Who has the money?

Warning! Sorry, rant ahead:
How much money would a corporation make to ‘deserve’ a cash (!) tax rebate of $880,000,000? That’s an enormous
amount of money for anything, let alone a rebate given to an
ever-so-obscenely-wealthy corporation like that run by Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Limited & the media conglomerate, News Corporation, publishers of (oft times, execrable) publications such as the now defunct News Of The World recently disgraced by the phone  acking scandal.
And now the Australian government, courtesy of the Australian tax payers, has had to foot this exorbitant bill! 
I simply don’t get it.
 Right now, there is a G 20 Summit being held in Sydney with finance honchos from around the world, discussing how to keep countries afloat financially. Some finance ministers are concentrating on how to keep “big  business” operating successfully in their country. But often, it seems, it is the “big business” people who are the ones ripping off the ordinary tax-paying
citizens by reducing their (big business) tax load to almost nil. They are clever, those accountants and tax experts, employed by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and James Packer. 
Australia’s treasurer is suggesting solutions to ‘Economic Reform’ such as raising the retirement age to 70 (make the oldies work longer!), creating looser work place laws (make it easier for
employers to work their employees harder for less), reducing red tape (make it  easier for the unscrupulous to break tax laws) and many other measures that will affect the ordinary ‘Joe and Joanna Blow’ working man and woman.
 But is that where big money can really be ‘saved’? 
 While the wealthy business magnates and their financial wizards discover ever more complex - though (just) legal -  ways to minimise (or obliterate) tax bills, it is reported that TRILLIONS of dollars are stashed away in off-shore tax havens. That’s TRILLIONS, not even BILLIONS
and certainly not measly millions, but TRILLIONS. 

The ultra-wealthy, banks and corporations from around the globe have some $32 trillion of wealth hidden in off-shore tax havens, according to a cache of information leaked by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.(as at April, 2013). 

It’s an unimaginable amount for the common folk to try and understand.
And yet, it’s the common folk who are the ones who are chased for every little dollar 
and who are carefully honest in their declarations of income.
There is something wrong with the system and yet it’s a system that will never be set right as long as governments are subservient to the mighty dollar controlled by the moneyed few.

Someone has to say it.
 
 

 

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