February, 2004

John Kerry is getting a lot of heat for bringing to our collective attention the abuses of business registering offshore to avoid taxes, while taking contributions from business in his campaign.

Sort of like criticizing the oil industry and being shellacked for filling up your car.

Lordy, lordy, we are a society that will trivialize almost anything in order to avoid looking at the issue. Depending on who's cooking the books, best estimates of tax revenues lost by American-based business claiming that it's actually headquartered in a dusty second-floor office in the Caymans, is between fifty and seventy billion a year.

Well, a billion just isn't what it used to be. Washington hands out a billion here and ten billion there like it was chump-change. Maybe it is. Maybe the citizens are the chumps, because it all ultimately comes out of our pockets. The same pocket in the pants or skirt of folks who declaim that Kerry can't point fingers while taking the cash.

For me, it's an absolutely mystifying point of view.

On that strange mental compartmentalization, no candidate could claim that any change was useful because change is . . . well, let's call it what it is . . . change. Mailing a letter would prevent criticism of the postal service. Serving in the army would prevent any questions about the Pentagon, as walking through airport security would stop dead any questions about John Ashcroft's constitutional conscience.

Kerry has made a brave and long overdue statement about a crooked and well camouflaged tax evasion---not an illegal evasion, because it's perfectly legal, just distastefully structured. Kerry's calling it what it is shows courage because it's going to cost him some business contribution in a race where the incumbent already out war-chests him at least three to one. It probably won't cost him any votes, ‘cause most of those practicing the off-shore game are already going to vote Republican.

But it just makes me nuts to see someone raked over the coals like that. John McCain took all the dough he could ever legally lay his hands on, yet was lauded (as he should be) for co-authoring the McCain Feingold campaign limit legislation. No one questioned his right to do so. We could use fifty to seventy billion in the tax coffers. The question is whether we'll wake up and listen.

We are not much of a listening society.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today