These people figure they can't attract legitimate investment so instead they index on how to bar the exits. It is more conspicuous who doesn't get the scrutiny

These people figure they can't attract legitimate investment so instead they index on how to bar the exits. It is more conspicuous who doesn't get the scrutiny of Brookings, ICIJ, TJN, and organizations like them. (hint: you elected them) These places are just fronts for post-hoc policy justification, and papers like these are pseudo-intellectual activism masquerading as scholarship. I see a similar authoritarian nerd attitude in security all the time, where someone finds an unexpectedly invasive surveillance method and then tries to ingratiate themselves to the institutions who can mandate it. They think they have made something people want, when in fact they have only invented a new way to betray their fellow citizens to the insatiable will to power of bureaucracies. (Contrary to the talking points of their apologists, bureaucracies are in fact not made of people, they are made of bureaucrats) Let's look at a problem these organizations don't care about, like the real social issue that is domestic money laundering, which not only converts the proceeds of really harmful crimes into legit bank deposits, it harms communities directly with real estate and rental bubbles, diseconomic businesses, dumping, political and police corruption, all of which their anti-capital policies directly create. The revenue-gap nerds are fine with laundering because some of it comes into the tax net, social consequences be damned. While I have never earned enough to hide it in my life, I wish the class of people who think governments have a revenue problem but not a spending or scope problem would try solving a problem they didn't first cause for a change instead of thinking the world needs more of their concern and facilitation.