Mitt’s Offshore Shenanigans: The Bigger Story
from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:
Mitts Offshore Shenanigans: The Bigger Story
July 21, 2012
All those official government stats on the maldistribution of wealth in the United States and the world vastly understate the actual extent of our contemporary inequality, says a landmark new study on global tax havens.
By Sam Pizzigati
Are Americas rich getting richer? Theyre certainly making much more than ever before. Every official income measure we have shows that Americas most affluent are upping their incomes at a much faster clip than everyone else.
How fast? Between 1980 and 2010, notes an analysis of IRS tax data this past spring by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, incomes for Americas top 1 percent more than doubled, after inflation, to an average $1.02 million.
Average incomes for the nations top 0.1 percent, over that same span, more than tripled, and at the tippy top of Americas economic summit the top 0.01 percent average incomes more than quadrupled, to $23.8 million in 2010.
And what about the rest of us? After inflation, average incomes for Americas bottom 90 percent actually fell by 4.8 percent between 1980 and 2010. Americans in this 90 percent averaged $31,337 in 1980, only $29,840 in 2010. ...............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/mitts-offshore-shenanigans-tax-havens/
Coyotl
(15,262 posts)From the article
These havens, notes Henry, host over 3.5 million paper companies, thousands of shell banks and insurance companies, and tens of thousands of shell subsidiaries for the worlds largest banks, accounting firms, and energy, software, drug, and defense companies.
This vast web, aided and abetted by weak and poorly enforced government regulations, has enabled, notes Henry, fewer than 100,000 people just .001 percent of the worlds population to control over 30 percent of the worlds financial wealth.
Americans make up, according to various previous surveys of the worlds ultra rich, almost a third of the worlds super wealthy. That would put the American share of unrecorded offshore private assets as high as $10 trillion.