| | Michael:
re; For instance, who is "the Lion of the Senate"?
That is generally the made up honorary title given to Ted Kennedy. Nobody has spent more time in the last several decades shuffling back and forth to the Caymans than Ted Kennedy.
re; Mike Huckabee
During the GOP campaign, Huckabee made a famous trip to the Caymans, for a paid political speech event.
re; turtles
The unofficial tourism symbol of the Caymans is a pirate turtle, and the island is also famous for its massive turtle farm, out past a little post office named 'Hell.'
I used to own an offshore corp in the Caymans, and I used it as an offshore international sales corp. I used it for lots of reasons, including, to defer income generated from international business from fat years into lean years. I also used it to pursue business that I otherwise couldn't as a US corp. If a Canadian distributor could not sell directly to my US Corp because of some trade restriction, it had no problem at all selling to my Caymans Corp, and vice versa. My Caymans Corp would sell to Egypt or Qatar or Bangladesh, and would buy product from wherever, including my US Corp. My US Corp would ship product to the Caymans, where hired contractors(DHL, FED EXP)would do a 'touch and go', and re-ship the goods to wherever.
'Touch and go' was(is?) perfectly legal in the Caymans, aka the Disneyland of money. It was marketed as a service. The US doesn't like it, but the US has nothing to do with it. The upshot of all of this paper chasing was, goods sold out of the US, income into the US, taxes eventually paid to the US, in spite of, not because of, US policy. And that, apparently, is some of what Barry the brilliant CO wants to eliminate.
Apparently, he thinks our endemic trade imbalance is too small.
It was fully disclosed to the IRS, -- like about half of the corps in the Caymans. It paid a yearly management fee to my US corp,(ie, resulted in income taxable in the US), and I jumped through all the little boob bait hoops required to legally operate an offshore corp under the 'rules,' for a few years. I dissolved it back in the mid 90s. Yes, I used it to defer that portion of my income from international sales from fat years into thin years, to even out my tax bite, but so what? I did so according to the rules in place, and I don't recognize any obligation to organize my affairs to pay the maximum possible taxes every year, screw that.
And, I did that with both corps having only one employee, me, and one shareholder, me, because the folks in the Caymans made it exceedingly easy to do so as part of their full service economies.
The 'rules' I obeyed were put into place by the Senate, and were absurd. For example, the quarterly passive asset repatriation rule sounded good, for the boobs at home, but it was a static snapshot rule. It went like this: disclosed offshore corporations have assets, passive and non-passive. A passive asset would be, cash in a checking account, or some investment in a mutual fund or whatnot. A non passive asset would be a condo that is rented out and earning income. Anyway, at the end of every quarter, offshore corps had to declare their passive assets, and if they exceeded a certain percentage of total assets, then it was necessary to declare those passive assets over that percentage as income taxable in the US, and pay the taxes as if the assets had been repatriated into the US.
Only...the Senate put an exception into the rule; the exception was, the end of quarter balance was a snapshot, and any asset that would be treated as taxfree under the US Code was not counted as a passive asset.
The upshot of this is, on the last day of each quarter, offshore corps transfer assets from their Vanguard funds or whatnot into other Vanguard funds that are treated as 'tax free', sufficient to avoid the repatriation rule, then they take their qaurterly asset snapshot balance, then possibly on the first day of the quarter, or maybe not, they transfer those assets back to wherever, depending, and Congress' boob-bait charade for the folks at home goes on.
In case it isn't precisely clear, because this doesn't make the news, the 'reason' for all this nonsense is so that the US Congress can tell the boobs at home that they are reigning in offshore assets with strict quarterly repatriation rules, while still permitting the US COngress to use the Caymans as the Club treasury, and has been that way for years.
Barry just stumbled into the Club Treasury, and the Senate Club members are hemming and hawing, including his fellow Democrats, because when Barry insists that Citibank and so on cough up the names on all those offshore accounts, then in a perfect world, if I'm the CEO of a pissed off Citibank, the first several hundred names read on that list on CSPAN all have former DC adresses.
It will make for compelling TV drama...
Keep reading the news along with me, and history. It is riveting lately.
regards,
Fred
|
|
If financial institutions won't cooperate with us, we will assume that they are sheltering money in tax havens and act accordingly
