bono might be a bit of an idiot

I'm currently really struggling with my opinion on something. Furthermore, it's something that I once talked about on here, and that some of you replied to calling me a silly, grotesque idiot.

I still stand by large swathes of what I said in those posts, but now there is an aspect of the man Bono that I'm really struggling with, and that is the - admittedly not exactly new - revelation that the band dodge taxes by moving where their company is based in order to enjoy much lower taxation than they would staying in Ireland.

There's two ways to look at this in my mind:

1) That it is hugely hypocritical for a band that go around preaching about how Governments spend their money to duck out of paying themselves. They are rich enough to afford to play the system, when ordinary irish folk are paying the full brunt of state tax.

2) That - hang on a second - this is a band that already gives 20% of its earnings to charity, and that they have a right to move their operations elsewhere (in this case - The Netherlands) in order to be tax efficient, as guitar man The Edge says in that there Bloomberg article.

And I just don't know which saucy camp I fall in to on this one. It irritates my gin soaked head that companies such as Tesco set up various operations in places such as Guernsey to avoid paying massive amounts of corporation tax that the rest of us have to cough up. But, does the charity work and contributions of U2 mean they are ethically sound in making themselves more tax efficient? It's not as if Tesco is a huge supporter of Make Poverty History like the band. Does this make Bono a filthy idiot?

I do not know. I do know - however - that I now really like the word 'filthy'.