I find that just a bit naive. You’ve never heard any stories along these lines? The real-life Michael Burry, who correctly called the subprime crisis and was played by Christian Bale in The Big Short, has reportedly been audited several times for some unknown reason. No doubt no one could find a smoking gun of anyone directly ordering it, but these things seem to happen.
I recall one article I read decades ago that said high-profile celebrities were often a favorite target for auditing, people like Johnny Carson say, because they’ll go on to make jokes about it and act as an unintentional deterrent to tax cheats. But you’ll never find any specific orders for that, I’d bet.
Well, such a thing would be specifically illegal under U.S. law–I linked to the relevant section of the U.S. code. This being General Questions, do you have any actual cite–beyond “everybody knows” stories–of illegally-ordered audits for political purposes taking place in the 21st century U.S.?
Certainly people–even people who are officials of the U.S. federal government–break the law sometimes. But if we’re just going to wildly speculate why not say “The cinema owners could probably expect to suffer mysterious single-car fatal traffic accidents” or “The cinema owners could probably expect to be killed by mysterious assassins wielding ricin-tipped umbrellas”.
Would it be LEGAL to show movies supporting America’s enemies? Of course.
Such a movie could never be a big hit, obviously, but I have no problem believing that indie/art house theaters would happily screen movies making American soldiers out to be the bad guys in movies about any number of conflicts.
Except that, as documented in this thread, there isn’t any “of course” about it at all: it has been prosecuted in the past, and may be prosecuted again some time in the future.
Maybe because Burry’s annual income likely fluctuated wildly over a period of several years since the strategy that made him famous consisted of him betting against a strong economic trend during the mid 2000s in anticipation of a sharp reversal that did not materialize until 2008. Such inconsistencies in reported income from year to year will almost guarantee an audit.
Also, my understanding is that a lot of tax issues arose during this period due to the increased popularity of both hedge funds and derivatives in general which, in turn, subjected investors like Burry to increased scrutiny.
Help me understand something - if someone were to use a YouTube channel or an email account to try to recruit people to join ISIS, he’d probably be charged with aiding and abetting terrorism, or something of the sort.
But if someone makes a movie (according to the consensus in this thread) promoting ISIS and trying to get people to join ISIS, then that’s Constitutionally protected free speech and cultural art/expression?
It’s like, if you try to get 10 people to join ISIS, that’s a crime, but if you try to persuade a TV audience of 10 million viewers to join ISIS, that’s not a crime?
In the past decade or two, the Cuban film industry has won quite a lot of international awards, but I can’t recall any Cuban film ever being shown on any of the cable movie channels. (However, some films made outside Cuba by emigres were identified as “Cuban” and shown.)
But that would be a different situation, because the Treasury Department would pronibit any business transaction that involved trade with any Cuban interest, including the necessity to pay royalties fo the Cuban owners of the film rights, according to international intellectual property treaties. So the Treasury Department apparently had the lawful power to prohibit speech if the rights to the content were owned by Cuba copyright.
I saw what purported to be Iranian films on a cable outlet about ten years ago, but I strongly suspect that they, too , were created outside Iran for the international Iranian emigre audience.
I know I’m rather late to the thread, but my memory of Das Boot was that the sailors and officers in general didn’t care much for Naziism, they were just fighting on behalf of Germany. In particular, the filmmakers depict the one guy who is an overt Nazi (perhaps as a direct assignment from one of their intelligence organs or something? I don’t remember) as uptight, naive, and generally not in tune with the rest of the boat. They very definitely showed antipathy towards the Nazi cause despite showing the deeds of a boat and its crew there were under its flag. The focus is far more on what life was like as a submariner in wartime in the 1940s than it was on political ideology, and what little there was of the latter was resoundingly opposed to the historically present German government’s.
Hedge funds and their managers are routinely audited by the IRS. Anybody who makes several million dollars a year has something like a 60% chance of being audited in any given year, and that probability increases more if there are sudden, huge spikes in income. Michael Burry is not unique in this regard - most successful hedge fund partners are probably audited more often than they are not, especially because that business often leads to large swings.