Tax Evasion Kills 1,000 Children Every Day

Christian Aid: Death and Taxes:  The True Toll of Tax Dodging:

Christian Aid has concluded that the necessary money, and more, is already available – if only those who owe it would pay up. We are talking about tax. This report seeks to expose the scandal of a global taxation system that allows the world’s richest to duck their responsibilities while condemning the poorest to stunted development, even premature death.

This is in part to do with super-rich individuals. It is also to do with governments, including the UK government, who have let this situation develop and persist. But it is mostly about the world’s transnational corporations wielding their enormous power to avoid the attentions of the tax man – with devastating results.

The situation is stark and urgent. We predict that illegal, trade-related tax evasion alone will be responsible for some 5.6 million deaths of young children in the developing world between 2000 and 2015. That is almost 1,000 a day. Half are already dead.

(Hat Tip:  Tax Justice Network.)

Update:  Joe Kristan disagrees:

I don't buy it. In much of the developing world governments are merely lawless gangster regimes. Millions of people trying to scratch out a living in countries without the rule of law survive only because they, or their employers, hide enough to eat from their parasitical overlords. In such places tax evasion saves lives by letting people feed their children, rather than their dictators' Swiss bank accounts. It's hard to see where the people of Burma, for example, or companies that operate there, have a moral obligation to feed a government that won't even let outsiders in to help feed their subjects after a humanitarian disaster.

It's wrong to apply the same kind of ethical standards to tax evasion in a despotic land that applies in the U.S. While our tax system has flaws (heaven knows it does), at least you have some predictability as to what is taxable, and you have a reasonably fair system to turn to if you disagree with the IRS. Try telling, say, the Cuban or Russian government that you disagree with their tax assessment and see how far you get.