Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!
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@tufty Sure, why not? It was just a shit post in the Garage (basically) in response to a previous post of a bunch of tweets.
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@Captain said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
Trump's AgCzar is a former big sugar lobbyist. So much for draining the swamp.
They'll drain the swamp so that they can plant more sugar cane!
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@lolwhat said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
Hey @Captain, as long as you're OK with the IRS revoking the Clinton Foundation's obviously fraudulent not-for-profit status, soaking its shareholders for back taxes, and charging them under RICO and money laundering statutes, I'll listen to you yammer about Trump's alleged tax fraud.
If it's so obvious, where is the proof?
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@Captain said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
If it's so obvious, where is the proof?
Oh, jeez, we've been around on this sort of thing before where you deliberately ignore the words of a statute over and over. What would you accept as proof? Also, please do note that his statement about the Clinton Foundation doesn't seem to have less proof for it than what you're pushing about Trump.
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@boomzilla said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
Oh, jeez, we've been around on this sort of thing before where you deliberately ignore the words of a statute over and over. What would you accept as proof? Also, please do note that his statement about the Clinton Foundation doesn't seem to have less proof for it than what you're pushing about Trump.
The proof we have about Trump is that his lawyers warned him that he was highly likely to get sued and lose, because others used that strategy, were sued, and lost.
The IRS had been defunded and Trump was willing to risk it. Well bully for him. Isn't he lucky to afford to take that kind of chance! It's almost as if the rules are different when you're a billionaire.
And the words of the Espionage Act are exactly as described. See The United States v. Gorrin (1941). Or just read the Espionage Act. It's not that hard. It explicitly requires mens rea.
Why Intent, Not Gross Negligence, is the Standard in Clinton Case
On July 5, FBI Director James Comey announced that he was not going to recommend the filing of criminal charges against Hillary Clinton over her use of a
In Gorin v. United States (1941), the Supreme Court heard a challenge to a conviction of a Navy intelligence official who sold classified material to the Soviet Union on Japanese intelligence operations in the United States. In that case, the defendant was charged with selling information “relating to the national defense” to a foreign power. The defendant argued on appeal that the phrase “relating to the national defense” was unconstitutionally vague, so much so that the defendant was deprived of the ability to predetermine whether his actions were a crime.
Justice Stanley Reed wrote the majority opinion and disagreed that the law was unconstitutionally vague, but only on the very narrow grounds that the law required “intent or reason to believe that the information to be obtained is to be used to the injury of the United States.” Only because the court read the law to require scienter, or bad faith, before a conviction could be sustained was the law constitutional. Otherwise, it would be too difficult for a defendant to know when exactly material related to the national defense. The court made clear that if the law criminalized the simple mishandling of classified information, it would not survive constitutional scrutiny, writing:
The sections are not simple prohibitions against obtaining or delivering to foreign powers information… relating to national defense. If this were the language, it would need to be tested by the inquiry as to whether it had double meaning or forced anyone, at his peril, to speculate as to whether certain actions violated the statute.
In other words, the defendant had to intend for his conduct to benefit a foreign power for his actions to violate 793(f).
Lucky for us, he's implementing a regressive tax policy, lowering the marginal cost of a dollar for himself and raising it for at least 7 million people. What is the marginal benefit of a dollar to Trump? What is the marginal benefit of a dollar to 7 million bona fide tax payers?
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@Captain said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
The proof we have about Trump is that his lawyers warned him that he was highly likely to get sued and lose, because others used that strategy, were sued, and lost.
AKA: Not proof. Thanks.
@Captain said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
And the words of the Espionage Act are exactly as described. See The United States v. Gorrin (1941). Or just read the Espionage Act. It's not that hard. It explicitly requires mens rea.
This is like 
level denial. Yes, I already explained that this court case talked about a different section of the statute (793(a), not 793(f)).
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No, Gorin v. United States talked about USC793(f), not (a). It talked about the whole Act, in fact.
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@Captain said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
No, Gorin v. United States talked about USC793(f), not (a). It talked about the whole Act, in fact.
This guy plead guilty when he was charged with it:
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@boomzilla said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
This guy plead guilty when he was charged with it
A guilty plea would normally be taken as establishing mens rea beyond all reasonable doubt. The only grounds for appealing it that I can think of would be if there was reason to believe that the plea was coerced, when you'd be in the territory of a serious miscarriage of justice (indeed, a potentially career-ending one for the judge; they're supposed to stop that sort of thing from going through because it's such a threat to the law as an institution…)
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@xaade said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
If someone went off the grid, and managed to live like a king through self-subsistence, they shouldn't pay taxes either.
...you don't know much about kings, do you?
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@masonwheeler or, apparently, similes?
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@tufty said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
What should be done is stripping person status from companies, and putting liability directly on the board of directors, financial advisors, and shareholders.
I was with you right up until those last two words.
The problem there is that you're creating real problems for no gain. If Evil, inc does something horrible, what purpose would be served in punishing you for it because the person who manages your 401k thought its stock was a good prospect for your retirement goals? Better to put liability where it belongs--on decision makers--and nowhere else.
Actually, I think that principle could be generalized to a fundamental definition of justice: Justice is when you pay for your own wrongdoing, and you do not pay for things someone else did wrong. Mess with either half of that formula and you have injustice.
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@masonwheeler Shareholders are liable, but typically only to the value of their holding; that's the point of a limited liability corporation. It's technically up to the bankruptcy court to decide (so as to limit some of the worst shenanigans) but normal investors will only lose at most the value of their investment itself.
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@masonwheeler said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
Justice is when you pay for your own wrongdoing, and you do not pay for things someone else did wrong.
Sure. But if you're funding, and benefitting from, someone's wrongdoing, where does that put you?
Bear in mind I'm not talking about sending shareholders to jail. I am, however, all about punitive clawbacks. You invested in a company who avoided billions in tax, and profited from that in terms of dividends, raise in value of your shares, and all that jazz? You're profiting from illegal action, and you get to pay. That already exists in non-punitive form, as the concept of disgorgement, but I'm suggesting punitive action. Got a thousand dollar dividend from your tax-evading investment? Well done, that's $1500 you get to pay.
Tax evasion is not OK. Profiting from other people's tax evasion is not OK either.
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@tufty said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
Sure. But if you're funding, and benefitting from, someone's wrongdoing, where does that put you?
Unless you participated in the IPO, you're not funding it. Whatever shares you hold have probably literally changed hands thousands of times since the funding took place, and the company never saw a cent from any of it.
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@masonwheeler You're part owner.
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@tufty said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
Tax evasion is not OK. Profiting from other people's tax evasion is not OK either.
That's all true but I think that your idea takes that too far and would have dire consequences to the modern economy. I know plenty of people around here will say, "Great! Fuck 'em all!" but I think the world would be worse like that than with today's limited liability.
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@boomzilla The idea isn't to punish people. It's to make tax evasion a thing of the past.
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@tufty said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
@boomzilla The idea isn't to punish people. It's to make tax evasion a thing of the past.
Well, yeah, by punishing people. I'm just saying that I think your cure would be way worse than the disease.
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@boomzilla said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
by punishing people
… for committing crimes. Profiting from criminal activity is a crime in itself.
The cure would be really fucking short term. If Brin and company find themselves in jail, and Google's shareholders find themselves having to cough up, tax evasion has a future about as long as Trump's stubby little fingers.
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@tufty So what you're saying is, "I don't understand the concept of mens rea"?
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@tufty said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
The cure would be really fucking short term.
Yeah, it probably wouldn't take long to be revealed as awful when everyone realizes that they don't want to invest any more.
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@boomzilla said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
@ben_lubar Politifact is like...Breitbart / PuffHost level credibility, though.
Disagree. Politifact is actually quite fair and factual. They address real, actual issues, and present sourced facts to back up their assertion. I followed the Obama-meter for years because I was curious about how those "hope and change" campaign promises were coming along. They weren't biased for or against them.
And unlike a series of xoF@ links, you can actually follow them, read the article, and not have the article instantly disprove the point the OP is trying to make.
Brietfart and HuffPoo are exactly that, though.
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@PJH said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
This started off as a post citing the 2000 episode of the Simpsons (Bart to the Future) which predicted todays result
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQmbttoxUeE
Now we know.
