Republicans: continued

[Seabass]

You Can’t Tax the Rich Without the IRS
Until the budget-starved agency is restored, corporations and the wealthy will easily fend off attempts to increase the rates they pay.
https://www.propublica.org/article/you- ... ue-service

The hot policy in Democratic circles these days is raising taxes on the rich. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a plan to tax “ultramillionaires,” as she calls them. Sen. Bernie Sanders wants to expand the estate tax. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has floated raising the top income tax rate to 70% for those making over $10 million a year.

But before this country raises taxes, it should grapple with something much more prosaic but equally important for tackling inequality: saving the Internal Revenue Service.

Already, wealthy people and corporations easily get around today’s rules. However tough any new laws might seem, they’d soon be undercut.

Slowly and quietly over the past eight years, the IRS has been eviscerated. It’s lost tens of thousands of employees. It has fewer auditors now than at any time since 1953. In real dollars, the agency’s budget has dropped by almost $3 billion since 2010.

Businesses and the wealthy benefit the most from this state of affairs. The largest corporations in America used to be audited every year. That started to change when the cuts began, and today, the audit rate has fallen by half. It’s a similar story for individuals making $10 million or more a year: With twice the chance of escaping IRS scrutiny, the ultrarich are much less likely to lose at the game of audit roulette.

Fixing the problem will require more than increasing the IRS’ budget (though that would certainly help). It’s about having the right personnel with the right skills. Today, the wealthy and corporations have the IRS outgunned. The ultra-affluent — with the help of legions of tax professionals — make domestic income disappear overseas or hide it in a pyramid of partnerships. It’s like trying to take on a modern army while armed with spears and clubs.

The IRS has difficulty tracing the income of the superwealthy or countering their sophisticated arguments about why what appears to be one type of income is actually something else. The agency has also trouble valuing their assets (a problem that, as The New York Times revealed, dates back at least to when Fred Trump was misleading the IRS about how much his buildings were worth). By the public admission of numerous IRS officials, it has long done a poor job of scrutinizing complicated partnerships to understand who owns what portion of what stock.

The top 0.5% of highest-earning Americans account for about a fifth of the income that’s hidden from the IRS, according to one University of Michigan study, or more than $50 billion a year in today’s dollars.

It’s much easier to enforce the tax laws for the bottom 90% of earners. Wages are reported straight to the IRS, and computers can easily check that tax returns accurately report that income. This means that inadequate enforcement of the tax laws necessarily has a regressive effect, liberating those at the top from scrutiny while the masses continue to be tracked by machines.

With its budget slashed, the IRS has pulled back across the board — except for one area where it’s been easier to keep the numbers from falling so much: audits of the poor. More than one-third of all audit targets are recipients of the earned income tax credit, one of the nation’s largest anti-poverty programs. By the hundreds of thousands, IRS computers spit out letters that require low-income taxpayers to prove their eligibility. The counties with the highest audit rates aren’t found in the hedge fund precincts of Connecticut or the lobbyist enclaves of Northern Virginia. No, they’re rural, mostly African American counties in the Deep South.

continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/you- ... ue-service

[Seabass]

[L'Emmerdeur]

Using private email for government business is a big deal if you're a prominent Democrat, but the Trump administration has shown repeatedly that compliance with that standard is not a particular concern. The phony Election Integrity commission headed during its brief existence by Mr. Voter Suppression himself, Kris Kobach, is involved in this instance.

'Justice Officials Must Fork Over Voter Commission Emails'

Striking a blow at an administration whose scorn for “email crimes” helped its rise to power, a federal judge ordered the disclosure Tuesday of emails from the now-shuttered commission created by President Donald Trump to root out supposed voter fraud.

New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice and the Protect Democracy Project brought the lawsuit in August 2017, about three months after Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity via executive order.

Though the challengers cited at least two instances where Justice Department officials used personal email accounts to send and receive emails about the commission, the government argued that its duties under the Freedom of Information Act required it only to search agency records, leaving the private email accounts off limits.

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein disagreed at summary judgment, noting in a 13-page opinion Tuesday that increased private email use by public officials harms transparency.

“In an environment of widespread use of personal devices for official work, there is danger of an incentive to shunt critical and sensitive communication away from official channels and out of public scrutiny, with decisions to forward the communications to official record repositories postponable at the whim of the public official,” Hellerstein wrote. “The practice is inconsistent with ‘the citizen’s right to be informed about what their government is up to,’ the very purpose of FOIA.”

[Brian Peacock]

They could just subpoena Gmail for the emails, but alas, subpoenas have no binding force these days.

[Tero]

The Republican War on Democracy
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comme ... democracy/
NYT article

reddit comment

level 2
truthovertribe

I recommend the book "Democracy In Chains" written by a well respected Historian and Author. According to this book, the Koch Brothers have bought the soul of the Republican Party. They are atheists (pandering to the Religious Right for the sake of power). They aren't Conservatives, they're Radical Libertarians. They want no taxes and they want to take Democracy away from the American people because they fear you might demand things that benefit you like Social Security and Medicare or indeed any safety net. They rig the system for themselves by buying legislators, then call it Capitalism. They want no Unions or ability of the people to organize for their own interests. They want no regulations. If their Oil/Gas companies pollute the environment or water or air and harm Americans they don't care, they care only about profits. This Administration has been an absolute wet dream for the Koch Brothers ( indeed most Oligarchs) and Mega-Corporations. Until we understand how we have a greed based system where the wealthiest (this includes foreigners) are buying Politicians to rig the rules of the game in their favor we won't be able to make the Political apparatus begin to work for the majority of Americans instead. I would try not to vote for any legislator who is in the pockets of the Koch Brothers, other Oligarchs, Big Pharma, Big Medical Insurance Corporations, the Oil/Gas Industries and the Weapons Dealers. Don't vote for anyone who signed Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge. Grover Norquist is working for the wealthiest only!...Best Wishes!

[Tero]

One of my rare reddit responses to truthovertribe:

In economic terms yes, the Kochs of the world are running the country. We only seem to control some issues people deal with daily, personal freedoms. What I call "guns babies and Jesus" when election time comes around. As far as the republicans go. Democrats are concerned with pubic policy: trash, energy, infrastructure, minorities in various settings. Immigrants.

[pErvinalia]

"pubic policy"..

[Tero]

Yeah I'm not changing it. I have had reddit posts renoved as I did not respond at the right level of hierarchy.

But remember the old "public hairs"? Google won't find it for me. It insists on showing pubic hair memes.

[Tero]

public hair.jpg (21.49 KiB) Viewed 2416 times

Only found one hit

[L'Emmerdeur]

'Banana Republicans' and 'dictator envy'--Brian Klaas has some snappy lines, but his central point that the Trump presidency is inuring at least a segment of the US population to an authoritarian tendency in American politics seems well founded to me. Trump cozies up to murderous dictators including Kim, who has made threats against the US, and the Republican party has his back while his supporters continue to cheer for him.

[Seabass]

Exclusive: Trump fixer Cohen says he helped Falwell handle racy photos

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Months before evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr.’s game-changing presidential endorsement of Donald Trump in 2016, Falwell asked Trump fixer Michael Cohen for a personal favor, Cohen said in a recorded conversation reviewed by Reuters.

Falwell, president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian universities, said someone had come into possession of what Cohen described as racy “personal” photographs — the sort that would typically be kept “between husband and wife,” Cohen said in the taped conversation.

...

The Falwells wanted to keep “a bunch of photographs, personal photographs” from becoming public, Cohen told Arnold. “I actually have one of the photos,” he said, without going into specifics. “It’s terrible.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKCN1SD2JG

[Seabass]

Republicans are monsters. ALL of them. This is extreme, it is radical, it is backwards, it is obscene, it is barbaric, it is medieval, and it is about as tyrannical as you can get. Land of the dumb, home of the cruel. But hey, the Dems want the US to be more like *gasp* Canada, so they're just as bad, right?

Georgia Just Criminalized Abortion. Women Who Terminate Their Pregnancies Would Receive Life in Prison.

On Tuesday, Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a “fetal heartbeat” bill that seeks to outlaw abortion after about six weeks. The measure, HB 481, is the most extreme abortion ban in the country—not just because it would impose severe limitations on women’s reproductive rights, but also because it would subject women who get illegal abortions to life imprisonment and the death penalty.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... rison.html

[JimC]

What about Wade v Roe?

[Seabass]

This will get challenged in the courts. Hopefully it will get struck down before it gets to the SCOTUS, because the SCOTUS is Trumped.

[JimC]

We have state based laws as well, but my impression is that generally, there is less differences between our states (even when run by different major parties), and that federal laws in general have the ability to override state laws in quite a few circumstances...