The problem is that political donors are influencing the law. How can you change the law when the ones that need to lose the most influence are currently the ones with the most influence? These people are the problem.
Yep, this is why discussing this issue can be a hilarious exercise in circular frustration. The counter argument boils down to "don't hate the player, hate the game", except these players are lobbying to keep the game alive, so don't tell me I can't hate those players.
newsclues seems to be seeking the root of the problem. I'm no US history expert, but I don't figure there were PACs and SuperPACs influencing electoral politics when this country was founded. The congresspeople seem to have been here before the corrupt lobbying industry arrived, which would suggest corruption within the members of congress themselves arose first.
I assure you, lobbyists existed from the beginning. The rich - heavily represented in the Founding Fathers - have always had friends and "friends" looking to use their influence. Go outside the US and you'll see the same phenomenon; Viking chiefs will have had their buddies, the French kings had their courtiers, etc.
PACs and SuperPACs exist because the rich willed them into existence.
There’s really no significant nexus documented here between Yass’ political giving and the legality of his tax avoidance strategy. He’s a free-market libertarian who hates paying taxes. He donates to groups and candidates that agree with his philosophy.
Maybe in 2025 a GOP trifecta that had help winning from Yass (and many, many others) will zero out all capital gains taxes or something, but that’s not corrupt, it’s just the long term policy see-saw tilting a different way.
Joe Biden could offer a pardon for anyone who manages to assassinate a a conservative within a federal jurisdiction and it would be completely legal within our system, however I suspect some would still find it problematic.
It's literally corruption. Your constituency is not your donors; it's your voters. The fact that this raises no concerns to the majority of Americans speaks to how cynical we all are.
No. They are not the problem. They don't makes the laws. They don't accept the donations. They don't take an oath to serve The People. Etc. These people are a symptoms. To believe otherwise is simply a false mental model.
These "OMG Mr X..." and "OMG Ms Y..." and "OMG Company Z" - and the accused nearly always GOP'ers (which certainly doesn't reflect reality, odd huh) - is a waste of time.
How do I know it's a waste of time? Because we get one or so per month and...nothing is discussed. Nothing changes. In fact, the drone of stating the obvious just switches people off. How convenient.
The truth is, these distractions are another spin job manufacturered by The Politics Industrial Complex. So perhaps we start the discussion there then as that the foundation on which all other nonsense is build?
> No. They are not the problem. They don't makes the laws. They don't accept the donations. They don't take an oath to serve The People. Etc. These people are a symptoms. To believe otherwise is simply a false mental model.
They donate money to the people who do take the oath to serve and make the laws. If you hire a hitman, you’re still guilty of murder. If you pay to get bad politicians elected, you’re still responsible for the outcome.
> Many American special interest groups draft model acts which they lobby lawmakers to pass. In particular, the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has successfully gotten hundreds of model acts passed since 2010.
Model Acts exist, but they are an exception to the rule, also they are aimed at State Legislatures, not Federal. In addition, they serve a valid purpose to harmonize laws. For example, the CDC's state level emergency acts are all Model Acts, as well as a lot of other Federal-Local legislation.
No offense, but I worked on the Hill as a Staffer and activiely worked on helping draft legislation. Having a front-end developer with no legislative experience trying to explain my former job to me and how we actively wrote legislation is a bit jarring.
Also, I never said it didn't exist - I said it's more common at the state level than the federal level
"I worked as an individual staffer in 1/538 offices" isn't a great refutation for reputable news reporting; I certainly wouldn't be surprised by lobbyists targeting specific receptive legislators for the tactic. We've got plenty of incontrovertible evidence of lobbyists getting their precise language into bills; a staffer is quoted in the NPR article with a very different opinion than the one you're espousing.
(I'm not a front-end dev, incidentally. That's my absolute least favorite part of the web.)
I know Lee. I also have close friends and ex-colleagues of mine who work at the New America Foundation. Ironically, they also lobby and help write legislation (by your definition).
For example, a lot of the current anti-trust bills coming in the House and separately being spearheaded by Lina Khan in the FTC are directly out of the work the New America Foundation did (I 100% support their cause btw - this statement isn't trying to tar and smear them).
There is stuff to complain about how lobbying is managed in the US, but the take in this entire thread is off and arguing something entirely tangential.
The sophomoric cynicism you describe is widespread in American society, but I notice it can be particularly bad among engineers, who seem to have a real arrogance in thinking they know more about how other domains operate than they actually do.
Amen to that. I've seen a lot of bad takes by people on here who support politicians on either side of the aisle.
Most commentators here on HN honestly suck at anything social sciences related and it 100% is Reddit level discourse - which is not something a board should aspire to be.
I think being cynical about what's going on in DC is a way to show respect for the intelligence of the lawmakers. I don't think any of them really believe a lot of their own statements but just say and do what's tactically best to appease donors and get reelected.
My ex used to work at several congress committees during the drafting of Obamacare and then later financial regulation after the 2008 crash. The lobbyists maybe didn’t write the laws from scratch but they certainly rewrote important sections of Obamacare that dealt with cost reduction and the bank lobbyists also got to remove a lot of provisions the banks didn’t like. A lot of smaller bills that are brought up in the House are almost verbatim from what lobbyists submitted to a representative.
Pedantry about "most" and "written" aside, there's a massive (> billion dollar / year) effort to further the reactionary project. So let's instead write "too many" and "strong-armed".
As for "bOTh siDes THe SamE", if working to end democracy is legitimate, then why are the reactionaries working in secret?
Donald Trump was very much the head of the executive branch in the United States for four years. He may not have written laws but he certainly signed many into law. But, it was broken before he came in and I honestly don't know much about the bills he signed into law.
I would agree with the greater point that might be getting made here is that it's all of Washington, DC gaming the laws and using their democratically elected "for the people" powers for personal inurement.
I will never judge private citizens for using any law to their advantage. After all, a private citizen is just leveraging what everyone else can.
Unfortunately, we know who writes the laws but the voters in states rarely replace their senators and representatives. I wish this was less of a "team sport" where my guy who is "conservative" or "liberal" has to win and people would be willing to fire a senator or a representative for just one term so our elected officials are reminded who they work for and that we may vote them out at any time. We don't have term limits for these seats but through voting we effectively /could/ replace them every cycle if we wanted.
I have a friend who owns businesses. His business is part of a larger non-profit association and this association lobbies capital hill every year. He personally goes up there and has conversations with them once a year for our state. He like to share a story where he was waiting to meet with a member of the house. The representative came out of his office, his assistant was helping him put on his jacket and he asked his assistant "What is this vote for?" .. He gets his answer and then he asks -- "How are we voting?" ... presumably asking how his party is voting or how his majority whip wants him to vote.
I like this verbiage from a specific website (pragmaticvoters.com):
A pragmatic voter understands that a politician who is afraid of losing their position is a politician that is willing to govern for the better interest of the people. Politicians should always fear losing their jobs. Through voting, we remind them who they work for.
Unfortunately a willingness to fire a senator or rep for one term, can be capitalized on by candidates or entire parties that are incapable of governing, but exist to attack and disrupt. And even those candidates are still plugged into the same money network.
> I wish this was less of a "team sport" where my guy who is "conservative" or "liberal" has to win and people would be willing to fire a senator or a representative for just one term
I think you should consider that this is something that can be manipulated to achieve the end goals of people like Yass. Current political strategy is to appeal to the extremes rather than the centers. Culture wars and the like are used to exploit people’s biases in social issues and help wedge apart the center.
The ruling in Citizen's United v FEC and subsequent decisions (wrt independent expenditures, disclosure) has played out exactly as the critics had warned.
No surprise here, a billionaire donates to the GOP and is a tax scammer, who would have thought. If anyone is keeping up with current US politics, the new Congress has voted to defund the IRS, why ? It is very expensive for the IRS to audit the very rich, by defunding it, the IRS will be unable to prevent tax the fraud by rich and large corporations.
Over the past 20 years, the funding for the IRS has been cut in almost every budget by the GOP majority.
Jeff Yass is amazing at staying out of the news in general. I'm surprised to find him on the front page of HN. But while Ken Griffin is top of mind to every gambling Redditer, with them following his jets and calling for his imprisonment at every opportunity, Jeff Yass does the same things Ken does, and they don't have any clue who he is.
OK, I read the article and I still don't get how this works.
If you look at the graph near the bottom, he's offsetting short-term gains with loss. But it's a loss, he's losing money. And looking at the two, many years have bigger losses than gains.
They even state in the article "Of course, if you consider the trade as a whole, it makes no money."
> One strategy, in simplified form, works like this: Make two bets that should move in opposite directions. Think of, say, both betting on and against Coca-Cola’s stock. Towards the end of the year, one bet will be up, and one will be down. At 365 days, the last day a trade is considered short-term, sell the one that’s down. A day later, sell the one that’s up.
> Of course, if you consider the trade as a whole, it makes no money. But that isn’t the point. You’ve found a risk-free way to generate two valuable commodities: short-term losses and long-term gains.
They're picking which gain/loss to realize - in both directions, on the same stock - in a way that means they always win.
>>You’ve found a risk-free way to generate two valuable commodities: short-term losses and long-term gains.
A loss is not valuable.
Edit: see my follow-up comment before you make another post re-explaining the scheme. The point is it's bad explanation because the merits have nothing to with "losses" being generally "valuable commodities".
I got that part. But look at the quote: The article is attempting to explain the benefit of the tax scheme by saying that it reduces into components that are valuable in themselves -- "valuable commodities".
The scheme works as a whole, but the dynamics of it have nothing to do with losses being valuable commodities. It's just an over-clever writer trying to jazz up the explanation without realizing they're saying nonsense in the process and introducing a bad model.
The company makes nearly all of its money on short-term trades, but short-term trades have a much higher tax rate than long-term gains. Since short- and long-term taxes are calculated in separate buckets, if you create losses in the short-term bucket then you can drastically reduce your tax burden. These aren't really losses though, since they're balanced by opposite long-term bets
A gain of X minus a loss of X is 0, but if you claim the loss at the 40% tax rate and the gain at the 20% tax rate you've suddenly reduced your taxes by 20% of X, which is significantly valuable.
Yes, but that means the the scheme as a whole is valuable, not that a loss can rightly be called a "valuable commodity". See the follow-up[1].
This is like those Saturday morning commercials that say Cocoa-puffs is part of a balanced breakfast, and tyring to explain that by asserting how each component, including the Cocoa-puffs, is balanced. That's not how it works, the aggregate property is not piecewise reducible.
Suppose during 2023, you make $1B from short-term trading. If that's all that happened, you'd be taxed for short-term capital gains on it. But also, this happens:
July 1, 2022: Place a large bet "A" on S&P 500, and a separate large bet "B" against the S&P 500.
July 1, 2023 (365 days later): Suppose S&P500 is up. Sell your bet B. You lose $1B in short-term gains.
July 2, 2023 (366 days later): Sell your bet A. You make essentially the same amount that you lost yesterday, $1B, but in long-term gains.
Total for 2023: $0B net short-term gains, $1B net long-term gains, taxed at a low rate.
If you think the Democrats have no rich people “gaming the tax system” and donating “mega” amounts of dollars to politicians and their related groups, you have absolutely no idea how the system works. This is a team sport.
There is no pot of gold by going after rich tax cheats. You get some headlines, but even if you seized all the wealth of Bill Gates and Elon Musk you’d fund the government (at best) for a few months.
You need to increase taxes broadly on the vast middle and lower classes to truly make a difference. It’s usually done in backhanded ways at this scale, like increasing the retirement age or the payroll tax. Direct income taxes are extremely unpopular for the people they impact, so broadly doing this is a non starter, it only works as a class warfare move (“no one under 400k income is impacted!”).
So the republicans are posturing that they will decrease funding but it won’t happen. If the IRS starts mass auditing it will be the lower and middle classes. The EITC is rife with fraud as is small business and eBay / Etsy hustlers. You audit someone and garnish their wages and they will be a lifelong hater of the IRS and all associated with them. It’s a long game.
When 1% (~4M) of the country owns 32% of the wealth, you can either target them for taxes. OR you can go after the 160M people in the Middle/Upper 40% to get the 26% of the wealth... Last option, as a compromise you can go over the top 10% (40M) for 72% of the wealth.
Now, I'm a simple IRS person, but I want to maximize taxes garnered for time spent. This is such a stupidly easy equation.
Pretending that taxing the rich for all they've got is less effective than taxing the upper/middle class, is just absolute BS, and is easily proved false.
The rich own assets, they aren’t making massive amounts of income. Wealth taxes don’t work well. The game at the highest level is very complex.
In Europe, the middle class pays far more in tax. The left in America advocate for a European-style welfare state but pretend the middle class doesn’t have to pay a nickel in extra tax for it because they can get it all from the rich. The math doesn’t add up.
et voila "one wealth tax didn't work", becomes "all wealth taxes don't work". But also what does "didn't work" even mean here? There's nothing about the French law that suggests it didn't get money.
Republicans fund the military because it's a handout to the people who vote for them. Democrats fund the Federal bureaucracy because it's a handout to the people who vote for them. Neither of the actions are about accomplishing things--just attempts to entrench their own power.
Thats not what this article is suggesting. It is possible the article is targeting the GOP considering their recent bill to gut the IRS and remove income tax.
> Thats not what this article is suggesting. It is possible the article is targeting the GOP considering their recent bill to gut the IRS and remove income tax.
That's a mischaracterization. That's a messaging bill that's been was first introduced and must have failed in 1999, and I presume many other times since.
So in other words, they're considering doing no such thing. It's DOA and everyone knows it. If it wasn't DOA, it wouldn't be on the table.
Let Dobbs be your guide. Politics is attrition warfare. It takes greater time and commitment than the players have brought to bear to reverse the entropy.
These people (e.g., Trump) don't write the laws. We know who do. Let's focus on the root problem, not yet another symptom.
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