A Redditor Criticized ICE. Trump Is Trying to Unmask Them by Dragging the Company to a Secret Grand Jury. The Intercept
America’s New Tax Mantra: ‘The IRS Isn’t Going to Catch Me’
The battered Internal Revenue Service shed thousands of enforcement employees—and more taxpayers appear eager to cheat
A clever new paper puts concrete numbers to the taxes paid by members of the Forbes 400.
According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the richest of rich Americans pay an average tax rate of 34 percent, higher than any other cohort’s. In reality, as everyone has long known, they pay less than that. A new study by some of the country’s most preeminent economists has finally put concrete numbers to the disparity. The average rate that the richest Americans pay, they find, sits at just 24 percent. That number has fallen markedly in recent years and will remain low for the foreseeable future, thanks to Donald Trump.
The new study is a technical feat, combining data on corporate earnings, private wealth, and individual tax payments. And it confirms that the country’s tax code is regressive, not progressive, at the very top. Every year, America’s richest citizens paper over their earnings with losses and use other creative accounting strategies to shelter their fortunes, as the tax code allows them to do. As a result, the country’s billionaires pay lower tax rates than many of its millionaires do. Indeed, they pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals.
The study, by the UC Berkeley economists Akcan Balkir, Emmanuel Saez, Danny Yagan, and Gabriel Zucman, examines the wealth of Americans on the Forbes 400—not the 1 percent or even 0.01 percent, but the 0.0002 percent, a group including Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Trump himself. As of this year, these individuals have a minimum net worth of $3.3 billion.
To study these billionaires and their wealth-management strategies, Saez, Zucman, and their co-authors could not examine their personal tax returns. The IRS’s strict data-privacy rules would prevent any academic from doing so. Instead, they received anonymized IRS data files, provided only to vetted researchers, on the richest 400 Americans by wealth, rather than earnings. The data were pooled so that the researchers couldn’t connect specific numbers to any particular individual. The academics augmented the pooled statistics with information culled from the annual filings made by public companies, government data on gift and estate taxes, and IRS data on the earnings of private firms. . .
Senior NHS officials warned staff over criticising rollout of Palantir platform
The NHS analytics official had made no secret of his concerns about Palantir’s Federated Data Platform, questioning the need for the technology after its rollout last year at the hospital where he works. Then he received a phone call that caught him off guard: “If you criticise the FDP one more time, you are going to lose your job.”
The words of warning came from a senior NHS England official who had been involved in procuring the platform that brings together disparate NHS data — such as number of patients waiting per clinician, operating theatre schedules and staff rosters — into a single system.
What’s A law firm to do when client files leak on the Dark Web
Richard Freiberg CPA – “When a law firm experiences a data breach the consequences extend far beyond reputational harm. Increasingly, attackers exfiltrate entire client files including documents filed under seal or protected by attorney–client privilege—and post them on the dark web. and law firms must navigate a complex mix of ethical duties, procedural obligations, and legal protections. Drawing on ABA Formal Opinion 483, the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, and relevant case law…”
It is harder than ever to get quality journalism these days. Even basic factual information can be scarce, now that the Epstein Class has bought up all the legacy media while their dementia puppet in the White House has forced the federal government to stop releasing reliable stats. Still, many foreign and independent sources are still doing good work, and if you’re looking to add a few excellent smaller outfits to your list, I would offer The Downballot and Electoral-Vote.com.
Why the Bad Guys Keep Winning It’s not that complicated
Trump Issues Another Warning To Iran In Late-Night Truth Social Post
President Donald Trump posted another warning to Iran late Wednesday evening and threatened even more violence if the country didn't comply with any final agreement that's reached.
How the media should cover this deranged president
American Crisis – “The moment I saw Trump’s crazy and dangerous Truth Social post on the morning of Easter Sunday, I could imagine the freakout in newsrooms across the country. The essence of it would be something like this: “How much of this do we publish? How do we report this without breaking with every one of our standards and traditions?”…Based on my survey of regional-newspaper front pages on Monday morning, very few came anywhere near rising to the occasion.
Many chose not to feature the story at all on their A1, or to give it much emphasis. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times did relatively well, leading their front pages with it. Both used Trump’s full language high up in their front-page story. There’s been a lot of talk — including here — about the media’s disastrous tendency to “sane-wash” Trump.
It comes down to this: The press, because of its own conventions and time-honored practices, normalizes him, and thus fails to get across the extreme nature of this president’s behavior. Ten years of sane-washing have had their effect. He remains in power, reelected, undeterred. On seeing Trump’s post, I thought immediately of Mark Jacob’s October piece about how the media is missing the biggest story there is — Trump’s apparent mental illness. Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, wrote:
“It keeps getting worse, and the mainstream media keep making the same mistakes in their coverage of the King of Crazytown.” After Trump claimed he “predicted” 9/11, Jacob wrote on Bluesky that “the media need to be writing about his mental unfitness every day until we get rid of him and save our country.”
But of course, that didn’t happen then, and it didn’t happen this time. And now, with this horrible Easter morning development, we’ve entered new territory. But let’s get real. If traditional techniques and language (“emphatic threats”) aren’t getting it done, what actually would work? I’ll make three suggestions, and would be happy to hear yours…”
