Pirates of the Golden Main                        

            Imagine your favorite movie-character pirate.  Replace the head cloth with a $50 haircut or a $150 perm, and the haphazard clothes with well-tailored ones.  Now add an expensive shirt or blouse, tasteful neckwear, and expensive shoes, and you have transformed a fictional brigand into a modern day pirate.  A thief every bit as crooked and not nearly as funny as his or her movie counterpart.

            The game is still in the Caribbean.  The piracy of long ago persists.  Today’s hearties still steal from others to enrich themselves, these days protesting to all that it’s perfectly legal.  Rich Americans appropriate the wealth created by others, leaving them poor and vulnerable.  They hide this wealth in offshore accounts where America can’t tax it and generate enough revenue to adequately help the poor and vulnerable.  Anyone with sufficient resources can become a pirate.  High-incomers from anywhere in a city or rural area, seeking to minimize taxes, can navigate this golden main.  The only people who feel good about it are the wealthy ones who are tossing their loot into the big Caribbean catcher’s mitt and playing ball on everybody else’s dime.

            Congress, that ever predictable AWOL gang, can mince around, eloquently reeking of tax reform that fixes nothing, but the problem they invariably ignore is the gaping Caribbean catcher’s mitt of tax evasion that lines the dugouts of the wealthy.  The big league game is still going…and around here, the Caribbean Pirates seem to be winning.  Why?!