This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 5th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Panama Papers leak reveals as several current and former officials and various governments around the world took advantage of tax havens to shelter wealth from prying

tax men.

Many of those officials head or headed authoritarian governments and have been accused of raiding

their treasuries.

But is the problem that they took advantage of

legal structures in other countries or that they took advantage of the people in

their own countries? Cato's Dan Mitchell comments. The Panama Leeks scandal such as it is involves the theft or leaking of millions of pages of documents

from a major international law firm based in Panama with offices all around the world.

And what we're supposed to be scandalized by is the fact that people who are active in

international business use international structures, companies, trusts, foundations, things like that.

So as far as I'm concerned, there's no real there there.

Now for over a year the investigators have had this information. They've combed through it.

And it's remarkable how little salacious information they've been able to uncover.

They found a few politicians. information they've been able to uncover.

They found a few politicians, a few sports celebrities.

But the real issue is, are any of these people actually breaking any laws

or are they just engaging in what every red-blooded

American and every red-blooded person around the world does which is try to

minimize the amount of tax that government takes from them.

The assumption that I made when I initially heard about this is, oh, these are high-ranking

government officials who are probably looting the Treasury and making use of these havens to hide the money that they've taken.

...