-- Download Stop Saying Tax "Haven" and Tax "Burden" as PDF --

The latest nonsense of the hyper-rich 1% and their political compradors has reminded us once again, that the rich hide their money from government to avoid paying taxes…because they’re rich and can get their way.

Part of how they do that is by using language against us to spin how we even think of community building, on a local or national level. Here’s how:

Firstly, as the brilliant Trish Hennessy puts it:

Tax havens: wrong term.

It’s tax evasion.

Tax havens make tax evasion sound like a temporary holiday, whereas for many of the world’s wealthy, it’s a permanent strategy to avoid paying their fair share of taxes in the country in which they live.

It’s not tax havens, it’s tax evasion. And it robs public coffers of a lot of money.

via It’s not a tax haven | Framed In Canada.

Secondly, the whole notion of taxes being a burden is spin that the rich have been using on us through corporate media for decades. Why? They want us to think taxes are bad. That bad things happen because of taxes: like I can’t buy what I want, like food or a nice home. But really, taxes get in the way of the rich when they want to buy their third car, second home, private jet, $10,000/week Caribbean vacation, and similar 1% wealth rituals.

Taxes are how we buy things together. We pool our money locally, provincially and nationally to buy big awesome things like free healthcare, education, clean tap water, and a myriad of things that make our society better, for everyone.

But since the rich can afford all that already, they resent having to cough up some of their hard earned/inherited money so that all Canadians can share in at least a decent standard of living.

But it just galls them. They say taxes are a burden. They need a haven to protect their hard earned/inherited money so that it’s safe from predators like 35 million Canadians who’d like clean drinking water and healthcare and all those other things that we should all have because they’re human rights.

But really, they’re just greedy and selfish and don’t want to share. Even though they have lots and lots of money. And they are a blight on humanity because of it.

So we should NOT be using phrases like tax burden and tax haven.

Tax burden should be “investment in a civilized, just and equal society for all.”

And as Trish Hennessy writes, instead of saying tax haven, we should say “tax evasion,” because if it’s a crime, we should call it what it is.

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Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun

Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

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