done with all that lost tax revenue over the years: the schools that could have been built, the police who could have been given raises, the “dying Rust Belt cities” that could have been revived. Instead, “we endure potholes and live in fear of collapsing highway bridges because our leaders wanted these very special people to have an even larger second yacht.”