The thing is Donald Trump (or any modern Great Man, I suppose) cannot hide from history. Every e-mail, Google search (I guess) tax return all of that is saved someplace forever. After all, the cost of storage is crashing to trivial levels.
But things like tax returns, or private e-mails are protected by law. Nonetheless, at some point in the future such I suppose such documents will be available to historians.
If we had a file cabinet someplace with Abe Lincoln’s personal love letters or tax returns (I know), surely their value to history would be many times greater than the value of privacy to a few dry bones. It would simply be wrong to keep them secret.
**Is there a legal mechanism to release such documents? If so when? ** When will Donald Trump’s tax records be made public?
If there is no such legal means to allow access to such thing, should there be?
I’m not claiming expertise. But I did some online searching and from what I can tell individual tax records are never generally released as public information.
On a related note, I used to work for the NY prison system. And we had requirements for how long we held various records. But most records would never become public information. We just held them as long as we were required to and then destroyed them. (At least in theory. I can tell you as a matter of personal knowledge that destroying old records was never a priority. I saw records that were fifty or sixty years old that were still around even though they were eligible to be destroyed after ten years. The real criteria for destroying old records is you destroyed them when you needed the storage space.)
But my point is that there are government records that never get released to the public. And tax records might be like that.
The government will not release tax returns, but individuals can release their own and dead individuals’ estates or descendants can release them if they want.
I do not know if, as in your example, Lincoln’s descendants still own any of his personal effects but I would expect that items that are not official correspondence, like love letters, would remain the property of his heirs and not the government.
It wouldn’t. If I want my torrid affair with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. kept private even after my death, by what possible imperative can you simply declare my wishes are wrong?
Tax returns? IIRC income tax came in around WWI. (When’s the 100th anniversary?) I assume that’s what you meant by “I know”
I assume there’s some procedure for releasing material collected in a presidential library/archive at various schedules mostly due to classification, but I’m not sure when “classified” or presidential libraries became a thing.
A lot of historical letters or other documents, IIRC, pop up because they were in collection either left to a university archive or something, or donated by a private buyer of such; or published by the private buyer/owner/recipient. (Especially love letters would be private to the recipient(s) )
I assume in the days before photocopiers and carbon paper in typewriters became common, there might be a lot of letters from prominent people like the president that got buried in the filing cabinets of the relevant departments along with all the triviata. Was general house-cleaning of the oval office, removal of correspondence, on change of administration a common thing?
Income tax may have existed during Lincoln’s lifetime but were there income tax returns? I doubt it. It’s taken decades for the complex system we have now to develop.
But in junior high school, I read a book about George Washington’s expense reports during the Revolutionary War and the things he tried to claim as expenses.
I don’t know if there were tax returns then, but tax returns existed as soon as we had an income tax after the 16th amendment was passed. I don’t know if everyone had to fill one out, or just the people who owed taxes, but the forms existed.
I knew we would go off on a tangent about the origin of the income tax.
If you were the President, your steamy love letters from long ago would shed light on your actions. If you were never President, I would assume that in five hundred years your love letters would give important insights into our mating rituals.
Surely a person has no right to privacy after he has been dead a couple of centuries. Fairly soon we will have records of people who died in that long ago. Ought the various agencies and companies that have such records be free to release them at some point?
My understanding is that returns as we know them happened after income taxes started being withheld from paychecks, which wasn’t, I think, until 1943. Otherwise there’s nothing to return. Though people still filed and there were records, so that’s probably a general meaning of “tax return” nowadays.
The idea that ordinary records will someday be valuable tidbits of history is a pretty new idea. Previously the reality that records storage was bulky and expensive and that unorganized records were totally unsearchable pretty well precluded ever recognizing their value to future history.
The storage and search reality has changed. Society and especially our laws haven’t caught up to that change yet.
A side consequence of the tech revolution is that some records now have shorter storage lives than they used to. Made up conceptual example: The immigration cards from Ellis Island from 1895 are still legible, if in crappy shape and not indexed. The data from some 1960s computer system stored on 1960s backup tapes has long since degraded into unreadability. As well there are no functioning tape drives that can read it any more.
So for future historians to have access to 2017 digital records, there will need to be an ongoing and continuous effort to always keep transferring these records from older mediums to newer mediums. Without garbling the data or losing an understanding of their internal organization. Figuring out the meaning of a 3D barcode long after that tech is forgotten will be a lot harder for some 2800 AD anthropologist than it was for an 1800s anthropologist to learn to read the Domesday Book.
The best example of tax records “taking away” was the burning of the Palace of Westminster (i.e. the old Parliament buildings).
For centuries, when the county tax collectors brought in the money they had collected, the royal officials in the Exchequer would make dual tally sticks: two sticks with marks cut in to show the pounds, shillings and pence brought in. They would give one of the tally sticks to the county tax official, and kept one for their own records.
So what do you do with the tally sticks? Store them in the basements of the Palace of Westminster.
Where they dry out.
And then, when you need the space (per Little Nemo), and decide to burn several centuries of dry tally sticks, they cause a chimney fire which rapidly gets out of control …
Oh well, the replacement Parliament buildings are quite impressive.
The wishes of people who are dead, at some point, have to stop being controlling, right?
Presumably, the legal mechanism to release things like tax returns. would be to pass a law that makes them public at a certain point. If you make the delay long enough, no one will have standing to challenge it
The legal mechanism might not be that relevant, though, given the current state of InfoSec. I’d be surprised if Trumps tax returns manage to remain private for a decade.
Your wishes aren’t wrong, they’re just irrelevant because you’re not alive any more. You wanted to keep your letters secret? Sucks to be you, because you’re dead and don’t get to decide what future generations do with your scraps of paper. If you want to control those documents you need to make arrangements with a trusted person to burn your letters after you die. And even then you never know, you could have a Max Brod/Franz Kafka situation. What’s Kafka going to do about it when Brod doesn’t burn his papers? He can’t do shit about it, being dead.
The time to curate your personal effects is before you die. If you leave it up to others, you can tell them what you want done, and then it’s up to the living to decide what happens. Sure, if one of those living people is a judge who says that we’re going to respect your wishes, then your wishes are respected. But that’s because a living judge and living cops have agreed to the idea.
Census records aren’t released to the public until 72 years after “census day”. I assume we’re not going to live to see anything related to Trump being made automatically available. Well, there will eventually be a social security death notice. Those are pretty quick, but pretty sparse on information.
When I think of his records, I have to wonder about his library.