Not a good week for blood pressure and anger management, but a stellar seven days for practicing relaxing, deep-breathing exercises.
Even though the nation’s tax deadline was pushed back three days to April 18 (four if you are a lucky resident of Maine or Massachusetts where residents observe Patriot’s Day) it’s hard not to get a little worked up when it comes time to settle accounts with Uncle Sam.
Even those who are fortunate enough to get a refund may have a hard time swallowing the ritual of gathering relevant paperwork, itemizing deductions, addition, subtraction and prayer. When you’re struggling to pay bills and have a little left over to live, explaining yourself can feel insulting if not perplexing when, on paper, you seem to make more than what you actually have in your pocket.
I suspect even those who do not struggle financially resent having to employ accounting acrobatics to hang on to as much of their money as possible.
So it did not soothe ruffled feathers when last week the world was introduced to the Panama Papers.
A series of news reports based on bank documents exposed how the globe’s ultra rich and powerful use offshore accounts, this one in Panama, to hide income and essentially escape paying taxes. They are the sort of dodges CEOs of hedge fund companies and prime ministers use, not the bakery owner or mechanic who fixes your 10-year-old car.
Solace in the knowledge that there were so few U.S. individuals named in the reports was short lived when you realize that in the U.S. there are enough tax loopholes and dodges that this country’s ultra rich and powerful can avoid paying their fair share of taxes via domestic means.
About the only other way you could add insult to injury is a distasteful reminder that the world is a different place for those who have connections, money and power.
For example, if one were to read that the son of former State Assemblyman Fabian Nunez was on Sunday released early from prison thanks to a favor from former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, that might qualify as salt in a wound. Or spit in your eye.
If one were to remember the details — that Fabian Nunez’s son Esteban was convicted and sentenced to 16 years for his part in the 2008 stabbing death of a college kid, but his friend the governor shortened the sentence on his last day in office in 2011 because, Schwarzenegger said, “Of course you help a friend” — you might become apoplectic.
The subtle and not so subtle reminders that there are all sorts of ways for the rich and well connected to weasel out of their debts to society while the rest of us toil away by the rules for the common man are enough to make your blood boil.
