The following is excerpted from a article in Common Dreams. The author, Sam Pizzigati, is co-editor of Inequality.org
America's most familiar super rich simply do not appear in the Pandora Papers coverage. No sign of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Bill Gates or any of the other U.S. mega billionaires who top the just-released annual Forbes 400 list of America's richest....
How could that be—when Americans so dominate the ranks of the global super rich? Are America's super wealthiest simply behaving more nobly than their peers elsewhere and refusing to engage in shifty financial games to shield their fortunes?
The relative absence of U.S. billionaires in the Pandora Papers has nothing whatsoever to do with nobility. We're talking accessibility here. The U.S. super rich have plenty of financial agents—the tax attorneys, accountants, and wealth managers, as my Institute for Policy Studies colleague Chuck Collins puts it, "paid millions to help billionaires sequester trillions"—close to home. They don't need to partake of the services provided by wealth advisory firms in places like Samoa, Cyprus, and Singapore, or any of the other 11 offshore locales from where the Pandora Papers leaked.
One other dynamic also helps explain why so few U.S. billionaires have been showing up in the Pandora Papers coverage. America's super rich, as one Pandora Papers report notes, "pay so little in taxes relative to their incomes that hiding money offshore" can turn out to be "mostly unnecessary."
How effective have these workarounds become? This past June, analysts at ProPublica gleaned from a massive leak of IRS data that America's 25 richest paid taxes on the $401 billion they gained from 2014 to 2018 at an incredibly tiny true tax rate of a mere 3.4 percent.
The Pandora Papers make dramatically clear that the United States has now become a premiere "offshore" tax haven for super rich the world over. A handful of low-population U.S. states—led by South Dakota—have essentially turned themselves into pimps for global plutocrats. They've enacted a series of state laws that let financial agents set up shop within their borders and then go on to service and shield grand foreign fortunes. The "dynasty trusts" these states harbor are helping the super rich worldwide cloak their grand private fortunes in a gloriously lucrative anonymity. South Dakota, note tax analysts Bob Lord and Kalena Thomhave, now safe harbors $500 billion in trust assets, up 36 percent since 2019.
Our U.S. contribution to the global concentration of wealth, the Pandora Papers help us understand, has become frighteningly enormous. We're not just bending over backwards these days to grow the fortunes of our home-grown super rich. We're helping grow the fortunes of the super wealthy all over the world. We're no longer just dominating the world's billionaire ranks. We're helping those ranks worldwide become ever more dominant.
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