The “free marketplace” is as real as the unicorn and the chimera. There is not now, nor has there ever been, any such thing. As soon as the coins begin to clink, the guys with the swords begin to muscle in. After all, they are there to protect the “free marketplace”, nice little marketplace, be a shame if anything were to happen to it.
What do you guess, somewhere between 3500 to 5000 b.c.e.?
Meanwhile, trying to gauge what the impact of these three pages will be, there are some interesting bits in CNN’s recent poll’s details (note poll all taken after debate and before the NYT release):
No one wants to pay more than their fair share, I am pretty sure of that. But they want the least is to be paying their fair share while others get away with not paying theirs, even if they do it legally.
The other impact has been pointed out on 538 - he needs to makes some big plays to come back and even if this did not directly hurt him it runs down his clock.
DSeid, that’s interesting. I just posted this in the “what should Hillary’s attack priorities be” thread:
“There are a hundred other, more important and relevant things that should disqualify Trump in the minds of voters, and therefore in an ideal world should be the focus of Clinton’s attacks, but for some reason Trump’s legal non-payment of taxes seems to be getting some traction. So, even though I don’t fault him for this, I suppose it should be the focus of some attack ads and perhaps rally speeches, maybe for a week or so.”
Logically, you’d think there would be a widespread clamor for congressmen and senators to change the Federal tax code (and the president – including candidates to be the next one – to support and sign it), so that every wealthy person pays SOMETHING every year, even while carrying over a big loss. Any sign of a groundswell to actually change the rules, rather than merely complaining when someone abides by the current rules?
(I can’t believe I’m defending Trump in any way, shape, or form, but I guess I am…maybe this will help make my many criticisms of him more credible – not that my little opinion matters much.)
And people want the tax system to be fair. If Joe Average has a bad year and spends his savings in order to pay his mortgage, he doesn’t get to write off the loss. If he has a really bad year and is unemployed the whole year, he doesn’t get to carry forward the loss from year to year. In fact, if he gets forgiveness from his credit card company for debt, that amount is seen as income.
Carry forwards benefit only businesses and the investor class. They should probably, like most tax breaks, be phased. And twenty years is a long time. Also, they shouldn’t apply to paper losses like depreciation (though there is a recapture provision when you sell). They are useful - if you are living off investment income and social security and have to sell some stock at a loss, they are helpful to making your nest egg last. They encourage you to take risks, which is good for the economy. But there should be a call to rewrite them to make them more fair.
It’s not slavery, but you’ve used that descriptor for liberal policies too, IIRC. Both comparisons are equally ridiculous.
There are lots of ways for the wealthy to avoid sales tax. Buy it overseas - you should get tagged at customs, but if you claim those new suits were in your luggage when you left, the customs agent is likely to shrug and let you off.
I used to work for a wealthy guy who paid no sales taxes - he bought everything with a business federal tax id number “for resale” - everything from his daughters horses to his cars ran through the business. He also bought a lot of loose gems in Africa and the Far East and functionally smuggled them in through his carryon. This was a long time ago - perhaps he eventually got caught - but I sort of doubt it.
Yeah, I agree. But I think of it as analogous to committing other crimes.
Let’s take fraud.
The laws are written in a very careful way: people try to describe exactly when misleading someone else is legal, and when it’s not. Because it’s a complicated matter, the laws are complicated.
It’s possible to read those laws and come up with a brand new scheme through which you can mislead people, technically staying just this side of the law, and make a lot of money by doing it. And you hire an attorney with a professional obligation to defend your claims to legality in such circumstances–just like Trump hires CPAs with a professional obligation to keep him on the legal side of the tax issue.
You can stay legal without staying ethical. Your new scam that tricks elderly people intro giving you their pension might not technically violate any fraud statutes, and you might call it being smart and a good businessperson–but that doesn’t mean I, or anyone else, thinks it’s ethical.
Same thing with taxes. The spirit of the law is that people who increase their wealth during a year should pay some of that increased wealth toward taxes. The tax law is very complex, and it has too many loopholes in it such that people like Trump can increase their wealth tremendously without paying taxes. That may be legal, and I don’t blame the CPAs who help him structure his wealth such that he pays no taxes. But that doesn’t mean I think it’s ethical, any more ethical than the person who defrauds grannies while staying on the technical side of legal.
I remember about twenty or thirty years ago, the State of New York was cracking down on sales tax avoidance by people using schemes like Trump’s send-the-empty-box-to-the-Connecticut-house one. One particular jewelry store had done this multiple times for many customers. Another was to compare sales tax payments to customs declarations, so that if someone went overseas, bought stuff and then paid customs tax on it, they should also have paid sales or use tax to NYS. I think the state even threatened to check license plates of cars in New Jersey malls to look for New York residents buying stuff there and not paying the taxes due to the State of New York.
Gretchen Morgensen wrote about this this morning in the Times. She quotes someone as saying that the claim of fiduciary responsibility is laughable.
She also says that if businesses are driven by fiduciary responsibility to minimize taxes only, all should move overseas since that does reduce taxes. I doubt Trump would agree. He criticizes companies all the time for doing things which increase their return on investment.
Do you think Trump is a genius about the tax code for knowing to carryover losses - or more likely listening to his accountants? That’s what he’s claiming.
Well, whoever she is quoting is an idiot.
Nobody says that minimizing taxes is the only factor to be considered when determining fiduciary responsibility.
I would think it was pretty obvious that taking a perfectly legal tax write-off is more a fulfillment of one’s fiduciary responsibility to one’s investors and partners than relocating a real estate company or a casino overseas.
By that logic, anyone who is thinking of taking the child deduction on one’s income tax should move his family to the Bahamas.
Regards,
Shodan
Illegally obtained tax returns from twenty years ago is current events?
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, they just got released a few days ago. Do try to keep up.
Illegally obtained? Maybe. Maybe not.
So, if we find out tomorrow that he murdered someone in the 90s, it’s not newsworthy because it happened so long ago?
The reason Joe Average doesn’t get to write off the loss is because using savings to pay a mortgage isn’t a loss. The same is true for being unemployed - that’s not a loss. Do you understand why? Debt forgiveness can actually be income though, because that’s someone giving you money.
Here you are mixing two concepts. Depreciation recapture is generally for personal returns where one is deducting home office use and then later selling the property and recapturing the amount depreciated in the tax basis. Paper losses for depreciation for a business are often things like equipment and physical plant. Those expenses are grouped together as business expenses when determining net income. How do you think those would be deducted against income? Typically tax depreciation is prescribed based on the type of asset, with GAAP and tax basis differing in some areas. Depreciation on assets is required because it better matches expenses to the revenues associated with the costs of those assets.
Is there a time limit for which new revelations of old facts become non-news?
Let me guess – anything that happened to a Republican that predates Hillary’s use of email should not be considered news and just be totally buried and ignored.
No, evidence of a crime would be another matter. I’m sure you recognize the difference.
Regards,
Shodan