It’s all the rage to finger big corporations for parking hundreds of billions of dollars in profits overseas — in the Cayman Islands and other hospitable spots. And, it is an economic fuck-you to every hard-working person. But, funny enough, you don’t have to go overseas to find the problem.

You think it’s a foreign evasion problem. Citizens for Tax Justice basically say, “Nah”:

Americans might comfort themselves by thinking that all countries have this problem, but Cassara points out that it is particularly bad in the U.S. He explains that a “study by researchers at Brigham Young University, the University of Texas and Griffith University in Australia concluded that America was the second easiest country, after Kenya, in which to incorporate a shell company.”

This creates enormous problems for U.S. tax enforcement efforts. It’s more difficult to persuade foreign governments to help the IRS track down money hidden offshore when several U.S. states seem to be helping people from all over their world evade taxes owed to their governments. Another problem is that much of the money hidden in shell companies incorporated in Delaware or other U.S. states may be U.S. income that should be subject to U.S. taxes, and/or income generated by illegal activities in the U.S.

So, there you go: no reason to blame just Delaware. It’s the constant economic war among states — a war that corporations have cleverly exploited by threatening to go elsewhere if a state or city doesn’t do exactly as a corporation wishes. Sometimes that’s tax breaks. Other times it might be a nice law to allow tax evasion.