Governments should do more to prevent the mega-rich from exploiting tax loopholes.

Consider the following scenario: It's a special occasion and you and nine of your friends all go out for a slap-up feast at a right snobby restaurant. You order the set menu for ten plus five bottles of plonk and an hour later you are surfeit and contented so you ask the waiter to bring you the bill, agreeing to split it evenly between you. At this point, one of your pals (a right toff, dressed in an Armani suit with a Porsche 911 GT2 parked outside) excuses himself and goes to the bathroom. In the meantime, the bill arrives and as the minutes pass there is no sign of your upper-class chum. Concerned, you go to the bathroom to check he's okay but discover the room is empty. However, the window is wide open and it occurs to you that he may have done a runner. Returning to the restaurant your suspicions are confirmed when you hear the distinctive wail of a flat-six bi-turbo motor and watch in disbelief as your posh mate flashes past in his arse-engined Nazi staff car. Meanwhile, the waiter is standing by your table, arms folded, tapping his foot, tutting impatiently (it's a British restaurant) and you realise that instead of splitting the ï¿½1,000 bill ten ways, you now need to split it nine ways. Therefore, instead of paying ï¿½100 each, you now have to pay ï¿½111 each. So what do you think of that posh bloke who scarperred and left his mates to pay his bill? He's total, unmitigated scum, right? That's the way decent hardworking taxpayers should think about the mega-rich who illegally evade paying tax, but there are also ways that tycoons can legally exploit gaps in the law to avoid paying tax. Take a hypothetical country, I don't know, let's call it the Democratic Republic of Lesbia, and its government needs to raise $10 billion dollars a year to run it. It has 1 million economically active citizens so each taxpayer must hand over an average of $10,000 a year to the taxman. But if the richest 10% avoid paying tax, the rest of the population have to make up the deficit and each pay an additional $1,111 a year to the revenue department. Now, that's not fair is it ladies and gentlemen? Now, imagine, you are a citizen of Lesbia on your way home from a twelve-hour shift making industrial belts and fastenings at Lesbian Strap-ons Inc. and your route takes you past the harbour. At that point, a stone gets in through a hole in your shoe and you stop to take it out. Suddenly you hear loud guffaws and you look up and see the factory owner standing on the aft-deck of his Sunseeker Manhattan super yacht. He is dripping in high-class prostitutes and they are all quaffing champagne and pointing and laughing at you. With whatever dignity you can muster, you get up and walk on, pretending to ignore them. Now the thing is, you are friendly with the girl in the accounts department and she tells you that the factory owner doesn't pay any tax at all because he spends over sixty days a year abroad, which allows him to claim non-residency status meaning that he's not liable to pay Lesbian income tax. Even so, he still takes advantage of all the public services the government provides for Lesbian citizens and you realise that that you, a poor factory worker, are in effect, financially subsiding your multi-millionaire boss and your $1,111 probably paid for those hookers and all the bubbly as well. I suppose you can't blame the big boss man for exploiting this loophole but it's not fair that ordinary, hardworking families should be worse off as a result. For this reason, I contend that governments should do everything they can to prevent the mega-rich avoid paying tax.