Will the Pandora Papers Change Anything?
6th October 2021
(Hint: No.)
There is a principle in biology known as co-evolution. As prey species evolve to get better at evading predators, for instance, the predators evolve to get better at catching them. It is no different with tax authorities and those taxed. The US income tax code was a mere 11 pages in the 1913 Tariff Act. (That was the year the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, allowing the federal government to tax income). Today it is 70,000 pages long. As tax lawyers and accountants discovered loopholes, Congress moved to limit or close them.
And Congress has also helped out major political donors by quietly inserting tax favors in tax bills. The code is amended hundreds of times a year and many of those amendments benefit only a few, or even one, company or individual. It is a tax system that is corrupt to its core.