I'm Right Again Dot Com THE PANAMANIAN PAPERS, Part II: Moving American manufacturing jobs overseas.
More and more Americans are joining global leaders in owning secret shell corporations registered in Panamanian and tiny Caribbean Island hideouts, in order to shirk paying their fair share of taxes. This is important to the American economy, not just because lots of folks want to hide assets from former marriage partners or bankruptcy courts and avoid paying taxes on the profits derived from the sale of their Lamborghinis. It is also a necessary tool for the people engaged in the business of marketing illegal drugs, who use these offshore shelters for the massive laundering of tainted money. If all of this unreported revenue was put end to end, it would probably reach to that new planet found beyond the orbit of Pluto.
By skirting the tax laws, many of our fellow citizens are shifting an unfair share of the ever-increasing tax burden onto those of us who play by the rules.
However, all of this is a mere trifle, when compared to the monumental effect on our economy wrought by the movement of major companies that were "born" here, but are moving assets overseas in order to take advantage of cheap labor, thus leaving many thousands of their former American workers unemployed. I surely don't have to list all of the reasons why this is hurtful to America.
When I looked at a list of some of those companies that chose to move all, or some part of their manufacturing offshore, I was not terribly surprised to find such American Icons as Ford, Eli Lilly, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, Motorola, even an accounting division of Walgreen's. What broke my heart was seeing the Campbell Soup Company listed. I find this decidedly unpatriotic of all of them and unworthy of support.
Learned economists warn that even a suggestion of higher tariffs on the imported goods of manufacturers who have bailed on us, would result in immediate chaos in the global marketplace. So, we scufflers in the crowd, the little people with grease, paint and concrete on their clothing, must just keep on supporting this unfair situation, so the CEOs of those American companies can award themselves higher bonuses and perhaps dole out a measly dividend to their stockholders.
The chance of our legislators doing anything about this situation by decreasing governmental spending by a radical amount exceeds the odds that you or I will win a Powerball Lottery. An unwritten law requires them to keep bringing the bacon home to their constituencies.
What if we consumers began a private embargo of the outliers products? Let them sell it where it's made.
Who wants to start first?
-Phil Richardson, Observer of the human condition and storyteller. "He goes doddering on into his old age, making a public nuisance of himself." - Joseph L. Menchen
(Tucsonans, please note: I wrote this on Sunday 4/10/2016, a day before an editorial from Red-Blue America (a news service of the Tribune Company) appeared in the local daily in Tucson, with a slightly different take.)
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