Cicero, the first intellectual to succeed in politics, was more rhetorician than philosopher. He owed his rise to his sense of humour
The rich are different, and here’s why - They have better tax advisors
Some of Australia’s highest earners pay no tax, and it costs them a fortune
Friends of Complexities - "The Australian tax system is as complex as it is unfair," said
"The complexity isn't an accident, its the cloak behind which an enormous amount of tax is avoided,"
Millionaires who paid no tax and the richest and poorest postcodes revealed
Could your local accountant or tax agent be mixed up in financial crime?
It’s quite possible: many Aussies who ‘enable’ serious financial crime are actually just ordinary accountants and lawyers, a senior tax office official and a criminology expert have revealed.
Serious financial crime, which costs Australia around $47 billion a year, is a “highly complex problem” which is driven by various groups of people with different kinds of motivation, said Australian Institute of Criminology deputy director Dr Rick Brown.
One of these groups are what’s described as “enablers” who assist “hardcore criminals” in making money by rorting the system, said Brown – but often these ordinary people are just ‘suburban’ lawyers or accountants who don’t even know they’re facilitating crime.
“In some cases, it would be naivety, not being aware that actually they're getting involved in organised crime because perhaps they haven't done their due diligence in terms of knowing your customer and who they're dealing with,” Brown said on the ATO podcast Tax inVoice.
The good news is, most professionals do the right thing, and the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) keeps in touch with industry associations and organisations like the Tax Practitioners Board to “weed out those few bad apples”, said ATO deputy commissioner Will Day.
“But we also know ... it's relatively easy to be infiltrated,” Day said.
ATO reveals how ordinary ‘suburban’ Aussies become tax criminals
The ugly truth behind your fancy rewards credit card Vox
Florida sugar mill worker, 86, fatally shoots boss after he’s fired, sheriff says NBC
We don’t know how to get dressed anymoreWaPo. “We”? “Essential workers” — remember them? — have never forgotten, since they go to work every day:
Justice Department withdraws FBI subpoena for USA TODAY records ID’ing readers USA Today. The lead: “The FBI has withdrawn a subpoena demanding records from USA TODAY that would identify readers of a February story about a southern Florida shootout that killed two agents and wounded three others.”
Diverse six-justice majority rejects broad reading of computer-fraud law SCOTUSblog
YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: The Stimulus Checks Really Worked Daily Poster
The jobs went, the drugs moved in’: America’s addiction nightmare –
in pictures Guardian
The Definition of Death, by David DeGrazia.
White House to discuss supply chain r, but there’s no ‘magic bullet’ for US reliance on China and other countries, Biden administration says South China Morning Post
Are we better off? Noahopinion. All based on various sorts of averages. Totally missed costs of inequality (which even exacts a health cost), much shorter average job tenures (ie, insecurity), and the deterioration in pretty much all measures of well being, like life expectancy, use of anti-depressants, incarceration rates, teen births.
CEOs Are the Problem Project Syndicate
A horizontal suggests a landscape. A square evokes timelessness. A circle, the universe itself. How to frame our experiences? ... more »
Brian Galle (Georgetown; Google Scholar) & Murat Mungan (George Mason; Google Scholar), Predictable Punishments, 11 UC Irvine L. Rev. 227 (2020):
Economic analyses of both crime and regulation writ large suggest that the subjective cost or value of incentives is critical to their effectiveness. But reliable information about subjective valuation is scarce, as those who are punished have little reason to report honestly. Modern “big data” techniques promise to overcome this information shortfall but perhaps at the cost of individual privacy and the autonomy that privacy’s shield provides.
This Article argues that regulators can and should instead rely on methods that remain accurate even in the face of limited information. Building on a formal model we present elsewhere, we show that variability in a defendant’s subjective costs of punishment should be a key consideration in any incentive system, whether it be criminal law or otherwise. Our model suggests that this variability can be mitigated with some familiar and well-tested tools. For instance, in some situations, ex ante taxes on behavior that create a risk of harm can be preferable to ex post punitive regimes, such as the criminal law, that target primarily harms that actually arise.
Because of what we show to be the centrality of variation in subjective costs, we also argue that long-standing approaches to criminal theory and practice should be reconsidered. For example, economic theory strongly prefers fines over other forms of punishment. We argue that this claim is typically right—indeed, it is understated—when applied to firms. But fines can be the wrong choice for incentivizing most humans, while ex ante taxes are a promising alternative. We also show that this same analysis counsels that, if prison is the most viable punishment available, it can be more efficient to make prisons safer and less alienating
