Hoarding and Hiding Money

EVERYONE LOVES MONEY, which, the Bible teaches us, is why everyone is partly evil. Yes, everyone. As a purely diversionary tactic intended to enhance our sense of nobility and to impress others with our apparent ability to trenscend greed, and because of everyone's desire to appear generous, everyone claims to not care about money. Rarely if ever do we encounter anyone willing to admit what is true of us all; that the love of money is central to the human personalilty. But we all know this, deep down. Poor people are more generous than the wealthy, studies consistantly indicate. The poor wrongly perceive that they have little or nothing to lose by being generous; the wealthy hoard money like squirrels hoard acorns, and for the same reason; fear of having it taken from them by loved ones and governments, and ending up with too little to survive. The International Consortium of Journalists (ICIJ), the world's most literate union of snooping busy bodies, was gifted with a veritable twelve million page treasure trove of documentaion, the "Pandora Papers", which irrefutably substantiates the point just made about the wealthy and their wealth. The point is that the world's wealthiest people, the one percent of the top one percent, go to great lengths to hide their money in safe, obscure places, not to avoid having it stolen, but for a far less noble reason, to avoid legitimate, fair taxation. In some cases they are hiding it from spouses and former spouses and in some cases from creditors, but not usually. Usually the tax collectors from which they are hiding are perfectly fair and reasonable, not at all "confiscatory", as conservatives like to say about all taxes. They hide their enormous extragagant wealth not from unfair taxation, but from taxation which by any reasonable measure is quite fair and unobstusive. The list of money hiders is long, with most of the names unsurprising, but some surprising. Vladimir Putin is on the list. So are Bob Dyan and Elton John. The super wealthy Arab oil tycoons are almost all on there. Most American billionaires are, and the latest statistics indicate that the number of Amerian billionaires is now more than one thousand, and growing daily, as wealth in the United Atates, and all over the world, continues to concentrate in the hands of fewer and fewer people, a revolution waiting to explode.The global community, govenments all over the world, are beginning to take notice, and to do something about it. An agreement has recently been reached internationally according to which there will soon be a minimum global corporate tax rate of fifteen percent, to prevent corporations from roaming and hiding all over the world to hide their profits from taxation, in places such as Ireland, which they presently do. The number of tax havens has been growing steadily. The dubious practice used to be confined to a few small island nations in the Caribbean; now, several of the states in the U.S., notably South Dakota, sensing an opportunity to lure wealth to within their borders, are establishing themselves through legisltion as tax havens for the very wealthy. The most disgusting aspect of all this is that we the poor continue to pay more than our fair share of taxes, that all taxes are good in that they serve the common public interest, and, of course, that the excessively wealthy people of the world can easily afford to pay the taxes they so ardently seek to avoid, and finally,, the wealthy never fail to take full advantage of the public infrastructure and programs funded by tax revenue.