General Discussion

malaise

(294,130 posts) Fri Apr 8, 2016, 11:14 AM Apr 2016

Panama Papers -Cameron is guilty as a legislator

http://www.theguardian.com/news/commentisfree/2016/apr/08/david-cameron-tax-lawmaker-panama-papers
<snip>
At this point the political hullabaloo resorts to poor handling. Cameron was a rich guy. He did not “tell it all, tell it fast and tell it yourself”. He seemed dodgy and on the defensive. His earlier antics in defence of overseas trusts now seem hypocritical. But since Cameron did nothing illegal, nor was guilty of that weasel word of the age “wrongdoing”, he seems in the clear.

What is surely plain is that flows of surplus cash around the world are wholly distorted by a necklace of puny havens cheating national taxpayers out of vast sums of money. An astonishing fifth of these flows pass through British territories that were originally allowed to set their own taxes to save the British empire from subsidising them.

Those days are emphatically over. If Britain’s government wishes to confer tax advantages on anyone’s savings – including those of pension owners – it should find straightforward ways of doing so. Tax havens may survive somewhere, but surely not under the protection and citizenship of the western world, let alone of the EU, which Cameron is so desperate to defend. The thief’s defence, “If I hadn’t stolen the money, someone else would,” is no defence at all.

People are bound to guard their wealth as best they can within the law. But this law is an ass. Cameron may be innocent as a taxpayer. He is guilty as a legislator.