125,000 missing breasts

 
The anti-secrecy wars have started, finally

THOUSANDS OF BREASTS have gone missing. More than 125,000 artificial boobs, worth US$15 million, were imported to Argentina from 2008 to 2009. But cosmetic surgeons say they know nothing about them. Yet witnesses claim they can be seen swelling the sweaters of women in that country.

What’s going on? Argentina’s top tax man accused doctors of doing a mass wave of secret breast enhancements, paid in cash to avoid tax payments. “Come to my house at midnight, senorita, and lie down on the kitchen table near my Ginsu knife collection.”

Forensic accountants have been commissioned to track the breasts’ journey from arrival to their final destinations in the women’s D cup chestal areas.

Never again let it be said that accountancy is boring.
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This true story shows that the world no longer tolerates financial secrecy.

Elsewhere, tax dodgers around the world are quaking in their boots (or quacking in their boots, as my Uncle Ernie says) as Wikileaks.com prepares to reveal their names.
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(Illustration: Greek military men have really scary costumes)

Then there’s Greece, where hundreds of people are claiming that they “forgot” or “didn’t notice” they had swimming pools at their homes. (Pool owners have to pay tax.) How can you not notice a swimming pool? Are their homes so huge they never reached the backs of them? I blame the ouzo.
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And of course there’s IKEA, the world’s biggest chain of furniture shops. The Economist magazine revealed that it avoids tax because it is owned by the world’s biggest and least generous charity. Or perhaps we should say “so-called charity”, in the way that careful journalists write that “the so-called Queen of England” lives in “a so-called palace” in the “so-called British Isles” etc.
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There should be an award for the cheekiest tax dodge. Smug rich people would turn up to collect the prize, not realizing that the rest of us were laughing and waiting to see them arrested.
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But some not-so-rich individuals are also quaking/ quacking in their boots, after a Harris Interactive poll in the US last week reported that 30 per cent of married people lie to their spouses about money.

This columnist once wrote a mundane news item listing directors’ salaries from a bank’s annual report once. The bank boss left his office later that day to find his ex-wife outside, thrusting the newspaper at him.

“You told my lawyers you earned much less,” she thundered.

He defended himself with the immortal words: “Oops. Ah. Oh dear. #$%^.”
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Meanwhile, US tax authorities have passed a law saying that they will discount any non-payment excuse if it is “frivolous”, a posh word for “silly”. The actual wording is:

“A submission is a ‘specified frivolous submission’ if it is a ‘specified submission’ (defined in section 6702(b)(2)(B)).”

Other nations are expected to follow. How do you know if your excuse for not paying tax is silly? First, have a good look around your apartment. If you find a swimming pool in a spare room, tell the taxman now.

But I do NOT recommend that husbands check to see what their wives are doing with the family income.

She may be quietly setting aside funds to finance a “medical tourism” trip to Argentina.
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RELATED ITEMS

I like paying tax

The original tax system

Fat passenger tax coming

A tax on stupidity
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(Illustration, top: Jessica Alba, who claims to have no enhancement except digitally)

Comments

[Chamin AKA Maria Chaminda Veneracion DeJesus III]

Some related, older news here :-)

http://www.watoday.com.au/national/storm-in-a-ccup--130000-boobs-lost-at-sea-20081202-6pa5.html

[Lift Lurker]

Maybe the IRS is doing it wrong.

As saying goes: You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Instead of punishment for not paying tax, I suggest incentive for paying tax.

Some ideas:

- In democracies, number of votes of person is proportional to his tax payment ($500,000 tax = 500,000 votes)

- Like in credit cards, reward points for each tax dollar paid ($1 = 1 point), rewards include steak knifes, discount cards at shops, or seats in Congress

- Nobel Prize nomination for person who pay highest taxes.

Anyway, I heard that Neil Armstrong's per diem during his 5 days in space was tax free because US law tax income earned anywhere in the world (only). Neil was not in the world.

[Jason]

Liftie, per diem is tax free by definition.

When I lived in the US, the county taxed pets and the apartments charged pet rent. Do you have any pets? Um nope.

[TS]

How can you not notice a swimming pool?
Maybe there's have a window tax and they had the windows bricked up?

[TS]

If you own your own house in Denmark, they calculate how much rent you would have had to pay if you didn't own it. Then they tax that amount as income.
No kidding...

[Nury]

Liftie, the line about getting a nobel prize for paying the highest tax made me laugh out loud.
*
Thanks also for the other titbits about odd taxes -- worth saving for a follow-up column.
*
Brain-picking time. My kids are scoffing these snacks which are made of "organic evaporated cane juice" and the box says that doctors recommend they are eaten "six times a day".
I just realized that "organic evaporated cane juice" is sugar!
Does anyone know any other disguise words for sugar?

[grandpa]

The reason why the us of a want Assange extraded and silenced to death is not what he said about war, or banks...

The ones in charge do not want anybody to know what they did or did not do with their money.
-Mr Bush , what did you do with your money?
I planted myself in Irak, thousands of them...
Irakis will be called the bushmen of the XXI century

Can you prove it?

Mr Bermuscoli, what did you do with your money?

I promoted jobs.....
especially for young women with no brains, no bras and no future......

Can you prove it?
Sorry , no need to prove....

Mrs Palin , what did you do with your money?
I invested in education.....

When Bush called me to run for President , I learned to read and write.....

Can you prove it?

[grandpa]

< In france thousand of jobs have gone missing...
8 % of the population are -being paid to find them.. without much success.

rumor has it that jobs relocated in Asia...but no one saw them cross the border, or board airplane
They could have been abducted by elevator.

[grandpa]

Uncle

I have to raise my voice in the defense of colored women....
It is insulting to post this picture to illustrate the disappearance of breast transplants...
Everybody on this side of the planet knows that colored women are well equipped in that matter.
They do not need artificial ones

[Angela]

"organic evaporated cane juice"

Food labels must have been written by poets. Because it is cheaper to outsource to a writer than it is to pay a professional dietician.

This is how I would call sugar:

byproduct of cane processing

or

desiccated cane water crystals

or

crystallized fruit juices

I press my own orange juice with my beloved citromatic, I do not believe that store-bought fruit juices contain no sugar.

*

I found 50 names for sugar.

It should be made illegal to call sugar anything other than sugar.

Can you imagine if Sugar has to enter another country and is required to fill up the immigration declaration:

"Have you ever used other names (i.e., maiden, religious, professional, alias, etc.)?"

Sugar has more names than a rap star. Sean John Combs is also known as Sean Puffy Combs, alisa P. Diddy, aka Puff Daddy, aka puffy, aka puff, aka sean combs, aka sean, aka sean john aka diddy. Ever tried organizing your iTunes if you have his songs? Gave me nose bleed.

*

Here's 50 aliases for sugar:

1. Barley malt
2. Beet sugar
3. Brown sugar
4. Buttered syrup
5. Cane juice crystals
6. Cane sugar
7. Caramel
8. Corn syrup
9. Corn syrup solids
10. Confectioner’s sugar
11. Carob syrup
12. Castor sugar
13. Date sugar
14. Demerara sugar
15. Dextran
16. Dextrose
17. Diastatic malt
18. Diatase
19. Ethyl maltol
20. Fructose
21. Fruit juice
22. Fruit juice concentrate
23. Galactose
24. Glucose
25. Glucose solids
26. Golden sugar
27. Golden syrup
28. Grape sugar
29. High-fructose corn syrup
30. Honey
31. Icing sugar
32. Invert sugar
33. Lactose
34. Maltodextrin
35. Maltose
36. Malt syrup
37. Maple syrup
38. Molasses
39. Muscovado sugar
40. Panocha
41. Raw sugar
42. Refiner’s syrup
43. Rice syrup
44. Sorbitol
45. Sorghum syrup
46. Sucrose
47. Sugar
48. Treacle
49. Turbinado sugar
50. Yellow sugar

[rafanjr]

...grandpa, those missing breasts are not for the locals but for the not colored, not well equipped visitors on your side of the planet...

...and visitors are either men or women...

[rafanjr]

...sugar is

β-D-fructofuranosyl-(2→1)-α-D-glucopyranoside

... or simply

C12H22O11

... or more simply

disachharide (sucrose and fructose)

... or much more simply

SUGAR

[Frau Schlimm]

It's mainly
white powder
and it is labeled a
drug
by the WHO (?) World Health Org.

[TS]

Angela,

I found 50 names for sugar.
It should be made illegal to call sugar anything other than sugar.

I don't think that's quite fair on the manufacturers of food products. For people with allergies and other health issues, it is very important to know the origin of the sugar in their food.

If you live in a country or region with a proper food policy, in addition to an ingredients list, there should be a "Nutritional Value" box with the low-down on unholy trinity of sugar, salt & fat.

[grandpa]

Yes Grandma , your encyclopedia is not complete without..... carbohydrate.
But you are impressing me.......
again

[Karuna]

Cane sugar is better than white sugar that we use daily.
White sugar goes through chemical processing. This makes cane sugar an healthy product.
At home we try and use honey more as sweetener.

[Lift Lurker]

It seem like one of the mysteries is does toothpaste have sugar?

I cannot find answer in our local internet.

Maybe sej know?

[Chamin AKA Maria Chaminda Veneracion DeJesus III]

I think IRS can give discounts for guns to the conservatives who pay tax. They will stop grumbling about bigger government and higher taxes too :-p

"Organic evaporated cane juice"...
Hm, I can try similar jugglery with words to improve my resume:

Work experience:
Broomstick operation on a variety of domestic terrains for decades
(okay, sweeping the floor of all the apartments that I lived :-p)

[sej]

Alright Liftie,

Generally speaking, toothpaste does *not* have sugar. However, as far as I am aware this is not enshrined in law in any juristiction, and therefore, there is nothing to say toothpaste cannot contain sugar, although it would seem oddly self-defeating if it did. There is also nothing to say toothpaste cannot have artificial sweeteners.

Some more tidbits and other generally useless information:

Did you know, that sugar can also be regarded as an explosive, albeit not a very effective one? Take sucrose for example. Take two spoons, and place a few sugar grains on the back of one. Turn out the lights and then use the back of the other spoon to try and crush the grains. With enough luck, what you should see is a small flash of light - that is the grain of sugar exploding as it reacts with the oxygen in the air.

Another example you will often see or hear of, is a gummy bear dropped into molten sodium chlorate. The gummy bear provides the sugar/carbohydrate, the sodium chlorate provides the oxygen. (Don't do this at home kids!). The reaction is very much like a flare, lots of light, heat and smoke (although really, it's mostly water vapour and carbon dioxide).

(Actually, whenever you say "Don't do this at home kids", do you find that kids will, automatically become doubly attracted to "doing this at home"?)

Lastly, one of the suspected sources of ignition for the great fire of London, was the explosive ignition of flour dust at a bakers from the fire in the fireplace.

[TS]

That toothpaste should contain sugar is an old myth. It does however contain sugar alcohols such as xylitol or sorbitol, depending on brand, to give it the sweet taste. These are not sugars but artificial sweeteners , despite what twelve year old kids sitting in their room, high on conspiracy theories, write on their blogs and twitters. The flavourings used are normally a bit sharp, like spearmint, to camouflage the ugly taste of the other ingredients.

The sugar myth have had an impact. Go into your bathroom right now, I'll wait...



Oh... Sorry, I forgot to say what you were meant to do there... Don't you just hate that, you find yourself in the kitchen and have no idea why you went out there.
But I'm digressing. Go back to the bathroom and take a good look at your tube of Colgate toothpaste. Somewhere there's a statement: "No Colgate toothpaste contains sugar".
They write it in capital letters. On the net that's the equivalent of shouting. Why do the do that? BECAUSE YOU SHOULD NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ ON THE NET.

Some of my friends and I had heard of how you could make a smoke bomb from sugar and another household ingredient (which I will not reveal here). We tried it in the kitchen sink at Tim's house and it didn't work. So we left our setup in the sink and played with toy cars (we must have been 7 or 8 years old) in another room.
Suddenly smoke poured in through the door from the kitchen. It worked, we just hadn't given it time enough.
Water from the kitchen tap extinguished the process. The ceiling in the kitchen was all black. We left Tim to it and ran home. For all I know, Tim is still grounded.

[Angela]

Sugar definitely burns, creme brulee :)

*

I am tempted to do some sugar experiment in the kitchen now, with TS and Sej's recipes.

My twenty, okay, almost thirty years of experience with sugar, (I bake every week and cook my meals daily except when somebody takes me out for dinner) lead me to believe that sugar is a good conductor of heat. I learned that when I made caramels and tasted it right away. It burned my tongue like no soup ever did.

[TS]

The boiling point of water is 100 °C, soup will not be warmer than that.
Melted caramel can be much warmer, probably around 200 °C, not a good thing to put in your mouth no matter how hot you are yourself.

[Chamin]

I and my cousin too tried sugar plus some ingredient experiment, when we were around 12 yrs old. It went so well that our sisters got scared and reported to our parents that we are making nuclear weapons :-p

[Anonymous.]

Hmm... Tax evasion. Fun topic. Here in Malaysia, we don't hear much about it. usually, the products are displayed, but the police don't care. Maybe it's because they too evade taxes. Anyway, taxes usually range from something useful like bacon to something totally worthless like big, fancy cars. Who wants a big fancy Roll-Royce when you can...*whispers heard in the back*. I'm sorry, only royals in Malaysia are allowed to use Rolls-Royce, so "im supposed to change "de beeg,fansi kar"(Like how most Malays trying to speak English would say) to something less expensive like say, maybe a Bentley? So anyway, What's the use of it? We should all buy small, Indian cars made in China. Who's with me on the "Small Cars" campaign? We could all look like carbon copies of each other. At least, while we're driving.

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