Offshore Hypocrisy

Why Is It Always The Dems Who Do This?
Election Year Hypocrisy Hits the Offshore World
History has a way of repeating itself.
Democratic presidential candidate, millionaire John Edwards, is employed as a part-time consultant for a Cayman Islands hedge fund that is paying him US$480,000. Edwards has campaigned, both in 2004 and this year, against the use of offshore tax shelters, and what the Wall Street Journal calls "the supposed rising tide of U.S. inequality and the plight of the American worker."
You might remember that similar hypocrisy was shown in the 2004 presidential campaign. At the time, Democratic candidate John Kerry also denounced American corporations that moved their operations offshore to avoid high corporate taxes in the U.S., which by the way is a completely legal move. One of Kerry's best campaign applause lines is his pledge to end tax breaks for what he calls 'Benedict Arnold' firms that move offshore to places such as Bermuda.
In the Massachusetts senator's case, it turned out that not only did he have a trust fund in the Cayman Islands, his wife, Teresa, invested offshore. She earned a tidy profit by investing in one of the U.S. companies that had moved offshore to cut taxes. She made as much as US$200,000 in 2002 by selling shares in Ingersoll Rand, after it relocated to Bermuda the year before.
I have commented several times recently about offshore tax havens having been made a whipping boy for liberal senators such as Levin and Dorgan. Both of these senators have introduced blacklist legislation that paints tax havens as places where Americans evade taxes. It looks as if this attack will be a staple of presidential politics as well.
Forewarned is forearmed...now might be the time to take advantage of opportunities offshore, while you still can.