In what is believed to be an Australian first a Bondi man has won division one lotto twice in five days!
My mates at Iceberg are having more fun with few millions than most of the billionaires ;-) 
It is Saturday night in late April at the luxurious Mar-a-Lago resort in the billionaires' playground of West Palm Beach, Florida. Inside the dining room – a faithful replica of that in the 15th-century Palazzo Chigi in Rome – the 50 or so formally dressed guests have risen from their tables to applaud the President of the United States as he arrives for his 8.15pm dinner appointment.
Donald Trump pauses at the door and momentarily soaks in the applause before waving and calling out "enjoy your dinner!" to the gathering of super rich and Florida elite. The President then strides purposefully towards Anthony Pratt, who has been given a table directly next to his, and says without hesitation: "Anthony, great to see you and thanks for the ad!"
The ad was a full-page advertisement placed in The Wall Street Journal that
same day headlined with the words "Making good on our pledge" and
"Creating jobs in the Midwest". Next to a photo of Pratt leaning in
towards the camera, along with his signature, the accompanying text sets
out how, in 2017, Pratt Industries pledged to invest $US2 billion to
create 5000 manufacturing jobs in the United States. "And today, we are
breaking ground on a billion-dollar investment in a new paper mill and
box factory in Wapakoneta, Ohio," it reads, with more box factories
planned for Indiana and Pennsylvania. Pratt supports Trump more than
most, and he does so in a very outward manner.
The billionaire
box-maker quickly motions for his dining companion (your correspondent)
to step forward to meet the President, at which time we inform Trump
that Pratt tops this year's Financial Review Rich List.*2018 AFR Rich List: How Donald Trump helps Anthony Pratt get richer ..
Marty Cohen: the man behind CBA’s sales culture unveiled
"Rah-rah-style motivational forums" and a $40 million chit
for US consultant Marty Cohen helped to shape the aggressive
cross-selling Commonwealth Bank sales culture which led, in part, to the
customer disaster now unfolding at the banking Royal Commission. Michael Sainsbury reports.
Stacking boards with mates and creating group think mentality a recipe for disaster
Lone brave journalist exposes 1MDB corruption
Independent journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown, at the risk of her safety and without the protection of a news organization, has exposed the flow of billions of public Malaysian dollars from the government’s 1MDB development fund to the country’s top leaders and many others.Daniel N. Shaviro (NYU) presents Gilded Age Literature and Inequality today at Stanford:
We
are an intensely social species, and often a rivalrous one, prone to
measuring ourselves in terms of others, and often directly against
others. Accordingly, relative position matters to our sense of
wellbeing, although excluded from standard economic models that look
only at the utility derived from own consumption of commodities plus
leisure. For example, people can have deep-seated psychological
responses to inequality and social hierarchy, creating the potential for
extreme wealth differences to invoked feelings of superiority and
inferiority, or dominance and subordination, that may powerfully affect
how we relate to each other.
The
tools that one needs to understand how and why this matters include the
sociological and the qualitative. In my book-in-progress, Dangerous Grandiosity: Literary Perspectives on High-End Inequality Through the First Gilded Age, I use the particular tool of in-depth studies of particular classic works of literature (from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice through Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier and The Titan)
that offer suggestive insights regarding the felt experiences around
high-end inequality at different times and from different perspectives. A
successor volume will carry this account through the twentieth century
and up to the present.
Heather M. Field (UC-Hastings), A Taxonomy for Tax Loopholes, 55 Hous. L. Rev. 545 (2018) (reviewed here):
Democrats,
Republicans, media commentators and even academics denounce “tax
loopholes.” Speakers may think that they are talking about the same
things, but this article demonstrates that people have widely divergent
views about what tax loopholes are. Thus, people criticizing loopholes
often talk past each other and engage in the tax equivalent of
schoolyard name-calling. The response to this problem is not, however,
to try to define the concept of “tax loopholes” with precision. Such an
endeavor is pointless. Instead, this article provides a taxonomy for
translating the rhetoric of “tax loopholes” into meaningful tax policy
discourse. This taxonomy posits that any reference to a “tax loophole”
should be understood in two dimensions — the tax policy objection and
the target of the criticism. Using numerous examples from the
popular/political discourse and the academic literature, this article
catalogs alternatives on each dimension. Categorizing any purported “tax
loophole” using this taxonomy provides a more productive framing of
whatever critique is implied by any use of the “loophole” label, thereby
enabling the elevation of the quality of the conversation about the
individual tax preference. This taxonomy may be particularly useful now,
as our political leaders embark on efforts to reform the tax law,
because the taxonomy can help us better understand and advance the
debate that will certainly surround those reform efforts.
