It wouldn’t surprise many to hear or read that the gap between the rich and poor in America is getting deeper and wider. Evidence abounds. One of the most trusted research organizations in the U.S., the Pew Research Center, estimated in 2020 that income inequality in the U.S. was found to have increased by about 20% from 1980 to 2016. That was before the inflationary fallout from the Covid pandemic, caused by supply-chain shortages and driving up prices; then, the lingering price gouging by retailers who were drunk on record profits and reluctant to bring prices back down to earth.

Unfortunately, greed is one of the dark facets of capitalism.

Besides the growing gap in income and wealth, there are other consequences to this inequity. Another six-year Pew study reported that by 2020, the richest Americans were living 12 years longer than the poorest.

But there’s more. As reported in the Wall Street Journal this week, the median pay package for the highest paid CEOs in America set a record of $15.7 million. Median means the middle. “Several were making more than $50 million,” including Blackstone’s CEO, Steven Schwarzman, who made a cool $120 million, Hoch Tan of Broadcom who made $162 million and Christopher Winfrey of Charter Communications who made a modest $89.1 million. From 2022 to 2023, the median compensation packages of these titans grew by over 8%.

What is difficult for line workers to digest is what’s called the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio. If the calculus is made using median compensation of CEOs and workers, that 2023 compensation ratio was 251:1. That constituted a 26% increase from the previous year. No wonder the CEOs aren’t feeling much pain radiating from their bank accounts and wallets.

To bring this closer to home, Kroger’s profit from 2022 to 2023 was up 35.6%, shedding some light on why the checkout lines are so long. If you spend time in Florida, Publix was up 49% from 2022 to 2023. Wonder why food prices are so high? It’s their sky-high corporate profits, not their costs driving up prices.

What’s been said so far is a backdrop for a visit into “Moneyland.” The term isn’t new, but adopted recently by Oliver Bullough’s book “Moneyland.” The book explores how the rich get richer, where money is laundered and invested, avoiding taxes through what’s called “offshoring,” enabled by high-priced white-collar lawyers who are expert at showing global kleptocrats how to avoid paying taxes through Byzantine corporate cutouts found in small nations, whose economies thrive on providing safe havens for oligarchs and other rich and famous seeking bigger and bigger mansions and yachts. Simon Kuper of The Statesman put it this way. “You cannot understand power, wealth and poverty without knowing about Moneyland.”

Moneyland can be a fairly complicated “land” to explain in a brief column, but let me paint a picture in broad strokes. Let’s say you’ve made a bundle of money under the radar, maybe weapons sales, drug sales, skimmed money from your corporation or government, whatever, and you’ve converted your treasure into cash in suitcases sitting at a gate at Heathrow Airport in London. The UK doesn’t scan luggage for money. You’re on your way to the United Arab Republics to pick up more of your booty in Dubai. Dubai never checks or scans for money coming into the country. So then you’re off to Switzerland for an anonymous bank account in Geneva, where Switzerland allows you to fly in as much currency as you can pack in. You get the picture. In today’s world transporting cash around the globe can be done overseas as long as you know the shipping routes.

Wanting to get your money to unregulated and anonymous locales is known as “offshoring.” It’s the concept of an asset(s) being legally outside the jurisdiction that it is physically present in. According to Bullough, the concept is central to Moneyland working as it does.

Has anyone ever calculated how much unregulated, untaxed, money is out there in the world parked in these anonymous accounts? Well according to Bullough, a French economist who has studied Swiss banking, Gabriel Zucman, has estimated that “8% of all the world’s financial wealth held in tax havens in 2014 was about $7.6 trillion. That by the way does not include all the non-financial assets that are owned offshore like artworks, yachts, real estate and jewelry which he thinks may add up to another $2 trillion.” Yet that may be low balling it. “James Henry, an American economist came up with a far higher number which he thinks was $21 to 32 trillion in 2010.”

To put this into perspective, in 2022 there were 7.951 billion people in the world, according to the World Bank. If one were to take Henry’s estimates, not including all the yachts, artworks , etc., every single person in the world, adult and child, could receive a distribution of almost $4,000.

Where to hide your money in the vaults of Moneyland without paying your fair share of your gains? The Jersey Channel Islands, the Canary and Cayman Islands, Dubai, Panama, Luxembourg, Vietnam, Myanmar, Hong Kong and Singapore to name a few places. And by the way, it’s not just about anonymous offshore accounts. Devices like trusts, real estate, shell companies, tax havens, money laundering schemes and loopholes all require high-priced, white-collar lawyers who make boatloads of money navigating the subterranean legal mapping of what you can get away with and where you can get away with it.

In some of the United States, it’s easy to create a limited liability company without having to disclose your identity. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), “It tried to investigate a Nevada-based company that had received 3,774 suspicious wire transfers totaling $81 million over a period of approximately two years. The case was never prosecuted because they could not identify the owner of the corporation.”

In his book “Moneyland” Bullough tried to track down a suspicious shell company in London, only to discover that the address of the company was an empty house that upon further investigation was the address of hundreds of other shell companies. Part of the shell game as Bullough explains is that when investigating, you dive deep and you find out that Company A is owned by company B, which is owned jointly by company C and D, and your party owns all of or the majority of the shares of C and D.”

Well, welcome to Moneyland where the rich get richer and the middle class and the poor get poorer. It’s a fascinating yet ungovernable underworld that only works for you if you’re lawyered up, and have the money to dodge paying your fair share.

Bill Sims is a Hillsboro resident, retired president of the Denver Council on Foreign Relations, an author and runs a small farm in Berrysville with his wife. He is a former educator, executive and foundation president.