Thursday, March 16, 2017
Trump and Taxes II
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Companio de Tobacos v. Collector (1904)
It makes perfect sense when you think about it. Now that he is president of ALL the people, and especially those who have not enjoyed the lavish life style he enjoys, he would naturally want to try to help them. It all came to mind when DJT’s budget proposals for 2017 were disclosed. What one part of the proposed budget does, is give every taxpayer the opportunity to make money the way DJT did, by not paying amounts that were rightfully owed by him.
Followers of such things remember the many bankruptcies DJT enjoyed while accumulating his fortune. They enabled him to enhance his wealth by not paying contractors and suppliers for services rendered and materials furnished. The adverse consequences of those DJT practices fell on those DJT refused to pay. They were forced to file liens to get payment, sue DJT, or sit by helplessly as DJT’s obligations to pay them were discharged in bankruptcy. That practice produced a better result for DJT, the debtor, than for the creditors.
A good example of the success of this business practice can be seen in the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C. that by all reports is a great success and raking in lots of money for the Trump family. Nonetheless, there are still laborers and suppliers who have not been paid and have been forced to file liens against the hotel in the hope of forcing the Trumps to pay what they owe. As of January 2017, there were more than $5 million in liens filed against the property for unpaid bills.
DJT now wants the citizen to be given the same opportunity not to pay what the citizen owes, as he himself has done over the years, thus enhancing the citizen’s personal wealth. To do that, DJT has proposed a budget that will severely cut funding for the IRS, and lessen the chances that those who fail to pay taxes will get caught.
According to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, dated April 4, 2016, since 2010 the IRS budget has been cut by 17 percent after adjusting for inflation. According to the report, three quarters of the IRS funding is applied to personnel costs, and the number of staff engaged in enforcing the tax laws has declined by 23 percent. In 2010, 1.1 percent of individual returns were audited, whereas in 2015, only .8 percent of returns were audited. In the five years preceding the report, the IRS collected $30 billion less than in the same time period five years before that. For every $1 spent on IRS tax enforcement, the government gets $4 in increased revenue. Cutting the IRS budget means less revenue for the country. And that’s where DJT comes in.
Although recently approved Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, at first said he wanted to add staff and update IRS technology in order to increase collections, DJT has changed Mr. Mnuchin’s mind. The most recent DJT budget documents show that the IRS is slated to get another 14% cut to its budget. That means less of everything, including audits. And here is where the run of the mill taxpayer gets to enjoy the same benefits DJT has always enjoyed in his business dealings.
The average taxpayer can simply cheat on taxes the way DJT cheated people who worked for him. As the IRS budget is slashed, there is less chance the cheating taxpayer will be caught. Thus, taxpayers who do not pay what they owe, are less likely to be caught and prosecuted, and will be able to enjoy the higher standard of living such conduct provides, just the way DJT has enhanced his standard of living by refusing to pay what he owes. Readers hoping to take advantage of this good fortune should realize, however, that the consequences of cheating the IRS are somewhat different from DJT cheating people with whom he does business, although it is not clear which is less honorable. If the taxpayer is caught, the taxpayer faces severe penalties and possibly prison time. The only adverse consequences DJT suffers from cheating those with whom he has business dealings, is the need to pay legal fees while the effect of the cheating is sorted out in court. Notwithstanding the downside for the cheating taxpayer, by reducing funding for the IRS, the chances those who cheat on their taxes will get caught, are reduced.
There is one additional benefit to slashing the IRS budget by an additional 14%. That is, however, only a benefit for DJT. With fewer auditors employed at the IRS, it will take more time for the IRS to complete auditing DJT’s returns. Those are the returns from which stray pages occasionally make their way into the public domain, but which DJT has promised to release in their entirety as soon as the audits are completed. So sad. Christopher Brauchli can be emailed at brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu. For political commentary see his web page at http://humanraceandothersports.com
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Trump, Tapps [sic] and Twitters
O envy! Envy! Thou gnawing worm of virtue, and spring of infinite mischiefs! There is no other vice, my Sancho, but pleads some pleasure in its excuse. . .but envy is always attended by disgust, rancor, and distracting rage.
—Cervantes, Don Quixote
It is all explained by envy. Who’d have thought it? It was envy that inspired tweets early in the morning on March 4, 2017.
Tweets, as followers of DJT know, are vehicles that impart the most important information DJT has to share with his devoted and adoring followers. Tweets, by their nature, are limited to very few words, and their virtue lies in their ability to impart, but nothing more, important bits of information. They are not expected to, nor do they, offer any support for their assertions. With tweets it is the information, not its source, that matters. Once imparted, others can be expected to corroborate the tweet, if its validity is questioned.
At about 4 A,M. on March 4, 2017, DJT awakened and, egged on by envy, and seeking a way to tame her, he recalled a Breitbart news story from the preceding day. In that story, Breitbart had referred to “known steps taken by President Barack Obama’s administration in its last months, to undermine Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and, later, his new administration.” As DJT contemplated that story, he thought up a way to dispatch envy by diminishing her cause. At 4:35 A.M. he tweeted that he had “Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower. . . This is McCarthyism!” Having implicated the former president in a nefarious scheme, even though it lacked even a semblance of truth, DJT felt better. His envy of the former president abated for fourteen minutes. At the end of fourteen minutes, DJT realized that to firmly squelch envy he needed to comment further. At 4:49 A.M. he sent another tweet asking whether it was “legal for a sitting president to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW.” The important new information imparted by the 4:49 A.M. tweet that was not included in the earlier tweet, was that a court had turned something down earlier. The inference was that the turn down pertained to the wiretapping, but that wasn’t said, nor has anything been suggested since, nor does anyone know, to what court DJT was referring.
Having sent out the second tweet, DJT sat in his room believing he had evened the score, and was content for thirteen minutes. At 5:02 A.M. he realized he had not said something in his earlier tweets that needed saying. He sent out another tweet in which he asked: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” (The misspelling of the word “tap” might suggest that DJT was so agitated he just hit the ‘p” twice but, as numerous commentators have observed, messages from DJT and his White House are commonly filled with misspellings, since among the many skills not required of those who work for DJT, spelling is included. Indeed, spelling errors are so common, that if one encountered an anonymous misspelled tweet dealing with matters of government, one could safely assume it came from DJT or one of his operatives.)
Since many commentators have compared the speed with which President Obama selected and obtained approval for cabinet members he was required to appoint, to the speed at which DJT has accomplished the same task, one might assume that the perceived slowness of the DJT process and observations about that, is what inspired envy. That is not, however, its source. DJT knows that he will someday have made all the appointments he believes are needed, and the appointees will all be far more qualified than any appointees appointed by any other president since before Washington became president which, all would agree, is a very long time ago. The source of DJT’s envy is an honor bestowed on Barrack Obama that has nothing to do with what he accomplished in his first 40 days. It has to do with the fact that nine days after President Obama took office, he was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and in October of his first year in office, he received the prize. Although this has not been commented on in the press, it is this achievement that galls DJT. Although DJT is among the 318 people who have been nominated this year, he was nominated by an unidentified American and, as far as is known, (a) was not nominated within the first nine days of his presidency and (b) is a prize he is unlikely to receive. The suggestion that Mr. Obama tapped DJT’s phone alleviates envy’s distracting rage that so obviously afflicts him and awakens in him the need for a twitter storm. That is perfectly understandable.
Thursday, March 2, 2017
Trump vs. Immigrants
Driven from every corner of the earth. . . direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum. Let us cherish the noble guests and shelter them.
— Samuel Adams, Speech Philadelphia (August 1, 1776)
It was an especially poignant performance. It didn’t affect very many people. That is because it took place in a small boarding school in the middle of Colorado. It was attended only by the faculty and students in the school, the parents who were able to attend, and the students who participated in the performance. It was a performance of Fiddler on the Roof.
Fiddler on the Roof was a musical that opened in 1964. It takes places in the town of Anatevka in Imperial Russia in 1905. It is a touching story of Tevye, the Jewish dairyman, and his family and his community, but at the end of the tale, the Russian constable comes to the village to tell the Jews that they are being expelled and have three days to sell or otherwise dispose of their belongings, and leave town. It is a desperately sad ending to a story filled with beautiful music and lovely tales of family and young love. It brought to mind other times, other places, and other families.
One such time: February, 2017; the place: Phoenix Arizona; the family: Garcia de Rayos, her husband and her children. Garcia lived in Phoenix for more than 20 years. She first came to the United States as an illegal immigrant when she was 14 years old. In 2009, she was arrested by the notorious Sheriff Arpaio and charged with criminal impersonation. After months of incarceration, she was freed and permitted to remain in the United States, subject only to the requirement that she check in with the offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) every 6 months. She did as required, faithfully, and was permitted to stay in this country. Then a strange thing happened. A Strange Man, with the initials DJT, was elected president of the United States. Before he was elected president, he said, if elected, he would rid the country of illegal immigrants, describing them as “rapists and murderers.” After the Strange Man was elected president, he tempered his remarks somewhat. He said that his goal was to get rid of the rapists and murderers and not, one might assume by inference, people like Garcia. Anyone making that assumption would be wrong. In February, 2017, Garcia went to make her bi-annual report to ICE. Nothing had changed in her life since the one she had made 6 months earlier, except for the election of the Strange Man who wanted to get rid of rapists and murderers. Instead of being permitted to make her report and go home, Garcia was arrested and promptly sent back to Mexico. Her two teen age daughters are American citizens. They can stay in the United States. Garcia’s 14-year old daughter, Jaqueline, told reporters that if she could talk to the Strange Man, she would ask him why he took her mother away from her. “She hasn’t done anything wrong and I’m not scared of him.” Of course Jaqueline doesn’t have to be scared of him any more than the rest of us who live in this country and are United States citizens. Sadly, there are many people like her mother, like Jeanette Vizguerra.
Jeanette is 45-years old, and an undocumented immigrant. She lives in Denver, Colorado. She has spent 20 years working in the United States and has three children. Since living in the United States, she has been convicted of two misdemeanors, presenting false documents to police after a routine traffic stop, and reentering the country illegally after returning from her mother’s funeral in Mexico. In February, 2017, it was time for her to make her regular visit to ICE. She was afraid of what would happen were she to appear before ICE. She instructed her children what to do in the event of an ICE raid, stocked the house with food for them and left. She went to the basement of the First Unitarian Society Church in Denver, and moved into a basement room. Speaking to supporters she said: “I could be here days, months, or maybe even years.” That is where she now lives.
According to reports, the Obama administration’s priorities of deporting gang members and violent and serious offenders have been abandoned. All illegal immigrants, irrespective of their backgrounds, are now fair game for ICE agents. The Strange Man with the DJT initials addressed a group of manufacturing C.E.O.’s at the White House and told them: “You see what’s happening at the border, all of a sudden for the first time, we’re getting gang members out, we’re getting drug lords out, we’re getting really bad dudes out of this country, and at a rate that nobody’s ever seen before, and they’re the bad ones, and it’s a military operation because that has been allowed to come into our country [sic].” Someone should tell Jeanette and Garcia that they are drug lords and bad dudes. They might have trouble recognizing the Strange Man’s description of them. Garcia would envy Tevye. He was given three days to leave Anatevka. Welcome to the Strange Man’s Amerika.