the G.O.P. still ended up with a pair of bills that look, once again, like the caricature of Reagan-era Republicanism the party has become: heavy with tax cuts for corporations and the heirs of millionaires, lighter on relief for the middle class, lighter still for the working class, with a complicated slew of provisions and score-gaming expiration dates that have made it hard to discern whether lots of non-rich Americans (including the plan’s supposed model beneficiary, a family making $60,000 with multiple kids) even get a tax cut at all.
..The Republicans seem to be trying, in their none-too-competent and ideologically straitjacketed way, to cut taxes for two major constituencies, employers and middle-class families, while paying for some of these tax cuts by goring well-off professionals in high-tax liberal states.
.. The (much more modest) Republican proposal to tax the richest university endowments is admittedly more of a targeted culture-war jab.. the problem is what the Republicans are doing with the money. Specifically (and entirely predictably), they are plowing way too much of it into tax cuts for their donors, and not enough into tax cuts for everybody else... Senate Republicans seem to be turning to a more complicated and irresponsible alternative instead — one that gets more money for parents and middle-income taxpayers up front by making all their tax cuts sunset after 2025 (even as the corporate cuts are made permanent).. And it tells you something depressing, if unsurprising, about the G.O.P. that this combination is apparently vastly preferable to asking the donors and ideologues to just accept half a corporate-tax-cut loaf... At some point the party’s moderates and would-be reformers have to take a stand for the wild-and-crazy proposition that the Republican Party should pass legislation that has some chance of being popular and isn’t insanely jury-rigged.
How Corporations and the Wealthy Avoid Taxes (and How to Stop Them)
The United States loses, according to my estimates, close to $70 billion a year in tax revenue due to the shifting of corporate profits to tax havens. That’s close to 20 percent of the corporate tax revenue that is collected each year. This is legal.
Meanwhile, an estimated $8.7 trillion, 11.5 percent of the entire world’s G.D.P., is held offshore by ultrawealthy households in a handful of tax shelters, and most of it isn’t being reported to the relevant tax authorities. This is… not so legal.
.. In 2015, $15.5 billion in profits made their way to Google Ireland Holdings in Bermuda even though Google employs only a handful of people there... 63 percent of all the profits made outside of the United States by American multinationals are now reported in six low- or zero-tax countries:
- the Netherlands,
- Bermuda,
- Luxembourg,
- Ireland,
- Singapore and
- Switzerland.
.. After learning Irish authorities were going to close loopholes it had used, Apple asked a Bermuda-based law firm, Appleby, to design a similar tax shelter on the English Channel island of JerseyAppleby duly obliged, and Jersey became the new home of the (previously Irish) companies Apple Sales International and Apple Operations International... In 2015, the Swiss Leaks revealed the owners of bank accounts at HSBC Switzerland, and in 2016 the Panama Papers revealed those of the shell companies created by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. These showed that 50 percent of the wealth held in tax havens belongs to households with more than $50 million in net wealth.. In the Paradise Papers, we see that these are not only Russian oligarchs or Belgian dentists who use tax havens, but rich Americans too... For a long time, the bulk of it was held in Switzerland, but a fast-growing fraction is now in Hong Kong, Singapore and other emerging havens.The most compelling way to do this would be to create comprehensive registries recording the true individual owners of real estate and financial securities, including equities, bonds and mutual fund shares... One common objection to financial registries is that they would impinge on privacy. Yet countries have maintained property records for land and real estate for decades... comprehensive registries would make it possible to not only reduce tax evasion, but also curb money laundering, monitor international capital flows, fight the financing of terrorism and better measure inequality.
Bad Boies
The renowned liberal attorney threw ethics out the window to help Harvey Weinstein.
Boies told Farrow that he didn’t think this was a conflict, explaining that he was doing the Times a favor by pushing the newspaper to vet its Weinstein coverage carefully. “If evidence could be uncovered to convince the Times the charges should not be published, I did not believe, and do not believe, that that would be averse to the Times’ interest,” he told the New Yorker.
.. In the Trump era, we often measure justice along one simple axis, one that pits the president and his bullying New York attack dogs against legal rules and norms. But there is and has always been a second axis, one populated by respectable, principled attorneys who will work against the rule of law when they are working for the extremely wealthy. Consider Jamie Gorelick, the longtime Democratic activist and deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton, who represented Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in their business affairs. While Gorelick stepped back in July from handling anything related to Kushner and the Russia probe, her view has always been that everyone deserves quality representation.It is a long-standing American legal tradition dating back to John Adams that even contemptible people deserve good representation. The problem comes when counsel for the 1 percent finds themselves helping their clients contract out of, or bully their way around, the legal rules imposed upon the rest of us.wealthy to fail.What Boies seems to have done here is the very opposite of fighting for the rule of law. Rather, it looks an awful lot like aiding and abetting a man determined to bypass legal sanctions with money, privilege, and terror. At the very least, he created an attorney-client bubble around grotesque abuse. But Boies also should have known what lawyers and investigators were doing to vulnerable women in the interest of protecting Weinstein. In conceding that he failed to supervise or manage a raft of outside investigators, Boies was also admitting that Weinstein essentially bought his way around his legal relationship with his lawyer, then deployed that same legal relationship for cover.
There are many, many legal stratagems that allow society’s wealthiest to buy their way out of criminal and civil sanctions. In Weinstein’s case, those stratagems have included oppressive nondisclosure agreements and legal threats and attempts to confuse and harass witnesses. Anyone who has watched Donald Trump ooze his way out from under oodles of lawsuits knows that there have always been Platinum Elite workarounds for the rule of law—and lawyers willing to fly you there. This week we learned that Boies may very well be one of them.
What the corruption arrests in Saudia Arabia mean for the economy
Ryssdal: One of the other things, though, that that IPO, if and when it happens — and I should point out here that President Trump brought it up with King when they spoke this weekend — one of the things that IPO will bring is transparency and sunlight into the internal workings of the Saudi royal family and its finances, which has to be on Mohammed bin Salman’s mind.
Waldman: Clearly. Saudi Aramco, the oil company, is a slush fund for the royal family. The thousands of princes depend on oil revenue directly for their lifestyles. This is something of a warning shot to them, I believe, this corruption roundup, or anti-corruption roundup, saying to them, “Listen, your lifestyles are indeed threatened by what we’re planning to do in this kingdom, and you better not complain too much about it. We’re moving on.” So I do absolutely think this is all connected.
Ryssdal: One of the big names among the crowd that was arrested this past weekend is Alwaleed bin Talal. He’s a holder of, or has been owner of, Citigroup stock, and Ford, and Hewlett-Packard and Twitter. He is somebody in the world of international investments.
Waldman: He certainly is. I think Bloomberg ranks him in something like the 50th wealthiest person on the globe. We’re certainly not aware of specific allegations against any of these people, but particularly against him. On the other hand, the public has wondered for years both in Saudi Arabia and overseas, where did all that investment capital come from in the first place? So it could be an interesting file to open up.