“Democracy is like blowing your nose. You may not do it well, but it's something you ought to do yourself.”
—G.K. Chesterton
Never mind negative gearing. Australians pushed $67b through this tax vehicle
How a global data dive uncovered hundreds of honorary consuls linked to crimes or scandals
One Sunday in March 1888, former President Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his diary, “This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.” Hayes offered this private admission at the peak of the Gilded Age, when, as the historian Richard White put it, “corruption suffused government and the economy.” Businessmen amassed fortunes never seen before in American history and demanded government officials aid them in expanding those fortunes further.
Mike Johnson’s shutdown convo with Elon Musk has an ominous historical parallel
The Big Shining Lie: We’re Better Off Now–No, We’re Poorer, Much Poorer Charles Smith, Of Two Minds
ParlInfo - Surveillance Legislation (Confirmation of Application) Bill 2024
Surveillance
Legislation (Confirmation of Application) Bill 2024 – Parliament of Australia
Case A24/2024 - High Court
of Australia
Questions
of Law Reserved (1 and 2 of 2023) | Office of the Director of Public
Prosecutions
Top lawyers question law that stops Operation Ironside High Court challenge
How Wall Street Billionaires Avoid Paying Medicare Taxes
ProPublica – Reporting Highlights
- Tax Dodge: Most working Americans have to pay Medicare taxes, but some of the richest figures on Wall Street have found a way to opt out, a ProPublica investigation found.
- Accidental Loophole: Nearly 50 years ago, Congress tried to fix one financial abuse but unwittingly created an obscure loophole that these billionaires exploit to avoid Medicare taxes.
- Battling Abuse: The IRS only recently got tough on people it viewed as abusing the loophole, but it is unclear if the agency will be able to end the practice.
- But high-priced tax advisers, wielding a once-obscure bit of the tax code, found a way to make that obligation vanish. By carefully channeling profits through a company in a way that invokes that obscure provision, even a Steve Cohen, with a tax return showing he received hundreds of millions in profits from his hedge fund, can exempt that income from Medicare tax.
Over the past three years, ProPublica has mined the tax records of the rich to detail the many ways they avoid taxes. We’ve focused on basic structural features of the U.S. system that advantage them.
We’ve uncovered maneuversof questionable legality that seem to have escaped the notice of the IRS. The Medicare tax loophole occupies a gray area. The IRS definitely knows about it, but it’s unclear if the agency will be able to stop it. The potential of the loophole first surfaced in the 1990s, and the IRS soon expressed the view that active business owners shouldn’t be allowed to exploit it.
It was only in recent years, however, that the agency got tough. Today, the IRS continues to battle what it considers a serious abuse, waging a rare, long-shot campaign to prevent some of the nation’s wealthiest citizens from using the loophole.
Romanian police raid houses linked to vote irregularities probe, prosecutors say France24.
Commentary: The ‘Five Eyes’ spy alliance should let Japan join Channel News Asia
Stay sober and have a jolly holiday season with these expert tips AP
Annotations: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens JSTOR Daily
The Ukrainian Black Hole Gathers the Storm of World War III Gordon Hahn, Russian and Eurasian Politics