Tax aversion

Felix Salmon accurately deciphers some comments by Carlyle Group’s David Rubenstein’s at the Milken Institute conference: “I don’t want to pay higher taxes.”

A far more circuitous statement of the same is in today’s New York Times. In an article explaining how Singapore is becoming the Switzerland of east Asia for private banking and private wealth, there’s a lovely quote from former Californian Robert Chandran who moved his family and business to Singapore and exchanged US citizenship for Singaporean:

Mr. Chandran said that he was lured by Singapore’s blend of Western conveniences with Asian values and by the government’s zeal for keeping Singapore competitive. “They don’t have global taxation,” he said, which means that his capital gains and interest income are not taxed here.

I may be unfair to Chandran, but I suspect Asian values and competitiveness were secondary considerations. In other words, “I don’t want to pay higher taxes.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *