For the next couple of weeks Icelanders can head down to the tax office and check out what their neighbours and co-workers are rendering unto Caesar for the year 2010.
The tax returns might not make as exciting read as in the heady days of 2004-2008 but they still give the public valuable information about how wealth is spread throughout society. Last year for example, Gudbjorg Matthiasdottir, the fishing magnate from Vestmann Islands topped the list a year after getting out at the last moment with her Glitnir wealth, and courtesy of making her money in a foreign currency she could afford to make former PM and CB governor David Oddson the highest paid media person in the land albeit paying him in the depleted Icelandic krona.
Unsurprisingly, David Oddson’s close allies at the libertarian website Andriki (anti-gov) and AMX.is (claimed to be also funded by the Fisheries Association) have voiced their concerns with the information being made public. And now they are asking why there is not a similar list published of those receiving benefits from the state.
So right wing libertarians in Iceland are fighting the same battle as they are in the US and the UK. Attacking entitlement payments and taxes, and making innocent souls believe they are of the same kind.
It would be interesting to see cold, hard statistics, but due to underground economies and Central European and Caribbean tax havens they might be hard to come by. Yet it is not hard to imagine that tax-evasion by the wealthiest Icelanders is of far greater cost to society than false benefits collected by the poorest.
Yet we are all supposed to feel enraged towards jobless losers who feed off our honest work, while admiring the business smarts of people who can find ways to pay less taxes than they should.
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July 29th, 2011 → 11:12 am @ Dadi
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