Politics: January 2019 Archives
1950s Hollywood forged a golden age of tax avoidance by movie stars | Accounting Today
The oil-depletion allowance, deferred income, collapsible corporations, all provided Hollywood stars and other wealthy Americans a way to dodge the 90% top marginal income tax rate.
"Back then, the wealthiest people in the U.S. were not corporate executives or baseball players. (The latter group made so little they usually had to work during the off-season.) Rather, they were entertainers. In 1958, for instance, the chief executive of U.S. Steel, Roger Blough, made around $300,000. Frank Sinatra made closer to $4 million. (That's $35 million in today's dollars.) Sinatra, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr., Joan Crawford, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart -- these were the people who were most concerned with sheltering their income....
"The collapsible corporation was the other tax loophole Hollywood stars relied on. Whenever they made a movie, they would set up a corporation and have the movie producer pay their compensation to the corporation, out of which they would take a small salary and pay all their expenses. Why? Because the corporate tax rate was around 50 percent rather than 90 percent. After the star's fee had been paid out, the corporation would go out of business.
"Once again, [Bing] Crosby was a trailblazer, setting up his first collapsible corporation in 1937. Soon enough, every star in Hollywood was following suit. [Frank] Sinatra gave his corporations British-sounding names, like Essex, Bristol, Kent and Canterbury. Some stars would sell stock in their corporation to the movie company, so they could take their fee in the form of capital gains, which had a maximum tax rate of only 25 percent. At one point, the IRS sued Groucho Marx and his producing partner, arguing that the $1 million they received from NBC, which aired their show, "You Bet Your Life," should be categorized as income, not capital gains. Luckily for Groucho, the courts disagreed.
"In the mid-1950s, Congress did pass a law aimed at putting a stop to the use of collapsible corporations. But the law itself had a loophole: If 25 percent of the corporation's income came from a different industry, then it was legit. You can guess what the stars did. They merged their oil business and their movie business into one corporation."
Heads Should Roll at National Review -- Jack Cashill
Jack Cashill writes about NR's lust for respectability, as demonstrated by the pains they took to distance themselves from his investigative work on TWA Flight 800 and Bill Ayers' role in the authorship of Dreams from My Father, and most recently demonstrated in their knee-jerk response to the Covington Catholic video:
"In truth, National Review editors have been dancing to the left's tune since its founding in 1955. To justify its condemnation of the John Birch Society in the early 1960s, one of its editors gave away the game, writing, 'We can't afford to jeopardize the grudging status we've earned in the Liberal community.'
"For all of founder William Buckley's virtues, he overly worried about the 'status' the liberal community begrudged him. As Lowry once noted, 'Mr. Buckley's first great achievement was to purge the American right of its kooks.'
"Over dinner with Lowry [in 2001] and just one other person, I talked about the documentary I was working on at the time. The subject was TWA Flight 800. He gave me the look I would come to recognize from my conservative betters. It was the "kook" look. He showed zero interest in the subject.
"In September 2008, I introduced the theory, for which the evidence was overwhelming, that Bill Ayers had a major role in the writing of Obama's memoir 'Dreams from My Father.'
"At 'The Corner,' on National Review Online, Andy McCarthy called my analysis 'thorough, thoughtful, and alarming--particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama's memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers' memoir....'
"...I am told that McCarthy caught a lot of heat internally for jeopardizing National Review's 'grudging status' among liberals. What I know for sure is that the link from Coates' article to McCarthy's goes nowhere.
"I suspect McCarthy's review was scrubbed almost as quickly as Frankovich's. I was unaware of it until I read Remnick's attack on it two years later."
The hollowing out of American political parties - AEI
"As odd as it sounds, political parties in democracies have an important anti-democratic function. Traditionally, the parties shaped the choices put to voters. Long before voters decided anything in the primary or general elections, party bosses worked to groom good candidates, weed out bad ones, organize interests, and frame issues.
"In the modern era, the story of party decline usually begins in the aftermath of the 1968 presidential election. The move toward primaries and the democratic selection of delegates took power away from the bosses.
"After Watergate, there were more reforms, curbing the ability of the parties to raise and spend money freely. This led to the rise of political-action committees, which raise cash independent of the formal party structure. As Senator Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said during the floor debate over the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bill in 2001: 'We haven't taken a penny of money out of politics. We've only taken the parties out of politics.'...
"And yet, Americans keep talking about partisan politics as if the parties are in charge, and base voters on the left and the right keep railing against the party establishments like mobs unaware that they're kicking dead horses."
And veteran political bloggers who ought to know better fall into the same trap.
CNN Accidentally Proves Why Walls and Fences Work - Daily Signal
"In 1991, the government began construction of a 46-mile-long wall, now referred to as the 'primary fence.'
"This fence stands between 8 and 10 feet tall. It was tall enough to stop vehicle traffic, but could be easily breached by ladders and fence jumpers.
"In 1997, officials began building what's known as the "secondary fence," which runs 13 miles long and stands at 14 to 18 feet tall. This was meant to stop the illegal flow of foot traffic.
"Today, the San Diego sector accounts for only a small fraction of border apprehensions each year. According to the Department of Homeland Security, illegal crossings have decreased in the region by more than 90 percent since the walls and fences were built."
Trump's wall would be the 32nd active national emergency - CNNPolitics
The currently effective 31 emergencies date back to a Carter-declared emergency from 1979, imposing sanctions on Iran.
"The National Emergencies Act of 1974 empowers the President to activate special powers during a crisis. Congress can undo a state of emergency declaration, but it would likely require a veto-proof majority, which is unlikely to come from the Republican-controlled Senate.
"Not all national emergency declarations are so controversial. Trump has already issued three national emergency declarations during his tenure, most prominently a national emergency meant to punish foreign actors who interfere in American elections, though the move garnered bipartisan criticism for not going far enough. He's also invoked emergency powers to slap sanctions on human rights abusers around the globe and on members of the Nicaraguan government amid corruption and violent protests there."
Don Surber: CBS caught Trump in a lie. Hilarity ensues
"CBS reported, 'Fact check: Number of women sexually assaulted on trip to border.
"'CLAIM: The president claimed one in three women have been sexually assaulted traveling to the border.
"'FACT CHECK: Between 60 percent and 80 percent of female migrants traveling through Mexico are raped along the way, Amnesty International estimates.'...
"The network later scrubbed that from its fact-check."
The dark arts of the press are on full display - Conservative Review
"Because if the press believes it is this reasonable to consider muting the voice of a sitting president of the United States simply because they disagree with him, what do you think they are doing every other day of the week when it comes to shaping the narratives of the day?"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/how-mark-burnett-resurrected-donald-trump-as-an-icon-of-american-success?fbclid=IwAR33Q3fSZFN4An2ji4FszsN-b5CgspjXF9nfG3mXao8WzpSuUC3FalH45GA
Fascinating glimpse into reality television and the re-creation of Donald Trump
'"The Apprentice" was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be "fired." But, as ["The Apprentice " Seasons 1-6 editor Jonathon] Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to "reverse engineer" the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump's shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of "The Apprentice," Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, "We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, you're editing in reverse." Braun noted that President Trump's staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, "I find it strangely validating to hear that they're doing the same thing in the White House."'
