This tactic is used by many rich people but very few have used it as liberally as Donald Trump:
The IRS plans to end a major tax loophole for wealthy taxpayers that could raise more than $50 billion in revenue over the next decade, the U.S. Treasury Department says.
The proposed rule and guidance announced Monday includes plans to essentially stop “partnership basis shifting” — a process by which a business or person can move assets among a series of related parties to avoid paying taxes.
Biden administration officials said after evaluating the practice that there are no economic grounds for these transactions, with Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo calling it “really just a shell game.” The officials said the additional IRS funding provided through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act had enabled increased oversight and greater awareness of the practice.
“These tax shelters allow wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying what they owe,” IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said.
Due to previous years of underfunding, the IRS had cut back on the auditing of wealthy individuals and the shifting of assets among partnerships and companies became common.
The IRS says filings for large pass-through businesses used for the type of tax avoidance in the guidance increased 70% from 174,100 in 2010 to 297,400 in 2019. However, audit rates for these businesses fell from 3.8% to 0.1% in the same time frame.
Treasury said in a statement announcing the new guidance that there is an estimated $160 billion gap between what the top 1% of earners likely owe in taxes and what they pay.
Miles Johnson, a senior attorney adviser and partnership tax specialist at the Tax Law Center at NYU Law, said “these transactions effectively make income disappear from the tax system by creating depreciation deductions or other tax reductions that don’t reflect any true economic cost.”
I’ll look forward to hearing how this change in the tax regulations is really an assault on the everyday Real Americans in rural counties. I’m sure it will be creative.
Trump is running on an explicitly transactional platform planning to enact draconian tariffs on virtually everything because he thinks he can strong arm other countries into doing his bidding — which would crash the world economy and provoke hostility among friends and foes alike. I don’t think that’s what most of the country means when they say we should engage with the world.
Here’s what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said about Biden over the weekend:
“I think that Joe Biden is someone who is very clear, who knows exactly what he is doing and who is one of the most experienced politicians in the world, especially when it comes to international politics. In a difficult situation like this, where a war is taking place right here in Europe, after Russia invaded Ukraine, where many, many other conflicts are raging around the world, this is an asset, a good thing, and therefore I can only say that this is a man who knows exactly what he is doing.”
Or we can have an ignorant, malevolent, pathological liar in charge. That’s the choice.
There are Democrats out there who say the Biden campaign shouldn’t run ads like this. They say nothing matters but voters’ perceptions of the economy. I don’t think that’s true. (It certainly isn’t true of the MAGA people who are all about cult worship and culture wars.) And I don’t think it’s a good idea to push disinformation even if it’s in service of assuaging people’s concerns. The truth is the best way to go.
And the truth is that some people are economically insecure. Millions of them. And Biden has done as much as any president in my lifetime to address that. Nonetheless, it perennially exists in our country and you can’t sugar coat it. Some people need help. At the same time, the economy really is in a comparatively good place with lots of jobs, inflation coming down sharply and roaring markets which should be celebrated, not downplayed. Democrats do themselves no favors by being the Debbie Downer party while Trump is out there selling himself as having the greatest economy the world has ever seen.
Meanwhile, he’s a convicted felon and there’s good reason to believe that independents aren’t happy about this conviction. That’s where the election will be won or lost. This is a good ad.
Over the weekend Donald Trump committed one of the worst verbal “glitches” of the campaign so far. After delivering his standard line about how Joe Biden should be forced to take a cognitive test and rambling on about how he had “aced” his, Trump then said:
“Doc Ronny Johnson, does everyone know Doc Ronny Johnson from Texas? He was the White House doctor and he said that I was the healthiest, he feels, president in history so I liked him very much.”
Brig. Gen. Dr. Richard Tubb, said in a letter that the doctor had been attached like “Velcro” to Trump since Inauguration Day. Tubb explained that [the] office is “one of only a very few in the White House Residence proper,” located directly across the hall from the president’s private elevator. He said that “on any given day ‘physician’s office,’ as it is known, is generally the first and last to see the President.”
They were tight and Trump surely knows (or knew) that his last name is Jackson not Johnson and yet he said it wrong twice. But then he does that doesn’t he? Recall that he also repeatedly confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi at another rally earlier this year. But doing it in the same breath that he’s slagging Biden’s cognitive abilities takes it to a whole other level of absurdity.
If I had to guess, Trump was confusing Jackson’s name with Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, with whom he’s been reportedly on the phone a lot lately, harranguing him to somehow overturn his New York criminal conviction. (Perhaps he confused him with his former fixer Michael Cohen…)
Politico reported that Trump is obsessed with the idea of using congressional power to go after Democrats he believes have “weaponized” the justice system.
It’s a campaign he orchestrated in the days after his May 31 conviction on 34 felony counts in New York, starting with a phone call to the man he wanted to lead it: Speaker Mike Johnson. Trump was still angry when he made the call, according to those who have heard accounts of it from Johnson, dropping frequent F-bombs as he spoke with the soft-spoken and pious GOP leader.
“We have to overturn this,” Trump insisted.
That’s an interesting choice of words don’t you think? He has quite the habit of calling people up and demanding they “overturn ” results he doesn’t like. Recall the famous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger demanding that he “find” just enough votes to overturn the presidential election. Likewise he said publicly more than once that he believed the Supreme Court would overturn the results of the 2020 election, largely because the three he put on the bench owed it to him. At one point he was just posting #OVERTURN on social media.
That obviously didn’t work but it hasn’t stopped him from deploying the same demands in the wake of his conviction last month. And it appears that unlike Raffensberger, Johnson is ready and willing to do what he can to help. After all, he was an election denier before it was cool.
Back in 2020, Johnson was among those who argued that some states officials had changing voting procedures to accommodate the deadly pandemic was unconstitutional and he reportedly strong armed 125 House members to join him in a Supreme Court brief supporting a lawsuit filed in Texas to overturn the elections in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin. According to ABC, ” he told them Donald Trump was watching” and let it be known that he was in close contact with the then president.
The Supreme Court refused the case due to lack of standing but Johnson didn’t let up. He trafficked in some of kookiest election conspiracy theories including that the Dominion voting machines were rigged and were tied to the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez who had been dead for years. He’s a card-carrying election denier who will do everything he can to help Trump this November if he wants to challenge the results again (which he and the RNC are already setting up to do should he lose.)
Trump obviously knows this which is why he immediately got Johnson on the horn after the conviction, hurling F-bombs about how Johnson needs to overturn it, despite the fact that he is the Speaker of the House not a New York Appellate Court judge. Politico reported that Johnson was already on board:
The speaker didn’t really need to be convinced, one person familiar with the conversation said: Johnson, a former attorney himself, already believed the House had a role to play in addressing Trump’s predicament. The two have since spoken on the subject multiple times.
Whether he can fulfill Trump’s demands is another story. They managed to vote to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt last week but it wasn’t easy. It’s unknown if they will be able to pass any of their proposals to go after those who are prosecuting Trump and the move to pass a law allowing presidents to move state cases to federal court is still pending. While he once said that “defunding” Jack Smith’s office was unworkable, Johnson is now pursuing it but one senior appropriator told Politico that the defunding gambit is “stupid” and there is little indication that there are enough votes for any of this.
So perhaps Johnson’s just doing all this to appease his hard right flank and keep them from trying to oust him from the Speaker’s office. More likely, he’s trying to help Trump and from the way it sounds he’s more than happy to do it on principle.
After Trump demanded he overturn the conviction Johnson went on Fox and Friends and reassured everyone that his pals on the Supreme Court were going to take care of it:
“I think that the justices on the court—I know many of them personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight. This will be overturned, guys, there’s no question about it; it’s just going to take some time to do it.”
That had to be music to Trump’s ears and it no doubt made him love the speaker even more. But I hope Johnson doesn’t expect him to remember it. He’s been having a little trouble in that department lately. At this point, Trump could confuse him with Mike Pence and all that goodwill would go right out the window.
Salon
Sometimes, I surprise myself. I wrote this last night. This pops up this morning:
"I got to know Donald Trump post-presidency… and Trump had severe memory issues. As the journalist who spent the most time with him, he couldn't remember things, he couldn't even remember me."
German concentration camp, Auschwitz I (the main camp), Poland (1940–1945). Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
“Motivated ignorance,” writes Peter Wehner in The Atlantic,
refers to willfully blinding oneself to facts. It’s choosing not to know. In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to their core identity. Nescience is therefore incentivized; people actively decide to remain in a state of ignorance. If they are presented with strong arguments against a position they hold, or compelling evidence that disproves the narrative they embrace, they will reject them. Doing so fends off the psychological distress of the realization that they’ve been lying to themselves and to others.
This is why, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff suggests, the truth (facts) will not set them free. Or as his former student, Anat Shenker-Osorio, quips, truth for some people is more an “I’ll see it when I believe it” proposition and not the other way around. Motivated cognition, she told Lawrence O’Donnell, “is a helluva drug.”
Motivated ignorance is a widespread phenomenon; most people, to one degree or another, employ it. What matters is the degree to which one embraces it, and the consequences of doing so. In the case of MAGA world, the lies that Trump supporters believe, or say they believe, are obviously untrue and obviously destructive. Since 2016 there’s been a ratchet effect, each conspiracy theory getting more preposterous and more malicious. Things that Trump supporters wouldn’t believe or accept in the past have since become loyalty tests. Election denialism is one example. The claim that Trump is the target of “lawfare,” victim to the weaponization of the justice system, is another.
Wehner struggles, as do I, with how to assess the moral character of people who may otherwise present as decent people yet celebrate Trump’s lies and “defend his lawlessness and undisguised cruelty.” Political opinions are but one area of people’s intellectual lives. It’s one thing to embrace a conspiracy theory about faked moon landings that has little real-world impact. But it’s another “if the falsehood you’re embracing and promoting is venomous, harming others, and eroding cherished principles, promoting violence and subverting American democracy.” And getting people terrorized and killed.
Wehner cites the cases of two pro-segregation Baptist ministers from the 1950s and 60s.
Now ask yourself this: Did the fierce advocacy on behalf of segregation, and the dehumanization of Black Americans, reflect in any meaningful way on the character of those who advanced such views, even if, say, they volunteered once a month at a homeless shelter and wrote a popular commentary on the Book of Romans?
Readers can decide whether MAGA supporters are better or worse than Albert Garner and Carey Daniel. My point is that all of us believe there’s some place on the continuum in which the political choices we make reflect on our character. Some movements are overt and malignant enough that to willingly be a part of them becomes ethically problematic.
If not “grievously wrong,” perhaps as in joining Trump’s MAGA movement.
Many, Wehner adds, “are self-proclaimed evangelicals and fundamentalists, and they are also doing inestimable damage to the Christian faith they claim is central to their lives. That collaboration needs to be named. A generation from now, and probably sooner, it will be obvious to everyone that Trump supporters can’t claim they didn’t know.”
The villagers, he said, knew about the camp, and watched daily as thousands of prisoners would arrive by rail car, herded like cattle into the camp. Even though the camp never could have held the vast numbers of prisoners who were brought in, the villagers knew that no one ever left. They also knew that the smokestack of the camp’s crematorium belched a near-steady stream of smoke and ash. Yet the villagers chose to remain ignorant about what went on inside the camp. No one inquired, because no one wanted to know.
“But every day,” he said, “these people, in their neat Germanic way, would get out their feather dusters and go outside. And, never thinking about what it meant, they would sweep off the layer of ash that would settle on their windowsills overnight. Then they would return to their neat, clean lives and pretend not to notice what was happening next door.”
“When the camps were liberated and their contents were revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had gone on inside,” he said. “But they all had ash in their feather dusters.”
MAGA cult members will too, let’s hope only figuratively. Vote like your safety depends on it.
In a nation where many voters have made up their minds, Denning [26] and Etter [age 48] are among the voters whose decisions about the presidential race are neither firmly fixed nor whose participation is wholly predictable. As a group, these voters do not exactly fit the description of being undecided. Some lean toward a specific candidate. Some even say they will definitely vote for that candidate. But age or voting history or both leave open the question of how they will vote in November — if they vote at all.
The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University surveyed 3,513 registered voters in the six key battleground states. The survey was completed in April and May, before a New York jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts in the hush money trial involving an adult-film actress. Of the 3,513 surveyed, 2,255 were classified as “Deciders” — those who fit into one or more categories: They voted in only one of the last two presidential elections; are between ages 18 and 25; registered to vote since 2022; did not definitely plan to vote for either Biden or Trump this year; or switched their support between 2016 and 2020.
They are also classified as Deciders because they will have enormous influence in determining the winner of what are expected to be another round of close contests in the battleground states.
Not spongeworthy
These look like the voters I’m working on (and not very successfully trying to get Democrats to target) for reasons of age and voting history. They don’t look like low-hanging fruit for turnout efforts per what comes out of the Dems’ computer. In Seinfeld terms, they’re not spongeworthy.
One factor in assessing how these Deciders might act in the fall election is their view of the current state of politics and their interest in the election. Although some say they will definitely vote for either Biden or Trump, their voting history leaves open the question of whether they will follow through. The fact that they are less focused on the election underscores that these voters are different from those who are firmly committed and have a history of regular voting.
Almost 8 in 10 Deciders say they feel “worn out by the amount of politics news there is these days,” compared with about 7 in 10 non-Deciders. Four in 10 say they have given “quite a lot” of thought to the election, considerably smaller than the roughly 3 in 4 voters who are locked in supporting Trump or Biden. And while 60 percent of Deciders say they are either “extremely” or “very” motivated to vote in November, that’s far lower than the more than 9 in 10 (96 percent) of locked-in Biden and Trump voters who are so motivated.
“There’s a sense that there’s something important happening but nobody is particularly motivated to do anything about it,” said Mark J. Rozell, dean of the Schar School. “That is an opportunity for either candidate to find something to mobilize the American public.”
It’s a single anecdote, I know. But at a neighborhood mixer on Thursday, a woman said her kid (F/M?) had called and chewed on her ear about Gaza and Biden. They called again later to say that of course they were voting for Biden. Excitement about the candidates may not be the measure of turnout articles like this make it out to be. Engagement is. So freakin’ engage.
While knocking doors, you see many folks who have varying opinions on the political situation of our country.
Just yesterday, I knocked on doors in Grifton, NC. A handful of those folks said: “wow you’re out HERE?” And “you’re the first person I’ve ever had knock my door.” (1/2) https://t.co/7vKtwNJ5KD
Younger voters often turn out in lower percentages than older voters and, beyond that, young voters are far less committed to one of the major parties than are older voters. Biden’s campaign is keenly aware of the need to find ways to motivate these younger voters, who in recent campaigns have strongly backed Democratic candidates.
Deciders are more likely to be Black or Hispanic than non-Deciders. One-third of Deciders are non-White compared with about a fifth of other voters.
Deciders are more likely than non-Deciders to live in urban areas and are more likely to have no religion. They are twice as likely as non-Deciders (17 percent to 9 percent) to get their political news from TikTok and somewhat more likely to turn to YouTube for political news.
The pastor of one of the country’s largest churches—and who Donald Trump once named as a spiritual adviser—has admitted to “inappropriate sexual behavior” with a woman who says he sexually abused her when she was just 12 years old.
On Friday, Cindy Clemishire told The Wartburg Watch, a religious watchdog blog, that Robert Morris, the pastor of Texas’ Gateway Church, asked her to come into his room when he stayed with her family for Christmas in 1982. She was 12 and he was 20 at the time. She said Morris molested her and then ordered her not to say anything about his behavior “because it will ruin everything.” The abuse continued for years before Clemishire confided in a close friend, prompting Morris’ wife to find out and Morris to step down from the ministry, according to the report.
He eventually returned to the church and founded Gateway Church in 2000, turning it into one of the country’s largest megachurches with an estimated weekly attendance of 100,000, according to the church. He serves as its senior pastor, prompting Trump to name him to a spiritual advisory board in 2016.
After Clemishire came forward, Morris acknowledged the claims in a statement to The Christian Post, admitting he engaged in “inappropriate sexual behavior” with a “young lady,” refusing to acknowledge Clemishire’s age at the time.
“It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong,” he said.
He claimed that, with the blessing of the girl’s father and church elders, he returned to ministry two years after the abuse was reported. “I asked their forgiveness, and they graciously forgave me,” Morris said.
She was 12.
Clemishire told the Dallas Morning News that her family never condoned Morris’ return to the ministry, despite Morris’ claim to the contrary.
“We don’t believe anyone that’s done anything like this should be an overseer to anyone in any industry, but especially in the church,” Clemishire said.
As for whether she found Morris’ public apology to be earnest, Clemishire struck it down.
“I don’t think that it’s repentant when someone calls a 12-year-old a young lady and tries to just dismiss what happened as just some heavy petting,” Clemishire said. “I don’t believe that’s repentance. There’s no child on earth that any person should ever do that to. It’s just unacceptable. There’s zero excuse.”
I guess we can understand why all the alleged Christians are so willing to believe that Hillary Clinton is running a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor. It’s the kind of thing their conservative “spiritual advisers” do all the time. Why wouldn’t politicians?
Herman Paul Pressler III of Houston died June 7, four days before the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, where nothing was said about his passing.
Pressler, who had just turned 94, was the co-architect of the so-called “conservative resurgence” in the SBC.
He was a leading figure in the denomination for five decades. However, he has been credibly accused of sexual abuse of boys and young men over a period of years. Those allegations put his previous status as a champion of conservatism in a new light.
Ya think?
No wonder they don’t think Trump is any big deal. So he grabs women by the pussy and rapes one from time to time. And yeah, he’s been a philandering, married playboy his whole life and proud of it. But what powerful leader doesn’t have such peccadillos in his life, amirite? That’s just how they roll.
It’s an honor to be at Gateway Church with the Attorney General — our great Attorney General, William Barr. Thank you. (Applause.) And my friend, Ben Carson, who’s done a fantastic job at HUD. Secretary. (Applause.) And a young star, Jerome Adams, General. Where is Jerome? Jerome? (Applause.) Along with a lot of my friends out in the audience. In fact, a lot of the great political leaders from Texas, I see. Some great, great friends.
And I want to thank you all for being here: faith leaders; members of law enforcement, so important. We want law and order. We have to have a lot of good things, but we have to have law and order. (Applause.)
Got to have some strength. You have to have strength. You have to do what you have to do. And you look at a Seattle — we just came in; we just see over the screen, and we’ve been hearing about it. Bill and I were talking about it: the law and order. Look at what happened in Seattle: They took over a city. A city. A big city — Seattle. Took a chunk of it — a big chunk. Can’t happen. That couldn’t happen here, I don’t think, in the state of Texas, could it? (Laughter.) I don’t think so. (Applause.) I don’t think so.
So I want to thank Pastors Robert Morris and Steve Dulin. They’re great people. (Applause.) Great people with a great reputation. I have to say that. Great reputation. And Gateway Church — the team has been incredible in hosting us.
Actually, as the article says, it was well known at the time that Morris was a child molester.
We’ve all heard about the resurgence of the far right in Europe (although the extent of it was very overstated at first) but the UKisn’t among them:
Sunak surprised many in his own party by announcing an early election on May 22, against widespread expectations that he would wait until later in the year to allow more time for living standards to recover after the highest inflation in 40 years.
Market research company Savanta found 46% support for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, up 2 points on the previous poll five days earlier, while support for the Conservatives dropped 4 points to 21%. The poll was conducted from June 12 to June 14 for the Sunday Telegraph, opens new tab.
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Labour’s 25-point lead was the largest since the premiership of Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss, whose tax cut plans prompted investors to dump British government bonds, pushing up interest rates and forcing a Bank of England intervention.
“Our research suggests that this election could be nothing short of electoral extinction for the Conservative Party,” Chris Hopkins, political research director at Savanta, said.00:08Majority of 90 countries at Ukraine peace summit sign declaration
A separate poll by Survation, published by the Sunday Times, opens new tab, predicted the Conservatives could end up with just 72 seats in the 650-member House of Commons – the lowest in their nearly 200-year history – while Labour would win 456 seats.
This is the double edged sword of Trump and our electoral system. We were able to oust him during the pandemic and empower the Democrats. In the UK they got rid of their blameworthy leader and his short-lived successor but the party was still in charge. As a result, they have not had the success Biden has had in pulling the country back from the brink but at the same time, they are at least being held responsible for it. Here in America Biden is getting the blame for the pandemic hangover even though he’s done more than any other industrialized country to create a strong recovery. Sigh.
And then there’s the fact that we’re dealing with a cult of personality here in the US and facts, truth and reality have little to do with what’s happening. It means that Biden is facing about 42% of the voters being completely unpersuadable no matter what happens. At the same time, many Democratic voters have understandably withdrawn from the batshit crazy political conversation so they aren’t hearing anything but snippets of news and casual whines about prices and how bad everything is. And even if they did it’s going to be mano a mano because of the numbers.
Sophisticates knno that the Trump Crime Wave has been reversed, but the 2024 data (so far, it’s early yet) is actually better than that and suggests we’re on pace for the lowest murder rate year since *2014* fully reversing the post-Ferguson rise in lethal violence.
And yet a majority of Americans are convinced that we are in the midst of an unprecedented crime wave. Why? Because Donald Trump and the Republicans are pathological liars and the mainstream media is apparently incapable of effectively countering their lies. We know this because large numbers of non-MAGA voters who don’t watch Fox believe this. Some of it is the hangover from the pandemic crime spike and it takes a while for people to absorb changes. But they would be aware of it if the media would be more assertive in challenging the lies. Instead, much of the time they frame it as a matter of opinion.
President Biden on Saturday night said he expects the winner of this year’s presidential election will likely have the chance to fill two vacancies on the Supreme Court – a decision he warned would be “one of the scariest parts” if his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, is successful in his bid for a second term.
Biden made the remarks at a fundraiser that his campaign said raised a record $28 million. The event featured Hollywood stars like George Clooney and Julia Roberts, as well as former President Barack Obama.
Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel moderated a conversation with Biden and Obama, and the two presidents talked about the impact that Trump had on issues like abortion rights by naming conservative justices to the Supreme Court.
“The next president is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees. Two more. He’s already appointed two that have been very negative in terms of rights of individuals,” Biden said. Trump named three justices during his term – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanagh and Amy Coney Barrett – cementing the conservative majority on the bench.
Biden, who flew to Los Angeles on the heels of attending the G7 summit in Italy, did not expand upon how the two vacancies on the court would come about.
I can expand on it. If Trump wins and they take the senate Thomas and Alito will happily retire. Thomas will make some real big bucks on wingnut welfare and Alito will openly embrace his fascist activism. Trump will replace them with young fascist jurists handpicked by Leonard Leo and they will rule the court for another generation.
Martha-Ann Alito made that pretty clear when she told Lauren Windsor that she told her husband that when he is “free of this nonsense” she plans to let her freak flags fly and nonsensically mentioned a five year statute of limitations on defamation. It sure sounds like she doesn’t think he’s going to be on the court all that much longer.
Until this court is re-balanced there will be no more progress. The only thing we can hope for is to keep a majority in the congress and hold the presidency to offset their worst impulses. Letting Trump put two young Nazis on it to replace the two old wingnuts would be a tragedy.
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