“All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that the purpose of government is to serve the nation—not to enrich an oligarchic clan.”
~Anne Applebaum
Greens senator says appointment of Michael Ebeid ‘risks entrenching the very culture and leadership that need to change’
Trump and Vance Are Trying to Ruin the Fourth of July
Celebrating the ideals of the Declaration of Independence is hard if you don’t believe in them.
How Andy Burnham could raise £15bn – without a tax rise
There's one catch. He'd need to solve the UK’s biggest and least-discussed tax problem. Almost half of all small business corporation tax isn't being paid - and nobody knows why.
It’s the UK’s biggest and least discussed tax problem. There’s between £30bn and £48bn missing from each year’s small business tax bills. It’s been getting worse – and nobody knows why.
There’s no other issue where so much money is at stake but so little time is spent discussing it. It’s almost never mentioned by politicians, and HMRC devotes very limited resources to it. HMRC’s random audit programme checks only 330 small companies each year.
HMRC made spectacular progress on the large business corporation tax gap in the 2000s. If they made the same progress on the small business corporation tax gap, it would raise around £15bn. That revenue could be used to reduce the main rate of corporation tax down to 21%, benefiting all businesses. Or it could cover, for example, a major expansion in defence spending. And corporation tax is only part of the small business tax gap.
We shouldn’t just focus on numbers – there’s a fairness problem too. I receive emails every week from honest businesspeople furious that they’re undercut by competitors who don’t pay their tax. It’s an unfair playing field, tilted against the people doing the right thing.
This should be a cause tailor-made for a politician looking to show they stand for both fairness and business. It’s pro-enterprise and pro-fairness at the same time – and would be applauded by all the small businesses currently being ripped off by their less scrupulous competitors.
The first step is easy, uncontroversial and cheap. Push HMRC to properly resource and expand its random audit programme. Until we know what’s going on, we can’t fix it. And tens of billions of pounds will continue to vanish every year.
Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax
ProPublica – The Secret IRS Files: “In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row. ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years.
The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.
Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most.
The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year. Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more.
In recent years, the median American household earned about $70,000 annually and paid 14% in federal taxes. The highest income tax rate, 37%, kicked in this year, for couples, on earnings above $628,300. The confidential tax records obtained by ProPublica show that the ultrarich effectively sidestep this system…”
Don’t Let Trump’s Lawyers Bury Jack Smith’s Report
Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University via LinkedIn – “Three years ago this month, the Justice Department indicted Donald Trump under the Espionage Act for concealing and refusing to return classified documents—the first time a president had been charged with a crime, let alone one so grave. But President Trump hasn’t had to face trial, and he hasn’t had to fully account to the public for his actions, either. There are a few reasons for this.
The Justice Department abandoned the criminal case against Trump after he returned to the White House in 2025, citing a long-standing policy against the prosecution of sitting presidents. Trump’s personal lawyers have worked closely with the Justice Department, now staffed by Trump’s former personal lawyers, to bury the official report about the criminal investigation into Trump’s conduct.
Meanwhile, Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida has effectively prohibited Jack Smith, the special counsel who wrote the report, from talking about the report or even testifying about it to Congress. In The New York Times this morning, I explain why the suppression of Smith’s report is so disturbing and why the report’s disclosure is so essential:
[I]f presidents are to be immune from prosecution while in office, it’s all the more important that Congress and the public have access to the information that would empower them to hold the president accountable in other ways…Mr. Smith investigated Mr. Trump for conduct that appears to have entailed an astonishing betrayal of the public’s trust as well as the nation’s security.
Legislators and ordinary citizens should have the opportunity to read the report for themselves. It is incoherent to immunize the president from prosecution on the theory that he can be held accountable through the political process—and then to deny Congress and the public information that would help them do so.
As I explain in the essay, which you can read here [Note – beSpacific provided free access], the Knight Institute is suing for the release of Smith’s report, asserting that the public has a right of access to the report under the First Amendment and the common law. Judge Cannon rejected our arguments, but we’ve challenged her ruling and a federal appeals court in Miami will hear oral argument in the case in the fall…”
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White House Secretly Swayed Board Meant to Stop Civil Service Politicization
The New York Times – no paywall: “Behind the scenes, the Trump White House went to extensive lengths to advance its theory of executive power, potentially giving the president remarkable leeway to install loyalists at nearly every echelon of government.
In the tiny corner of the legal world that follows such things, the March ruling crashed down like a thunderbolt. It was issued by an obscure government agency called the Merit Systems Protection Board, whose purpose is to protect federal workers from unfair firings. But the decision backed President Trump’s assertion that he has broad authority to reshape the executive branch as he wants.
The ruling broke with decades of precedent, accepting the White House’s argument that Article II of the Constitution gives Mr. Trump the power to dismiss officials without due process. By that theory, he can essentially erase civil service protections, even for public servants — in this case, immigration judges — whose engagement with the law often puts them at odds with Mr. Trump’s political aims.
The board’s decision has no direct bearing on cases that the Supreme Court is expected to rule on this week, which could establish how far the president’s power over the civil service extends. But it defanged the most effective method for federal workers to challenge their dismissals, and if upheld on appeal could undercut protections for broad swaths of the civil service. And it came after the Trump administration leveled a concerted pressure campaign on the board in public and private, according to people with knowledge of the process. The private push — little different from calling a federal judge and telling him how to rule — was led by a White House aide who for years has been intently focused on making it easier to quickly fire federal workers.
The story of how the ruling came about illustrates the intense effort by the Trump White House to advance its theory of the unitary executive, the belief among many conservatives that the president has sweeping authority over the entire executive branch, and can direct the actions of employees, including federal prosecutors and immigration judges, who handle sensitive matters of law.
“Knowing that it was made with influence from the White House means the decision was not based on positions of law,” said Nicholas Bednar, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota who studies the federal civil service. The decision, he said, “reflects the same ideological considerations that is driving the evisceration of the federal civil service.”
