Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens

BOOK REVIEW

Since we have a clutch of big tax chiselers right here in River City*, this subject interests me greatly. As the Great Recession drags on for six years, with 9300 homeless just in our county, I have been puzzled by our economy’s apparent inability to right itself. This book and a couple of others have opened my eyes to central problems that don’t seem to get much attention, and certainly not clear analysis, in the media. To my mind the problems are those of offshoring of jobs, offshoring and withholding of capital, the resulting debt and the avoidance and shifting of tax burden down the social scale, further reducing the spendable incomes needed for a robust economy. This has all been done under the rubric of “deregulation for efficiency” and the supposed provision of more for everyone. However, any greater efficiency and increased GDP that has occurred since the deregulation craze began in the Carter Administration is due to advances in science, I believe, not deregulation.