#income tax returns 2020

[metamatar]

some of you are being outflanked from the left by the jacobin. lol.

For many loyal Democrats, this will not compute. The Biden economy, party-loyal pundits have said over and over again, is tremendous — low unemployment, strong GDP growth, slowing inflation, a booming stock market — and anyone unhappy about it must simply be brainwashed. Out of view in this self-congratulatory hall of mirrors were the constant statistics that said otherwise: evictions up past pre-pandemic levels, record-high homelessness, cost-burdened renters at an all-time high, median household income lower than the last pre-pandemic year, inequality returning to pre-pandemic levels, and food insecurity and poverty growing by large double digits since 2021, including a historic spike in child poverty. Here’s another thing you might not have heard. Largely due to a trick of history, including the COVID-19 pandemic and a Democratic-controlled Congress, Trump was partly responsible for the creation of what the New York Times called “something akin to a European-style welfare state” in 2020 that reduced inequality and even helped some Americans improve their finances for a short spell — and under Biden, all of it went away. Sometimes that happened due to factors outside Biden’s control and sometimes because of his own decisions, but it always took place with little fight from the president, and it contributed to the ominous rise in hardship under his tenure. That meant not only adding to people’s already onerous monthly expenses — in one case in a self-imposed October surprise that made student loan repayment much more unforgiving for tens of millions of borrowers just before voting. It also saw twenty-five million people being thrown off their public health insurance, many of them in some of the battleground states Harris lost last night. Recall that one of Biden’s attack lines against Trump four years ago was that Trump was going to strip twenty million people of their health insurance. This might have been mitigated had the president passed the flagship policies on his agenda, helping people weather the storm of rising living costs. Those that he did enact he sometimes self-sabotaged. (...)

As a result, Harris’s run was a major downgrade from the 2020 Democratic effort. Biden’s never-passed ambitions to historically expand the social safety net became firmly relegated to distant memory, never to be revived; only the child tax credit and a modest expansion of Medicare benefits survived. The campaign combined a sharp rightward lurch on foreign policy and immigration with a handful of laudable populist proposals to ban price gouging and help out first-time homebuyers (while largely avoiding the national 5 percent rent cap that Biden desperately took on before dropping out and that had earlier made its way into the Democratic platform). Beyond the Medicare proposal and vague promises to protect and strengthen Obamacare, the idea of reforming the broken US health care system — one of Americans’ biggest and most anxiety-inducing costs — was almost entirely absent from the campaign. When voters in a Univision town hall came to Harris with their bleak personal stories of suffering under the health care system and asked how she would solve them, she could give them nothing, because her only real major health care policy was for those over sixty-five and already insured under Medicare.

[simply-ivanka]

How the Biden-Harris Economy Left Most Americans Behind

A government spending boom fueled inflation that has crushed real average incomes.

By The Editorial Board -- Wall Street Journal

Kamala Harris plans to roll out her economic priorities in a speech on Friday, though leaks to the press say not to expect much different than the last four years. That’s bad news because the Biden-Harris economic record has left most Americans worse off than they were four years ago. The evidence is indisputable.

President Biden claims that he inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, but this isn’t close to true. The economy in January 2021 was fast recovering from the pandemic as vaccines rolled out and state lockdowns eased. GDP grew 34.8% in the third quarter of 2020, 4.2% in the fourth, and 5.2% in the first quarter of 2021. By the end of that first quarter, real GDP had returned to its pre-pandemic high. All Mr. Biden had to do was let the recovery unfold.

Instead, Democrats in March 2021 used Covid relief as a pretext to pass $1.9 trillion in new spending. This was more than double Barack Obama’s 2009 spending bonanza. State and local governments were the biggest beneficiaries, receiving $350 billion in direct aid, $122 billion for K-12 schools and $30 billion for mass transit. Insolvent union pension funds received a $86 billion rescue.

The rest was mostly transfer payments to individuals, including a five-month extension of enhanced unemployment benefits, a $3,600 fully refundable child tax credit, $1,400 stimulus payments per person, sweetened Affordable Care Act subsidies, an increased earned income tax credit including for folks who didn’t work, housing subsidies and so much more.

The handouts discouraged the unemployed from returning to work and fueled consumer spending, which was already primed to surge owing to pent-up savings from the Covid lockdowns and spending under Donald Trump. By mid-2021, Americans had $2.3 trillion in “excess savings” relative to pre-pandemic levels—equivalent to roughly 12.5% of disposable income.

So much money chasing too few goods fueled inflation, which was supercharged by the Federal Reserve’s accommodative policy. Historically low mortgage rates drove up housing prices. The White House blamed “corporate greed” for inflation that peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, even as the spending party in Washington continued.

In November 2021, Congress passed a $1 trillion bill full of green pork and more money for states. Then came the $280 billion Chips Act and Mr. Biden’s Green New Deal—aka the Inflation Reduction Act—which Goldman Sachs estimates will cost $1.2 trillion over a decade. Such heaps of government spending have distorted private investment.

While investment in new factories has grown, spending on research and development and new equipment has slowed. Overall private fixed investment has grown at roughly half the rate under Mr. Biden as it did under Mr. Trump. Manufacturing output remains lower than before the pandemic.

Magnifying market misallocations, the Administration conditioned subsidies on businesses advancing its priorities such as paying union-level wages and providing child care to workers. It also boosted food stamps, expanded eligibility for ObamaCare subsidies and waved away hundreds of billions of dollars in student debt. The result: $5.8 trillion in deficits during Mr. Biden’s first three years—about twice as much as during Donald Trump’s—and the highest inflation in four decades.

Prices have increased by nearly 20% since January 2021, compared to 7.8% during the Trump Presidency. Inflation-adjusted average weekly earnings are down 3.9% since Mr. Biden entered office, compared to an increase of 2.6% during Mr. Trump’s first three years. (Real wages increased much more in 2020, but partly owing to statistical artifacts.)

Higher interest rates are finally bringing inflation under control, which is allowing real wages to rise again. But the Federal Reserve had to raise rates higher than it otherwise would have to offset the monetary and fiscal gusher. The higher rates have pushed up mortgage costs for new home buyers.

Three years of inflation and higher interest rates are stretching American pocketbooks, especially for lower income workers. Seriously delinquent auto loans and credit cards are higher than any time since the immediate aftermath of the 2008-09 recession.

Ms. Harris boasts that the economy has added nearly 16 million jobs during the Biden Presidency—compared to about 6.4 million during Mr. Trump’s first three years. But most of these “new” jobs are backfilling losses from the pandemic lockdowns. The U.S. has fewer jobs than it was on track to add before the pandemic.

What’s more, all the Biden-Harris spending has yielded little economic bang for the taxpayer buck. Washington has borrowed more than $400,000 for every additional job added under Mr. Biden compared to Mr. Trump’s first three years. Most new jobs are concentrated in government, healthcare and social assistance—60% of new jobs in the last year.

Administrative agencies are also creating uncertainty by blitzing businesses with costly regulations—for instance, expanding overtime pay, restricting independent contractors, setting stricter emissions limits on power plants and factories, micro-managing broadband buildout and requiring CO2 emissions calculations in environmental reviews.

The economy is still expanding, but business investment has slowed. And although the affluent are doing relatively well because of buoyant asset prices, surveys show that most Americans feel financially insecure. Thus another political paradox of the Biden-Harris years: Socioeconomic disparities have increased.

Ms. Harris is promising the same economic policies with a shinier countenance. Don’t expect better results.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

On Thursday, Canada’s fiscal watchdog outlined how an automated tax filing system would benefit some Canadians, particularly those in low-income and vulnerable households who have never previously filed a return, or might have gaps in their filing histories. According to a 2020 study(opens in a new tab) conducted by two Carleton University professors, between 10-to-12 per cent of Canadians do not annually file their returns and might, as a result, miss out on benefits they're otherwise entitled to. The PBO revealed that if the automated system were to roll out now, eligible taxpaying households would receive more than $1.6 billion in benefits this current fiscal year. In five years, it will reach $1.9 billion.

Continue Reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Private equity ghouls have a new way to steal from their investors

Private equity is quite a racket. PE managers pile up other peoples’ money — pension funds, plutes, other pools of money — and then “invest” it (buying businesses, loading them with debt, cutting wages, lowering quality and setting traps for customers). For this, they get an annual fee — 2% — of the money they manage, and a bonus for any profits they make.

On top of this, private equity bosses get to use the carried interest tax loophole, a scam that lets them treat this ordinary income as a capital gain, so they can pay half the taxes that a working stiff would pay on a regular salary. If you don’t know much about carried interest, you might think it has to do with “interest” on a loan or a deposit, but it’s way weirder. “Carried interest” is a tax regime designed for 16th century sea captains and their “interest” in the cargo they “carried”:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Private equity is a cancer. Its profits come from buying productive firms, loading them with debt, abusing their suppliers, workers and customers, and driving them into ground, stiffing all of them — and the company’s creditors. The mafia have a name for this. They call it a “bust out”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Private equity destroyed Toys R Us, Sears, Bed, Bath and Beyond, and many more companies beloved of Main Street, bled dry for Wall Street:

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/

And they’re coming for more. PE funds are “rolling up” thousands of Boomer-owned business as their owners retire. There’s a good chance that every funeral home, pet groomer and urgent care clinic within an hour’s drive of you is owned by a single PE firm. There’s 2.9m more Boomer-owned businesses going up for sale in the coming years, with 32m employees, and PE is set to buy ’em all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

PE funds get their money from “institutional investors.” It shouldn’t surprise you to learn they treat their investors no better than their creditors, nor the customers, employees or suppliers of the businesses they buy.

Pension funds, in particular, are the perennial suckers at the poker table. My parent’s pension fund, the Ontario Teachers’ Fund, are every grifter’s favorite patsy, losing $90m to Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency scam:

https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/about-us/news-and-insights/2022/ontario-teachers--statement-on-ftx/

Pension funds are neck-deep in private equity, paying steep fees for shitty returns. Imagine knowing that the reason you can’t afford your apartment anymore is your pension fund gambled with the private equity firm that bought your building and jacked up the rent — and still lost money:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/25/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-25-feb-2020/

But there’s no depth too low for PE looters to sink to. They’ve found an exciting new way to steal from their investors, a scam called a “continuation fund.” Writing in his latest newsletter, the great Matt Levine breaks it down:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/matt-levines-money-stuff-buyout-funds-buy-from-themselves

Here’s the deal: say you’re a PE guy who’s raised a $1b fund. That entitles you to a 2% annual “carry” on the fund: $20,000,000/year. But you’ve managed to buy and asset strip so many productive businesses that it’s now worth $5b. Your carry doesn’t go up fivefold. You could sell the company and collect your 20% commission — $800m — but you stop collecting that annual carry.

But what if you do both? Here’s how: you create a “continuation fund” — a fund that buys your old fund’s portfolio. Now you’ve got $5b under management and your carry quintuples, to $100m/year. Levine dryly notes that the FT calls this “a controversial type of transaction”:

https://www.ft.com/content/11549c33-b97d-468b-8990-e6fd64294f85

These deals “look like a pyramid scheme” — one fund flips its assets to another fund, with the same manager running both funds. It’s a way to make the pie bigger, but to decrease the share (in both real and proportional terms) going to the pension funds and other institutional investors who backed the fund.

A PE boss is supposed to be a fiduciary, with a legal requirement to do what’s best for their investors. But when the same PE manager is the buyer and the seller, and when the sale takes place without inviting any outside bidders, how can they possibly resolve their conflict of interest?

They can’t: 42% of continuation fund deals involve a sale at a value lower than the one that the PE fund told their investors the assets were worth. Now, this may sound weird — if a PE boss wants to set a high initial value for their fund in order to maximize their carry, why would they sell its assets to the new fund at a discount?

Here’s Levine’s theory: if you’re a PE guy going back to your investors for money to put in a new fund, you’re more likely to succeed if you can show that their getting a bargain. So you raise $1b, build it up to $5b, and then tell your investors they can buy the new fund for only $3b. Sure, they can get out — and lose big. Or they can take the deal, get the new fund at a 40% discount — and the PE boss gets $60m/year for the next ten years, instead of the $20m they were getting before the continuation fund deal.

PE is devouring the productive economy and making the world’s richest people even richer. The one bright light? The FTC and DoJ Antitrust Division just published new merger guidelines that would make the PE acquire/debt-load/asset-strip model illegal:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/07/ftc-doj-seek-comment-draft-merger-guidelines

The bad news is that some sneaky fuck just slipped a 20% FTC budget cut — $50m/year — into the new appropriations bill:

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1681830706488438785

They’re scared, and they’re fighting dirty.

I’m at San Diego Comic-Con!

Today (Jul 20) 16h: Signing, Tor Books booth #2802 (free advance copies of The Lost Cause — Nov 2023 — to the first 50 people!)

Tomorrow (Jul 21):

1030h: Wish They All Could be CA MCs, room 24ABC (panel)

12h: Signing, AA09

Sat, Jul 22 15h: The Worlds We Return To, room 23ABC (panel)

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

[Image ID: An old Punch editorial cartoon depicting a bank-robber sticking up a group of businesspeople and workers. He wears a bandanna emblazoned with dollar-signs and a top-hat.]

[1americanconservative]

@markeatsmeat

Wow. Joel Salatin, a farmer and regenerative agriculture advocate, has been offered a position within the USDA. He will advise Thomas Massie who’s agreed to be Secretary of Agriculture. Here’s the full message posted to his website today: “The deplorables and garbage people won again.  Can you believe it?  I've been contacted by the Trump transition team to hold some sort of position within the USDA and have accepted one of the six "Advisor to the Secretary" spots.  My favorite congressman, Thomas Massie from Kentucky, has agreed to go in as Secretary of Agriculture. He's been the sponsor of the PRIME ACT, which, if pushed through, would be the biggest shot across the bow of the entrenched industrial meat processing system we've seen in a century.  Let liberty ring.  Wouldn't that be a change of fortune for Big Ag?  If RFK Jr. goes in as Sec. of Health and Human Services, everything will be inverted.  Talk about the coolest turn about.  He'd be the boss of the Faucis and Francis Collins--the whole covid anti-science crowd.  Wouldn't that be a change of fortune for Big Pharma?   And if Elon Musk goes in as a Government Waste Czar, do you think he could possibly find something?    Here's an interesting tidbit.  All the income taxes in the U.S. are $2 trillion a year.  Government spending and borrowing are so out of control that if we eliminated $2 trillion from the budget, it would only set us back to 2020.  Does anyone think returning to government spending in 2020 would destroy things?  Of course not.  So all we have to do is cut federal spending to 2020 levels and we can eliminate income tax.  Period.  Done.  How would that make you feel? Most people don't know enough history to know that the federal government was to be financed entirely from tariffs and excise taxes.  In fact, as a nation we operated just fine for nearly 150 years without an income tax.  The only president who eliminated the national debt was Andrew Jackson, and he did it by eliminating the second bank of the U.S.  Nearly 100 years later we got the third bank, known as the Federal Reserve, plus the income tax.  During that time, tariffs averaged 40-50 percent.  After the income tax, tariffs dropped to an average of about 7 percent, where they remain today.  If we went back to 40 percent, like we had for nearly 150 years, we would bring production home and free our citizens from impoverishing taxes.  Dear folks, this is a watershed moment to take a creative and serious look at the sacred cows in our nation and fry some serious burgers. We don't know history.  We don't know liberty.  We don't know earthworms or aquifers or immune systems.  I'm hoping this election is an opening to discovery.  Perhaps we could even figure out how to put negative occurrences like jails, pollution, and cancer on the nation's balance sheet, as a liability rather than an asset (Gross Domestic Product--more jails?  wonderful, pour more concrete and make more jobs).   Perhaps we'll eliminate federal involvement in education, from kindergarten to college.  Make every teacher accountable to performance.  Eliminate ALL federal intervention in the food system, in farming, in energy.  The Constitution (read it) doesn't allow for any of this and it's time to examine all of it.  Shut down foreign military bases; bring them all home.  Stop ALL foreign aid, from USAID to military aid.  Sell stuff is fine; giving it isn't.  I think whatever taxes we pay should be able to be designated to certain departments.  That way we the people could support or defund departments directly.  The reason we have K street is because all our freedoms are for sale.  Eliminate government manipulation and the lobbyists all go home.  These are simple things.  Let's do it.” https://thelunaticfarmer.com/blog/11/6/2024/celebration?format=amp

[thatstormygeek]

"The US did have a national universal free school lunch program during the height of the pandemic. In the 2021-2022 school year, some 16.5 million children received free school meals.  When the program lapsed, that number decreased by 1.2 million, or 7.7 percent."

My kid was one of those. My partner was let go from his job of 16 years in the fall of 2020. A lot of means-tested programs determine eligibility based on your previous year's tax returns. On paper, we looked fine. In reality, we had no income.

There are ways to appeal and we likely could have gotten enrolled in a free- or reduced-cost meal plan, but the universal program meant we didn't have to. We were saved the paperwork and red tape and headache. And that is fucking priceless.

Of course, the GOP will whine and groan and gnash their MAGA molars. They will insist that tax cuts for billionaires is more important than food for hungry children. They’ll rush to fight the overwhelmingly popular school lunch program. They’ll rush to fight the overwhelmingly popular policy of soaking the rich. Democrats should encourage them to do that. Universal school meals is a good policy for kids, a financially sound investment, and an overwhelmingly popular program. It will excite the Democratic base; it will underline that Republicans are horrible. And it’s a program already closely associated with the Democratic ticket thanks to Walz. It would be an organic commitment born of passion and very hard to pillory as a cynical political calculation. If Harris is looking for signature policy platforms, she — and hungry children across the country — couldn’t do much better. “Just feed our children” is a good campaign slogan and good policy too.

[mariacallous]

As all journalists know fear sells better than sex. Readers want be terrified. And here in the UK, there appears to be every reason to frighten them.

A country that was overdependent on financial services has been in decline ever since the banking crash of 2008. Then, from 2010 on, the astonishing Conservative policy failures of austerity, Trussonomics and, above all, Brexit further weakened an enfeebled state.

I was a child in a happy family during the crisis of the 1970s. Like all happy children I just got on with my life. But even I picked up a little of the despair and hopelessness of the time. That feeling that there is no way out is with us again.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher came to power, and with great brutality, set the UK on a new path as she inflicted landslide defeats on Labour.

Obviously, our current Conservative government is heading for a defeat, maybe a landslide defeat.

But there is little sense that Labour will transform the country.  The far-left takeover from 2015-2019 traumatised it. As recently as 2021, everyone expected Boris Johnson to rule the UK for most of the 2020s.  

Johnson’s contempt for the rules he insisted everyone else follow and the great Truss disaster are handing Labour victory. But the centre-left appears to be the beneficiary of scandal and right-wing madness, not an ideological sea change that might inspire it and sustain it in power

Desperate to drop its crank image, battered by the conservative media establishment, fashionable opinion holds that a wee, cowering and timorous Labour party will come into power without radical policies that equal the country’s needs.

Just this once, fashionable opinion may even be right

And yet, and I know I will regret this outbreak of commercially suicidal optimism, there are reasons to believe that the UK’s position is not quite as grim as it appears.

1)    The economy may revive

Although no one has been as wrong recently as the economists and central bankers who predicted that inflation would be a transitory phenomenon, it is finally coming down. Falls in energy prices may even bring it to the 2 per cent target this month. Interest rates will eventually follow suit.

Lower interest rates mean lower government borrowing costs. They will reduce the extraordinary debt bill Labour in power will have to meet.

Chris Giles of the Financial Times calculated this week that lower government borrowing costs improve the public finances five years ahead by almost £15bn (about 0.5 per cent of national income) for every percentage point reduction.

Meanwhile the Conservatives have raised taxes so high (by UK standards) a Labour government may not need to risk unpopularity by raising them further.  Under Conservative plans the tax burden has risen from 33.1 per cent of gross domestic product in 2019-20 to 36.5 per cent in 2024-25 with further rises planned, taking it to 37.1 per cent by 2028-29.

If the 1997-2010 Labour government is any guide, Labour will be reluctant in the extreme to play into its enemies’ hands by raising taxes

It may not need to if economic growth leads to the revenue growth that would take the UK out of the rolling crisis that has afflicted it since 2016.

I wouldn’t be doing my job if I did not add that there are some pretty large caveats to make.

Economists missed the post-covid inflation surge because they forgot about politics. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine upended the European economy. An extension of the war in Ukraine or the Middle East, or, more terrifyingly, a US-China confrontation, or the return of Donald Trump could all derail a new government.

In any case the IMF predicts growth of 1.5 percent in 2025, which is nowhere near the 3 percent we need to fund the state.

And yet, with a bit of luck there is a fair chance that our fortunes may revive, albeit modestly.

2) Labour is not as scared as it looks

Near where I live in London is the Union Chapel, a vast neo-Gothic hall.

Will Hutton was there recently to launch his new book This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britian. I have interviewed Will for the podcast, which should be out in a couple of days. For now, I’ll just say his book is a classic combination of liberal and left thought, and makes the case for radical reform. Keir Starmer arrived on stage to the cheers of the crowd and endorsed Hutton’s findings.

The fashionable view is that Labour has abandoned difficult policies so as not to alienate frightened voters, and I can see why people think that way.

The grand plan for green job creation has been hacked back after fears the markets would not wear it. The majority of people in this country, and the overwhelming majority of people who vote for opposition parties, now recognise that Brexit was a disastrous error. Year in year out it drags the country down. And yet Starmer, who once argued for a second referendum, is terrified of mentioning the subject in case he upsets a minority in marginal seats.

There was a depressing little vignette a few days ago when the European Commission laid out proposals for open movement to millions of 18- to 30-year-olds from the EU and UK, allowing them to work, study and live in respective states for up to four years. Labour joined the Tories in rejecting the offer.

 It would rather squash the aspirations of young people than lay itself open to the charge that it was taking us back towards EU membership.

Yet Rachel Reeves, Keir Starmer and David Lammy talk about the need for cooperation. “Success will rest on forming new bilateral and multilateral partnerships, and forging a closer relationship with our neighbours in the European Union,” Reeves said as she explained her economic programme.

Meanwhile the UK has been ruled by Conservatives for so long our battered minds can underestimate how much the country will change when they are thrown out.

The new parliament will be filled with politicians who support renters, more home building and the EU. They will at least be interested in a land value tax and a universal basic income. Radical that ideas have been forbidden for years will soon seem normal.

3) The impetus for change

The last Labour government of 1997 to 2010 did not change economic fundamentals for what seemed at the time to be a very good reason.

 When it came to power neo-liberalism worked. Indeed, is easy to forget now how successful the ideology appeared before the crash of 2008. Politicians like Gordon Brown and Tony Blair accepted much of what Margaret Thatcher had done because they thought they had no choice. Everyone knew, or thought they knew, that this was how you ran an economy.

None of that certainty pertains today. The Brexit nationalism that succeeded neo-liberalism has failed. Starmer and Reeves will not be like Blair and Brown: they will have no good reason to cling to discredited ideas.

That does not mean they won’t cling to them for fear of the Tory press or swing voters or because of their own intellectual failings. There is no guarantee that countries will turn themselves round. The UK could go the way of Argentina or Italy.

But the Labour leadership is made of serious politicians, and I keep asking myself why would serious politicians want to preside over decline? I can’t see why they would.

As I said, maybe I will regret writing this piece. But for the moment I think we can enjoy a rare moment of optimism.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Peter Nicholas at NBC News:

WASHINGTON — Olivia Troye, a former Trump administration official who denounced him in a speech at the Democratic convention in August, was boarding a plane recently when a passenger looked at her and said: “Your days are numbered.” Not wanting to escalate a bad situation, she said nothing, but the troubling encounter is emblematic of the hostility she’s faced as a recognizable and vocal critic of Trump. Now, with Trump returning to the White House, she is beset by newfound fears that he, his appointees or supporters could try to punish her for speaking out. “I’m worried that I’ll be targeted by him and a lot of people in his circle,” Troye said in an interview. “They very much know who I am. And I’m concerned for my family.”

She has plenty of company. For some who’ve run afoul of Trump, the election results have sparked fresh worries that he may enter office looking for retribution. He’s been out of power for nearly four years, airing grievances over how he believes he’s been mistreated by law enforcement, but on Jan. 20 he’ll be sworn in with a panoply of governmental powers at his disposal. He’s made no secret of who he believes has wronged him, and as president, he could upend their lives through investigations, tax audits or courts-martial if he chose. During the campaign, Trump has made different statements about whether he might target people who’ve upset him. What he’s said can be construed in different ways. He gave a speech last year hours after he was charged with mishandling classified documents and said that if elected, he would “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the United States of America: Joe Biden and the entire Biden crime family.” In February, he dismissed any concerns that he might want vengeance, saying: “My revenge will be success.” 

He told Fox News last month in an exchange about weaponizing government against political foes: “I don’t want to do that. That’s a bad thing for the country. I don’t want to do that. I haven’t said that I would. But they have done it.”  In the same interview, he described Democratic Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, both of California, as the “enemy from within.” As for Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who has been investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents and his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, Trump said last month he should be “thrown out of the country.” (A spokesperson for Smith declined to comment). Rep. Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump ally in Congress, said he doesn’t expect any of the prosecutors to face reprisals over Trump investigations.

“I don’t think any of that’s going to happen because we’re the party who’s against political prosecution,” Jordan said Sunday on CNN. “We’re the party who’s against going after your opponents using lawfare.” None of this has a precise parallel in the modern era. President Richard Nixon had his enemies, but tended to rail against them in private. [...]

In the last term, a federal judge ruled that prison officials had taken “retaliatory” action against Trump’s former lawyer-turned-critic Michael Cohen over a book he was writing. They had transferred Cohen from home detention to prison, a move that was “retaliatory in response to Cohen desiring to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish a book critical of the President [Trump] and to discuss the book on social media,” Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote. He ordered Cohen returned to confinement in his Manhattan apartment. Security clearances can be important to people who’ve moved to the private sector, and if the Trump administration were to yank them, he could deprive them of their livelihoods.

Incoming Vice President JD Vance suggested last month that the Trump administration would pull the security clearances of the 51 people with national security experience who signed a letter before the 2020 election questioning the authenticity of emails found on a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Vance told podcaster Joe Rogan that “they still all have security clearances, I believe, which is going to change when we win.” Larry Pfeiffer, former chief of staff at the CIA who co-signed the letter, said: “There are colleagues of mine on that list who have clearances because they’re active members of companies that do business inside the intelligence community, and they will likely lose their post-government livelihoods if their clearances are pulled.” “It would be, in our view, absolutely unprecedented to pull peoples’ clearances for some opinion that they espouse,” he added.

Trump will assume office with a mandate from voters and minimal restraints. Republicans will take control of the Senate and are better positioned than Democrats to run the House given the election results that are still coming in, lifting a potential check on executive power. Separately, a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year imbued the president with sweeping immunity, removing a deterrent to possible retaliatory action.

[...] “If anyone begins to truly use the criminal justice system or other aspects of the government to target their enemies, then we are nothing but a banana republic,” said Rep. Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat who before entering office was the lead counsel in Trump’s first impeachment case. “The response you’ll get from Republicans is, ‘That’s what Joe Biden did.’ And I would ask any right-thinking person to actually say that Joe Biden weaponized the Department of Justice when his Department of Justice convicted his own son.” Not wanting to call attention to themselves or antagonize Trump, some who’ve been publicly critical in the past are staying silent for now.

[...] If Trump or his political appointees were to pursue legal retribution, career prosecutors may not find it easy to bring such cases, nor might they be willing to go along.

Critics of Donald Trump are rightly worried about being targeted for retribution for opposing his tyrannical ways.

[beardedmrbean]

WASHINGTON – Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was indicted on charges he failed to pay his income taxes, Justice Department special counsel David Weiss announced Thursday.

The announcement came months after a plea deal over tax and gun charges collapsed. Under the agreement, which a federal judge rejected, Hunter Biden was set to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018.

Biden is charged in a California federal court with three felony tax offenses and six misdemeanors. He engaged in a scheme in which he failed to pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed taxes from 2016 through 2019, and also evaded tax assessment for 2018 when he filed false returns, according to the indictment.

From 2016 to 2020, Biden spent money "on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes," according to the indictment.

Separately, Weiss has charged Hunter Biden in Delaware with three federal gun charges, basically alleging he lied about using drugs when he bought a revolver in 2018. Biden pleaded not guilty to the charges Oct. 3.

"Based on the facts and the law, if Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought," said Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Hunter Biden, in a statement.

"Now, after five years of investigating with no new evidence -- and two years after Hunter paid his taxes in full -- the U.S. Attorney has piled on nine new charges when he had agreed just months ago to resolve this matter with a pair of misdemeanors," Lowell said.

Biden faces a maximum penalty of 17 years in prison if convicted on the tax charges, the Justice Department said in a press release. It noted that actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than maximum penalties.

Congressman Jason Smith, who heads the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement that the new charges further confirm the need for Congress to conduct an impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden "in order to uncover all the facts." The charges address years in which Hunter Biden earned millions of dollars by selling access to a family brand that was built on Joe Biden's political career, he said.

What are the tax charges?

While failing to pay his taxes, Biden allegedly spent millions on an extravagant lifestyle. In 2018, for example, he made about $383,000 in payments to women and spent about $151,00 on clothes and accessories, according to the charges.

Biden faces two felony charges of filing a false return and one felony charge of tax evasion. The six misdemeanor counts are for allegedly failing to file returns or pay his taxes when required.

Prosecutors have said Hunter Biden took in $2.4 million in income in 2017 and $2.1 in 2018 through Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, a Chinese-development firm, as well as domestic business interests and legal services.

Leo Wise, an assistant U.S. attorney, said at a July court hearing that an accountant prepared Biden's taxes both of those years, but his corporate and personal taxes were not paid. During this period, Hunter Biden made large cash withdrawals and covered other expenses like car payments on a Porsche, Wise said.

Hunter Biden told the court a "third party" paid the back taxes along with interest and fees pursuant to a personal loan he has not begun to repay.

Why did the judge reject the plea agreement?

Prosecutors had recommended probation for the two misdemeanor tax charges in the plea agreement, despite each carrying a maximum sentence of 12 months in prison. The agreement over the gun charge anticipated a pretrial diversion program that would wipe the charge off Biden’s record if he complied.

House Republicans called the agreement a “sweetheart deal” for lack of jail time.

U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika rejected the deal because of a dispute between prosecutors and defense lawyers over what it meant. Biden's lawyers argued that he would be protected from prosecution in future cases, but prosecutors denied that.

[hondacivictrucknuts]

Assorted thoughts on Kamala Harris.

I voted for her in 2016, in the California Senate primary. At the time I was hanging out with BLM activists, and Harris seemed like she had potentially interesting ideas about race and crime and how to improve the situation in realistic ways (I still love my BLM friends but they have never had realistic ideas for how to make things better).

She does not seem to be corrupt or crooked in any traditional sense. Per WSJ:

Harris and Emhoff together earned $450,299 in 2023, according to a jointly filed tax return. That consists of the $218,784 Harris reported earning in wages as vice president and $174,994 Emhoff made as a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Around $6,000 came in from royalties on Harris’s books. They made $50,603 in taxable interest on bank accounts and other investments. The couple’s income is significantly lower than it was before Harris took office as vice president. Emhoff, who was a partner at the corporate law firm DLA Piper, left the practice in August 2020 before Harris was inaugurated. He made more than $1.2 million in partnership income at DLA Piper in 2020. Harris was also making more from her two books published in 2019. She has profited a total of $749,484 since 2020.

The couple has retirement assets and bank account balances worth somewhere between $3.6 million and $7.36 million. A significant portion of Harris’s and Emhoff’s net worth is held in retirement accounts, according to government ethics forms.

I.e. she and her husband have been moderately successful and are living within their resulting means.

The childless cat lady thing: I do generally agree with J.D. Vance that childless people have less stake in society and their political opinions should count for less, but it doesn't apply to every individual. Note that Joe Biden, who was a thoroughly decent and generally honest man, seems to have committed his most corrupt acts in support of his prodigal son.

She's probably of middling intellect. She went to law school at UC Hastings, where the median LSAT of a recent class was 160, about the 75th percentile. Recall that the last woman to run against Trump went to Yale Law, where the median LSAT was 173, or the 99th percentile. I don't know anything about law school histories but from what I know of the UC system in general, Hastings Law was probably worse when Harris went there. Will this matter? Other than Joe Biden and John McCain, all the presidents in my memory and everybody who ran against them were top tier intellects. Running for president and being president requires one to speak to broad audiences about many complex issues, and that's a lot easier when you understand the complex issues deeply.

The enthusiasm for her does not seem durable. So far it looks like a combination of orange man bad, relief that the candidate is someone other than Biden of the June 27 debate, and lingering vestiges of "black girl magic" from ca. 2018.

What is her position on Israel and Hamas? Sooner or later she's going to have to make that clear. That she hasn't yet alienated either the Jewish or jihadi wing of the Democratic Party seems to be mostly the result of not taking any firm stance in public.

She is a fierce prosecutor, and in her brief Senate career was best known for her questioning at hearings. I think this plays into what Black men tend to dislike about Black women, and will end up hurting her with that demographic.

Trump's nickname for her, "Border Czar Harris," is brilliant in typical Trump form. First, it's original, to her if not to him. Second, it frames her as an incompetent cop, while letting the listener do most of the work themselves. Third, even if it's not quite true, she can't argue with it because the reality is worse, i.e. that she was not actually that involved in the so-called Biden-Harris administration's immigration policy.

As a national politician, her biggest issue is abortion. What is the substantive policy there in a post-Dobbs nation? Even if she got lucky and Clarence Thomas died or something, it doesn't seem like Roberts is eager to re-instate Roe v. Wade via some other case. That leaves legislation, which Congress was unable ever to do despite a half-century of platform planks about "codifying Roe." I don't know how they could even do that now under the 10th Amendment, but what do I know.

Her fundraising ads on YouTube are somewhat scolding: "today, not tomorrow,..." Compare J.D. Vance saying If you can't afford to donate because of the Biden economy, that's fine, take care of your family. I guess it's working for now but can it last 3+ months?

[simply-ivanka]

What the Choice of Tim Walz Says About Kamala Harris

In her first presidential-level decision, the Vice President bends to progressive pressure.

Donald Trump did Democrats a favor by choosing a running mate who reinforced his base rather than reaching out to swing voters. Kamala Harris has now returned the favor in selecting Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the progressive favorite, as her pick for Vice President.

The choice that scared Republicans was popular Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a swing state crucial to an Electoral College victory. But Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, was the target of an extraordinary and nasty campaign against him by the Democratic left. He was too pro-Israel and had upset unions by showing rhetorical support for school vouchers.

Ms. Harris appears to have wilted under this pressure, perhaps fearing protests at the Democratic convention in Chicago this month. She went with Mr. Walz instead, and there goes Mr. Trump’s hope of flipping the decisive swing state of Minnesota. That’s a joke, since the Land of 10,000 Liberals has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1976.

Mr. Walz’s progressive bona fides will please Sen. Bernie Sanders and the teachers unions. But his governing record will be fodder for Mr. Trump. And picking him is a bad omen about the ability, or even willingness, of Ms. Harris to defy her party’s left.

***

Mr. Walz, age 60, has a plain-spoken personality and an appealing Midwestern background. He joined the Army National Guard at 17, graduated from a state college, and became a high-school teacher and football coach. He was elected to Congress in 2006 from a rural district, and one selling point to Ms. Harris is that he might appeal to Trump voters.

But as Governor since 2019 Mr. Walz has moved Minnesota sharply to the left. He still wears a baseball cap and work jacket, but since Democrats gained control of the entire Legislature in 2023, he’s governed more like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, including:

• Increasing taxes, though Minnesota already has the fifth-highest top income-tax rate among the states, 9.85% at $193,000 of earnings for a single filer. Mr. Walz added a 1% surtax on net investment income above $1 million, while reducing deductions, and the Governor wanted more.

Minnesota is a rare state that still levies a death tax, up to 16%, on top of the federal 40% rate, which is one reason the state is losing taxpayers to better climes.

• Making an estimated 81,000 illegal immigrants in the state eligible for driver’s licenses, along with health insurance through the MinnesotaCare public marketplace.

• Funding “the North Star Promise Program, which provides free college for students with a family income under $80,000,” including illegal immigrants.

• Creating a state system for paid family and medical leave, capped at a combined 20 weeks a year and funded by a 0.88% payroll tax.

• Mandating that public utilities generate 80% carbon-free electricity by 2030, ramping up to 100% by 2040. He’s a fervent believer in “climate action.”

• Subsidizing electric vehicles by “requiring EV charging infrastructure within or adjacent to new commercial and multi-family buildings,” as the Governor’s office bragged.

• Passing one of the nation’s most permissive abortion statutes that has essentially no limits and no age consideration for minors.

• Declaring Minnesota to be a “trans refuge,” with a law saying that the state will ignore a “court order for the removal of a child issued in another state because the child’s parent or guardian assisted the child in receiving gender-affirming care in this state.”

• Establishing automatic voter registration and letting Minnesotans sign up for a permanent absentee ballot option.

No wonder Mr. Sanders is a fan. Yet now the vetting will begin in earnest. Mr. Walz’s response to the 2020 riots, after George Floyd’s killing, will be scrutinized in particular, as poor areas in Minneapolis burned and many business owners lost everything.

Did he hesitate to send in troops? Why is Minnesota losing residents to other states? Republicans are circulating remarks by Mr. Walz acknowledging what he calls his white privilege and urging his party: “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

***

Despite her four years as Vice President, Ms. Harris is largely unknown to most voters. Democrats want to keep it that way, hoping she can dodge media interviews and ride a gauzy theme about “the future” in a campaign sprint of a mere 100 days.

But her choice of a running mate is her first presidential-level decision, and it confirms the views she expressed in 2019 when she ran for the White House as a left-wing Democrat. Choosing Mr. Walz suggests that the real Kamala Harris is the one who wants Medicare for All and to eliminate cash bail. Voters who don’t like Mr. Trump might decide he’s still better than signing up for that.

Appeared in the August 7, 2024, print edition as 'Kamala Harris’s Revealing VP Choice'.

[theblogtini]

Daily mail has an article about the 10 million dollar donation being from an anonymous donor from SCVF

Summary:

In 2020 Archewell raised less than $50k and didn't even have to file tax returns

In 2021 they received a lump sum donation of $10million (77% of their intake that year) - and it's speculated that it came from Harry (by way of the SVCF as an anonymous donation) from his book deal advance.

So... if Harry is personally funding Archewell via advances, what's his plan for the next few years? He can't keep making $10million donations w/o securing multiple large advances *every year* which is unlikely...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Here are just two of the corporate giveaways hidden in the rushed, must-pass, end-of-year budget bill

Yesterday, Congress finally voted through the must-pass, end-of-year budget bill. As has become routine, this bill was stalled right until the final moment, so that Congressjerks could cram the 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion package with special favors for their donors, at the expense of the rest of the country.

This year’s budget package included a couple of especially egregious doozies, which were reported out for The American Prospect by Lee Harris (who covered a grotesque retirement giveaway for the ultra-rich) and Doraj Facundo (who covered a safety giveaway to Boeing and its lethal fleet of 737 Max airplanes).

Let’s start with the retirement scam. The budget bill includes Rep Richie Neal’s [DINO-MA] SECURE Act 2.0, which gives savers with retirement funds until age 75 to cash out their retirement savings — netting an extra three years of tax-free growth for the lucky, tiny minority with substantial retirement savings. This follows on Neal’s SECURE Act 1.0 of 2019, when the age was raised from 70.5 to 72.

The tax-exempt retirement savings account is a Carter-era bargain that replaced real pensions — ones that guaranteed that you wouldn’t starve or freeze to death when you retired — with accounts that let people gamble on the stock market, to be the suckers at Wall Street’s poker table:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

The market-based gambler’s pension is a catastrophic failure. Half of Americans have no retirement savings. Of the half that have any savings, the vast majority have almost nothing saved:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Retirement_Accounts;demographic:all;population:all;units:have

All in all, America has a $7 trillion retirement savings shortfall:

https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/IB_19-16.pdf

But for a tiny minority of the ultra-rich, tax-free savings accounts like ROTH IRAs are a means of avoiding even the paltry capital gains tax that you have to pay if you own things for a living, rather than doing things for a living. Propublica’s IRS Files revealed how ghouls like Peter Thiel avoided tax on billions in “passive income” by abusing tax-free savings accounts that were supposed to benefit the “middle class”:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#thiels-gambit

Meanwhile, Social Security is crumbling, thanks to a sustained attack on it by the business lobby and its friends in both parties. Progressive Dems had sought to amend SECURE Act 2.0 by inserting some clauses to shore up Social Security, and none of these were included in the final bill.

One of the fixes that died was the Savings Penalty Elimination Act, introduced by Senators Sherrod Brown [D-OH] and Rob Portman [R-OH]. This act would have tweaked the means-testing for Supplemental Security Income, which supports 8m low-income disabled adults and kids. Right now, you can’t collect SSI if you have $2k in the bank, a limit that hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since the 1980s (adjusted for inflation, $2k in 1980 is $7226.00 in 2022).

The $2k savings cap means that you have to be substantially below the poverty level to receive $585/month in SSI assistance — this being the only source of income for the majority of SSI recipients. Means-testing is a self-immolating fetish for corporate Dems and in retrospect, this betrayal seems inevitable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/03/utopia-of-rules/#in-triplicate

(Notice how no one proposes means-testing billionaires when they get PPP loans or hundreds of millions in IRS “refunds” — like Trump, who paid substantially less tax than you did:)

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/21/trump-income-tax-returns-detailed-in-new-report-.html

And it was a betrayal: progressive Dems bargained with Neal and co not to publicly condemn SECURE Act 2.0 if they could get some concessions for the 8 million poorest disabled people in America. In the end, Neal rug-pulled them. Of course he did! This is Richie Fucking Neal, the best friend the Trump tax giveaway ever had:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/13/youre-still-the-product/#richie-neal

As with everything Neal touches, this screws poor people in multiple ways. First, it leaves the SSI cap intact. But it also creates a giant unfunded liability in the federal budget. Technically, there’s no reason this should lead to cuts. The US Treasury can’t run out of dollars, and giveaways to the rich are only mildly inflationary, since rich people put their money in the bank and mostly spend it on buying politicians, not goods.

But because of the delusion that currency producers like the US Treasury have the same constraints as currency users like you and me, Congress will need to come up with “Pay Fors” in future budgets to “make up for” the money they’re giving to rich people with SECURE Act 2.0. Dollars to toenail clippings, they’ll do that by hacking away at the tattered remains of the US social safety net.

Fear not, you don’t need to be a desperately poor disabled person or child to get fucked over by late additions to a 4,000 page must-pass bill! If you can afford to get on an airplane, Congress has something for you, too!

Remember when Boeing (the monopoly US airplane manufacturer that squandered $43b on stock buybacks and had to borrow $14b from the US public to survive the pandemic) told the FAA that it could self-certify its 737 Max airplanes, and then killed hundreds and hundreds of people with its defective planes?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#boeing

The 737 Max was unsafe for many reasons, but one glaring factor was the fact that Boeing sold some of its core safety as “extras” — like they were downloadable content for your Fortnite character — leading to multiple crashes in which all lives were lost:

https://apnews.com/article/ethiopia-indonesia-accidents-ap-top-news-international-news-140576a8e9d4449eae646c8c479fdc3a

Boeing was forced to take the 737 Max out of service, but it eventually brought the plane back, “fixing” the problems by renaming the “737 Max” to the “737 8”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/20/dubious-quantitative-residue/#737-8

Supposedly, Boeing has been diligently working on fixing the problems with its defective jets that can’t be addressed by a rebranding campaign. This wasn’t voluntary: the 2020 Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act required Boeing — and every other manufacturer whose aircraft were certified by the FAA — to meet new minimum safety standards by December 27, 2022.

Every manufacturer met that deadline, except Boeing, and someone amended the budget bill to give the company three more years to meet these security standards. Critically, the new security measures, when they come, will be certified by an FAA that Republicans will control, thanks to the House changing hands.

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/government-spending-bill-waives-aircraft-safety-deadline/

Boeing is slated to ship 1,000 new 737 Maxes, which will fetch $50b for the company. Many of these planes will fly directly over my house, which is on the approach path for Burbank airport. Southwest Air flies dozens of 737 Maxes right over my roof every single day.

As Facundo points out, the FAA can ill afford any more hits to its credibility. It was once the case that if the FAA certified an aircraft, every other country in the world would waive any further certification, so trusting were they of the FAA’s judgment. That is no longer the case: today, the European Aviation Safety Agency does its own aircraft testing, holding jets that enter EU airspace to a higher standard than the FAA does for US planes.

It’s just another reminder that the US doesn’t have “corporate criminals” because the US doesn’t have any meaningful enforcement for corporate crimes. In America, we love our companies like we love our billionaires: too big to fail and too big to jail:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card

Image: Ryan Lee (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/190784293@N05/50862532686

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Henry Wadey (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flames_%2858765896%29.jpeg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A living room scene, featuring a sofa in the background and a sofa in the foreground. A man's hand reaches into the frame to lift up the corner of the sofa. A broom enters the frame to sweep a pile of dirt under the rug. Mixed in with the dirt are a crashed WWI biplane with Southwest Airlines livery, and an old lady in a rocking chair.]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Class Divide in the US:

Stephan Schwartz: "Seventy percent of Americans are feeling financially stressed. One in seven American children has hunger issues. But for the oligarchs times have never been better; they are almost a third richer than they were three years ago. 

Because of our grotesquely skewed tax system, the United States has become two very different countries. Not the Red Blue schism, although that is part of it, but wealth inequality so great that it has created a wealth aristocracy made up of the 5.3 million millionaires who represent the gentry, and 770 billionaires who have become a financial nobility. And then there is a shrinking middle class and several hundred million peasants. If that sounds medieval financially it is.

As the deadline for Americans to file federal income tax returns fast approaches, Oxfam America on Friday renewed calls for taxing the ultrarich while publishing an analysis showing America’s growing number of billionaires saw their wealth increase by nearly one-third since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and by nearly 90% over the past decade.

“Wealth inequality in the U.S. is more extreme and dangerous than income inequality; and we need to change our approach, so we effectively tax wealth as well as income,” the charity said in an introduction to the report, Tax Wealth, Tackle Inequality.

Based on Forbes data, the report found that “U.S. billionaires are almost a third richer (over a trillion dollars, in real terms) than they were at the onset of the pandemic in 2020,” while overall U.S. billionaire wealth has soared 86% since 2013.The number of U.S. billionaires—of which there are now more than 700—is also nearly 60% higher than it was a decade ..."

[Alter Net]

[mariacallous]

“On their 2020 income tax returns, Trump and his wife Melania paid no federal income taxes and claimed a refund of $5.47 million.”

The report reveals that Trump on his federal tax returns declared negative income in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2020, and that he paid a total of $1,500 in income taxes for the years 2016 and 2017.

I hope he gets Capone'd.

[mightyflamethrower]

Residents who fled Multnomah County, Oregon, in 2020 took over $1 billion in income as they searched for a better life in other areas.

The news is according to an analysis of data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Oregonian reported Sunday.

“Numbers gleaned from annual income tax returns provide the most detailed information available on where Americans are moving — and taking their money,” the outlet said:

The latest figures, based on income tax returns filed in 2020 and 2021, show that Multnomah County lost a net 14,257 tax filers and their dependents. The county’s resulting net income loss topped $1 billion for the first time in the decade that the IRS has tracked moving data. The pandemic appeared to prod relatively higher earners — more likely to hold jobs that can be done remotely — to relocate than in pre-pandemic years. The average income of Multnomah County residents who moved away in 2020, the most recent figure available, was 14% higher than of those who moved the year prior, according to The Oregonian/OregonLive’s analysis.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Census found almost three percent of Portland’s population decided to leave between 2020 and 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported in June.

“The drop of about 17,400 to 635,000 was the sixth largest decline among the 50 largest cities,” the article said, noting that local leaders are now desperate to keep people from moving out.

In addition, “Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat, has come under increasing pressure to address rising violent crime and sprawling homeless encampments,” the Journal article stated.

Portland families were reportedly packing up and moving elsewhere because of rampant homelessness and crime plaguing the area, according to a report from August 2022, reported by Breitbart News.

“Portland experienced a massive spike in its homicide rate from 2019 to 2021, recording a 207 percent increase. During that same timeframe, frequent ANTIFA riots were also occurring in the downtown area,” the article said.

In May, KPTV said Portland was “one of the fastest-shrinking U.S. cities.” A reporter for the outlet noted people said data backs up the fact that “Portland just is not what it used to be now.”