Itz News to Me

I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but yet another celebrity has gotten caught in his own hypocrisy. This time it’s Bono, lead singer of U2.

Bono has been spending the last few years running around the world chastising governments and their citizenry for not doing enough to deal with social problems. He thinks first-world countries are not spending enough to dig Third World countries out of holes that, in many cases, they have dug for themselves.

You could say it’s an admirable fight, but in order to spend more these countries need to tax their citizenry more. Where else are the revenues going to come from? And therein lies the rub.

Bono makes millions every year in royalties, but he doesn’t much care for actually paying taxes on his millions. So he and his band moved their music-publishing business from Ireland to Netherlands to take advantage of lower tax rates.

I’m all for punishing governments with high tax rates by moving businesses to lower tax rate jurisdictions. But then again, I’m not the one who is running around telling everyone else that they need to pay higher taxes.

Just something to keep in mind the next time he pays a visit to tell us how sad it is that we’re not doing enough for others in need…

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.