Termyn8or
Posts: 18681
Joined: 11/12/2005 Status: offline
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There is no law stating that anyone must pay taxes,,,, BUT, and this is a big BUT. If you operate within a corporate shell provided by US law you should be paying. If your well being depends upon enforcement of intellectual rights, such as copyrights and patents, you should be paying. If a significant amount of your income comes from US tax dollars you should be paying. But that's not me, nor a couple of others I know who no longer pay. The government does nothing to help us earn, in fact quite the opposite. I am completely ready for my day in court if and when it ever happens, and one has already gone through the process. They will never bother him again, and I saw the letter from the IRS stating that fact. However when I see a company like Haliburton moving to Dubai, my blood wants to boil. A rock star or movie actor is enabled by intellectual property laws to make money, many times very good money. When you get a slice of the pie in this manner, you should regurgitate your fair share. Actually if I held patents and was paid royalties, I would deem myself a payer, but if that ever happened I would have to do it without signing a 1040. The rest of what I make is none of their business. Luckily I hold no patents or such, so it is unlikely that I would ever have this dilemma. And I really don't claim to pay no taxes. Every day it is two packs of cigarettes at six bucks almost each. That is around ten bucks a day, or $3,650 a year. That is more than alot of people pay in income tax. People who make $40K-45K a year would be paying about that much. So I don't feel guilty using their roads, bridges and other infrastructure. So with my comment aside, I will now address the OP, about offshore accounts somehow getting people out of taxes. I don't see it, but then I do not exist in that world. How can simply moving the money out indemnify one from paying ? If they collected the money here there is a record, and those records are processed by the IRS corp. and they pay based on that. Who cares where the money went ? You collected, get your deductions out and pay up. Unless these people are playing a game with which I am unfamiliar, like making these offshore deposits into deductions somehow. It is illegal to do that and illegal to hide income, when you are rerquired to pay taxes. And they are. Whether I am or not, they are. Now you made this much money, these are your deductions. This minus that, send the result to the tax tables and you pay this amount that it says. How does an offshore account affect that ? It shouldn't, by any stretch of logic I can grasp. I have been involved in alot of things, but I admit that the finer aspects of the finances of large corporations and bigwigs is not something with which I am familiar. Your income is your income, now are they considering offshore accounts an investment and trying to tax any gains from what would amount to currency speculation ? Or is ther considerable interest being paid. If it is a foreign entity paying that interest, operating wholly under the law of another country, to me that raises the question of whether the US government even has the right to tax those specific earnings. I admit it when I am wrong and I admit it when I don't know. If someone could enlighten me I would appreciate it. One other thing, tax shelters. How the heck does one make money by losing money ? This is another thing I just don't understand. But then this subject was never my field of endevor, and I never really needed to know. Maybe Merc would come in handy here, I think he has been alot closer to these things than I ever was. (sick grammar, sorry) If I were to be enlightened in these matters, being a problem solver I might ne able to come up with an easy and effective solution. Corporations should pay taxes, the little Man should not. Corporations take advantage of governments, laws and treaties to survive and prosper, the little Man is afforded no such accomodation. So who should be paying ? T
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