How much is $355 Billion? It is 710 times the City of Sioux Falls yearly budget. Yeah, it’s a lot of dough, and most South Dakotans don’t have a clue our legislators are allowing this while our benefit to the state coffers is virtually ZERO;
In recent years, countries outside the US have been cracking down on offshore wealth. But according to an official in a traditional tax haven, who has watched as wealth has fled that country’s coffers for the US, the protections offered by states such as South Dakota are undermining global attempts to control tax dodging, kleptocracy and money-laundering. “One of the core issues in fighting a guerrilla war is that if the guerrillas have a safe harbour, you can’t win,†the official told me. “Well, the US is giving financial criminals a safe harbour, and a really effective safe harbour – far more effective than anything they ever had in Jersey or the Bahamas or wherever.â€
That means legislators are nodding through bills that they do not understand, at the behest of an industry that is sucking in ever-greater volumes of money from all over the world. If this was happening on a Caribbean island, or a European micro-principality, it would not be surprising, but this is the US. Aren’t ordinary South Dakotans concerned about what their state is enabling?
“The voters don’t have a clue what this means. They’ve never seen a feudal society, they don’t have a clue what they’re enabling,†Wismer said. “I don’t think there are 100 people in this state who understand the ramifications of what we’ve done.â€
That’s what we get with ONE party rule in South Dakota (and it doesn’t even matter which party). If we could even implement a teeny-tiny tax on this wealth, it would help us out tremendously in education, road funding and healthcare as well as many other things. We could eliminate video lottery, the food tax, reduce property taxes and help address our drug crisis in the state. But we continue to elect the greedy and the stupid (who are one in the same).