As I understand, the conviction was in a state court for evading New York taxes. As the actions reduced state income taxes and Federal and State tax laws/rules are largely the same, why hasn’t the IRS jumped in and said “Us too”?
The GOP cut the IRS budget a lot.
Why does it take years to investigate and charge for some crimes, particularly white collar - yet they can arrest some guy for shooting up a Walmart or DUI and he’s charged the next day. “The mills of the Gods grind slow… so slow they appear to have stopped.”
That’s true only for some jurisdictions. Some piggy-back on the federal rues, and some have significantly different rules. I don’t know which category New York is in.
Trumps lawyers are masters at delaying tactics and drawing things out. They counter sue the counter suit.
That mostly just grinds the little guys into dust. Runs them out of time and money. That should not be the case with the full force of the US government at your disposal.
The fear that the GOP will respond in kind to any type of action drives me nuts. OK then, roll up your sleeves and let’s do this.
[Moderating]
I don’t see how this discussion can proceed apolitically. Moving to Politics and Elections.
Our Attorney General isn’t the most competent AG we’ve had.
For the same reason it takes longer to build a skyscraper than it takes to build a bookshelf.
Because say, Income tax Fraud is harder to prove and it is not a “clear and present danger to public safety”.
Well, since no one has said it yet: because they don’t want to. It’s politics. They could have acted by now, but it is commonly accepted in DC that prosecuting a president criminally is not a good idea.
Trump has, at the very least, given probable cause to believe he committed a lot of crimes. While there are a lot of generally true statements you can make about prosecuting crime, such as “some cases take a long time,” there is a more straightforward explanation for why he hasn’t been charged with any of them. They would prefer not to.
Income tax audits are routinely done on higher level Federal employees, including the President. If the IRS had the proper budget, they would have properly audited trumps tax returns, and came up with a large deficiency. That is not prosecution, that is telling someone to pay a bill, which even sitting Presidents are expected to do, Sure, instead of Criminal Fraud they would likely have settled for a Civil Fraud penalty- which would have been confidential.
It’s a triple hypothetical and unprovable either way, but even at that I find it really unconvincing. The most famous guy in the country is a proven tax cheat, and the problem is the budget?
I am reluctantly coming to this same conclusion. We may see something from the independent counsel, or the GA district attorney. But I’m not holding my breath.
To an extent this is true, explicitly so. The DOJ has a policy to at least defer prosecution when it’s close to election time.
Prosecuting a sitting president is something the US doesn’t do (and arguably they can’t do it). The process is to impeach them and remove them from office before prosecution. (In theory at least.) But healthy, developed, and prosperous nations prosecute their former leaders, it’s absolutely not unheard of. The US needs to stop being so damn squeamish about it.
It’s a matter of allocation of resources to best recover money. They have very good data about what sort o return they get on the resources spent, and they want to recover as much as they can. There are a lot of people out there who are much more blatant tax cheats than Trump, at least according to the IRS’s view of the situation. If someone has over 100 entities that would need investigating, that’s a lot more work than the guy who has the same turnover in a single entity. So I guess the lesson is, if you want to commit tax fraud, do it when you own a lot of smaller businesses, and do it a little in each one, so the IRS doesn’t think they’ll get as big of a return as they would going after someone else.
Oh, and make sure the IRS doesn’t have their funding increased such that your place on the priority list isn’t going to be gotten to.
For the most part and in general, sure. Generally income is income. But there are many ways in which the rules for each state differ. I don’t know much about the tax law in states other than Michigan, but I do know that Michigan follows federal rules in general and then makes exceptions and changes to that. Judging from other states’ income tax returns, that’s generally not the process most states use; instead, they have basically their own set of rules for how to calculate income, and while they are very similar to federal rules, there’s no direct correspondence between them sometimes.
And this doesn’t even get into what is probably the most common way that state tax fraud is accomplished: claiming that more business activity goes on in a lower tax state than it actually did. I don’t know exactly what Trump’s businesses were doing that made them evade NY taxes, and I find it unlikely that someone in the real estate business can do much creatively with respect to where income was generated, but that’s definitely one major area of state tax law that, while it has the corresponding federal tax law regarding sourcing income between the US and foreign countries, is going to always work differently than it does for federal taxes.
When isn’t it close to election time?
I know, that’s a good point. I think it has to be the same calendar year as an election, but I’m just guessing. Which means every other year at least is off limits. Bad policy in my opinion.
Of course - I’m not saying the IRS doesn’t have to pinch pennies. I’m saying that identifying the specific true point that the IRS has to pinch pennies, or separately the specific true point that the feds are squeamish about prosecuting around elections, misses the pretty glaring universal truth, which is that for about 7 years now there has been no appetite for any entity to go after him hard for any of the several hundred things they collectively could have done, and I don’t think it’s a chain of unrelated decisions. I’m saying the reason that there’s been no movement by any federal entity on the known fact that he’s committed tax crimes is not that the budget dropped below a certain point, above which he would have been nailed to the wall.
People keep predicting various crimes will be the one that gets him, and then when it doesn’t happen, they find they have a reason particular to that crime for why it hasn’t happened yet. At some point you start to look for a rule of general applicability.
It appears to me that it is because most of the people in this country who are in charge of our fate are either the members of special interest groups, cowards, or both.