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.”

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.”

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).

By l3wis

6 thoughts on “While most South Dakotans barely scrape by, $355 Billion sits here in tax free trust havens”
  1. South Dakota is a state in name only. It is actually a constitutionally legal dummy pseudo political state/corporation, which the super rich are increasingly using as a beachfront within the United States, so they can use the benefits of our relatively stable political and economic system, and also conveniently benefit from the fact, that it is the home of the only true world reserve currency.

    When we talk about these trusts in South Dakota, we are talking about how Janklow in the early 1980s not only messed with our usury laws at the time, but he also revoked what in legal terms is called the rule against perpetuities; a rule that was meant to prevent “deadhand” control of wealth. But apparently Republicans then, and now, prefer to have the past control us, and thus, determine what our future will be with or without lessons from the past having been learned, except the understanding that we are being used in this state and for now it is beyond our control, and in the hands of those who are now dead.

  2. Tax Free TRUST Havens

    The next time you’re driving DT, take a look at the building on the SW corner of 10th and Phillips……

    This is the business of that building…..take a look in the north windows, you will see empty office, after empty office……

    Hmm……

  3. Is not most of this money people have made and saved over a lifetime? I don’t understand why the state of South Dakota is entitled to any of it. Am I missing something?

  4. What makes you think if any of it was taxed that the money earned off of the taxation would go to any of the things you mentioned? This state & its politicians are corrupt as hell. Would just give them more money for their own special interests rather than taking care of things they should. Just like all the other states in this nation, the problem for Sioux Falls isnt due to lack of money but a spending problem of those in charge of the coffers.

  5. Erica, it is not just this state’s politicians that are corrupt. Think of all of those states with much higher taxes than ours. They have all the same problems that need fixing- or worse- yet these issues do not get solved. We should be so lucky to be like California with defecation in the streets, homeless blocking the sidewalks, etc- but the drug crisis must be solved there as they have so much tax revenue. I guess not

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