• Tag Archives Clinton

  • Hillary Clinton Avoided Taxes the Same Way Trump Did

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Hillary Clinton used the same exact method as Donald Trump to pay less tax, according to her own tax returns released by her presidential campaign.

    Donald Trump reportedly avoided paying federal income taxes by reporting massive losses on his 1995 tax return, which the New York Times somehow obtained before Trump himself released it.

    The Wall Street Journal describes the loophole that Trump used:

    The tax treatment of losses, bound to become a subject of national debate, is a typically noncontroversial feature of the income-tax system. The government doesn’t pay net refunds when business owners lose money, but it lets taxpayers use those losses to smooth their tax payments as they make money. That reflects the fact that “the natural business cycle of a taxpayer may exceed 12 months,” according to a congressional report.

    Typically, for federal returns, such net operating losses can be carried backward for two years to offset past income and then kept on a taxpayer’s books for 20 years, though Mr. Trump’s losses could only qualify for a 15-year carryforward under the law at the time.

    The Clinton campaign has hammered Trump on his unreleased tax returns. When pundits on cable news now refer to the “Taxes” issue, they’re usually talking about Trump’s personal “taxes” issue, not the taxes paid by American voters.

    But the Zerohedge blog first noticed something that could undercut Clinton’s ability to hit Trump on his “net operating losses.”

    Clinton’s 2015 tax returns reveal that Hillary Clinton also reported capital gains losses in order to lessen her tax burden through a “carryover.”

    Page 17 of the tax returns show “Capital Gains and Losses” for “WILLIAM J CLINTON & HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON.”

    The Clintons reported a “Long-term capital loss carryover” of $699,540.

    Thus, the Clintons reported a “Net long-term capital gain or (loss)” of “-699,540.”

    Source: Hillary Clinton Avoided Taxes the Same Way Trump Did – Breitbart


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  • “Stop and Frisk” and “No Fly, No Buy” Both Violate Gun Rights and Due Process

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    “Stop and Frisk” and “No Fly, No Buy” Both Violate Gun Rights and Due Process

    Despite a rancorous campaign season, there is at least one belief that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton share: Americans have far too much liberty when it comes to firearms and due process.

    Between Sec. Clinton’s resurrection of the failed proposal to ban people on terror watchlists from buying guns and Mr. Trump’s advocacy for a nationwide “stop and frisk” anti-gun campaign, gun rights and due process took a beating last night.

    No Fly, No Buy

    Hillary Clinton:

    [W]e finally need to pass a prohibition on anyone who’s on the terrorist watch list from being able to buy a gun in our country. If you’re too dangerous to fly, you are too dangerous to buy a gun.

    Donald Trump:

    First of all, I agree, and a lot of people even within my own party want to give certain rights to people on watch lists and no- fly lists. I agree with you. When a person is on a watch list or a no-fly list, and I have the endorsement of the NRA, which I’m very proud of.

    Preventing people on the terror watchlists from buying guns has some intuitive appeal, and “our opponents want terrorists to buy guns” is a whopper of a sound bite. But any cursory examination of the watchlisting process reveals the deficiency in this proposal. 

    First and foremost, there is a vast chasm between “terrorist” and “person on a terror watchlist,” and due process exists precisely to prevent that chasm from swallowing our liberty whole. 

    The process is intentionally overbroad, and designed to sweep up people the government knows it cannot act against.

    People, predominantly members of our Arab, South Asian, and Muslim communities, are added to the terror watchlists without so much as a notice. They aren’t entitled to a hearing, they aren’t allowed to see the evidence against them, they aren’t allowed to challenge witnesses or question the government agent responsible for nominating them to the list. Even if a watchlisted individual manages to clear his/her name, it can still take years to be removed from the list. The process is so rife with errors that people such as the late Senator Ted Kennedy and sitting Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) have ended up on the list. I’ve previously written about this issue here and here.

    In the eyes of No Fly, No Buy advocates, the lack of process protections is a feature, not a bug. “Due process is what’s killing us,” lamented Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) while advocating for the policy. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) insisted that requiring probable cause before people lost their gun rights would defeat the entire purpose, as “if the FBI had [enough] evidence [to establish probable cause] they would have arrested the person to begin with.”

    In other words, the process is intentionally overbroad, and designed to sweep up people the government knows it cannot act against.

    Ironically, it was Sec. Clinton herself who last night lamented that Americans are perhaps too quick to “jump to conclusions about people.” Jumping to conclusions about people without so much as a charge or trial is exactly what “No Fly, No Buy” requires.

    The proposal is so deficient that even organizations such as the ACLU, not known for its zealous defense of gun rights, have gotten involved. Just last week I spoke on Capitol Hill about the dangers of No Fly, No Buy, alongside Chris Anders of the ACLU and Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (D-MI) at an event hosted by the Arab American Institute.

    As the broad coalition of opponents emphasizes, No Fly, No Buy is a fundamentally deficient, discriminatory, and unconstutional policy. That it still enjoys the support of Sec. Clinton and Mr. Trump is cause for concern.

    Nationwide Stop and Frisk

    Donald Trump, who received the endorsement of the National Rifle Association, further positioned himself as a due process and gun rights antagonist by repeating his earlier call for the imposition of a nationwide stop and frisk program, with an eye toward confiscating firearms.

    Contrary to Mr. Trump’s denials, stop and frisk was indeed ruled unconstitutional by at least one federal court. That ruling is correct. Stop and frisk, as practiced in cities like New York and Chicago, refers to police detentions and searches of people with virtually no individual suspicion of wrongdoing. Advocates of the program insist that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Terry v. Ohio, allowing frisks where the police can articulate reasonable suspicion of criminal behavior, supports the practice, but that’s a far cry from the standard the NYPD used for years.

    Police routinely cited “suspicious” behaviors such as “fidgeting,” “changing direction,” “looking over his shoulder,” and “furtive movements” to justify stops and searches of innocent New Yorkers. And the brunt of this policy was disproportionately borne by people of color (roughly half of the stops targeted black citizens, and roughly a third targeted Hispanic citizens, despite the fact that stops of white people were more likely to produce contraband).

    Last night’s debate was a frightening spectacle for Americans concerned about the right to bear arms, the right to be free of unreasonable searches, or the right to due process.

    Mr. Trump insisted last night that only “bad people” would risk having their guns taken or being harassed under a nationwide enactment of the program, but the numbers tell a different tale. Under stop and frisk, New Yorkers were stopped hundreds of thousands of times each year. Before the program was reformed in 2013, between 85% and 90% of those hundreds of thousands of stops uncovered no wrongdoing at all. In other words, the vast majority of people who were detained and searched by the government were not “bad people,” they were innocent New Yorkers going about their day. 

    Innocent gun owners should not have to fear random, suspicionless searches when they walk down the street. In addition to the constitutional violation, the potential for unjustified interactions to needlessly escalate into violence should be on everyone’s mind as we continue to grapple with the role of police in society.

    Mr. Trump also played loose with the crime data regarding the efficacy of the program. As the NYPD itself points out, the decline in crime Mr. Trump attributed to stop and frisk actually began before the program was implemented, and continued after the program ended.

    Neither suspicion-free searches of citizens nor process-free no-gun lists are viable solutions to what Sec. Clinton referred to as the “gun epidemic” in America, and both policies promise to violate the rights of thousands of innocent Americans.

    In short, last night’s debate was a frightening spectacle for Americans concerned about the right to bear arms, the right to be free of unreasonable searches, or the right to due process.

    Reprinted from Cato.

    Adam Bates


    Adam Bates

    Adam Bates is a policy analyst with Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice. His research interests include constitutional law, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, police militarization, and overcriminalization.

    Bates received a BA in Political Science from the University of Miami, where he also walked onto the Miami Hurricanes football team, and both an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies and a J.D. from the University of Michigan. He is a member of the Oklahoma bar.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Hillary’s Economically Clueless Plans Will Create Poverty

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Hillary’s Economically Clueless Plans Will Create Poverty

    Because of my disdain for the two statists that were nominated by the Republicans and Democrats, I’m trying to ignore the election. But every so often, something gets said or written that cries out for analysis.

    Today is one of those days. Hillary Clinton has an editorial in the New York Times entitled “My Plan for Helping America’s Poor” and it is so filled with errors and mistakes that it requires a full fisking (i.e., a “point-by-point debunking of lies and/or idiocies”).

    We’ll start with her very first sentence.

    The true measure of any society is how we take care of our children.

    I realize she (or the staffers who actually wrote the column) were probably trying to launch the piece with a fuzzy, feel-good line, but let’s think about what’s implied by “how we take care of our children.” It echoes one of the messages in her vapid 1996 book, It Takes a Village, in that it implies that child rearing somehow is a collective responsibility.

    Hardly. This is one of those areas where social conservatives and libertarians are fully in sync. Children are raised by parents, as part of families.

    To be fair, Hillary’s column then immediately refers to poor children who go to bed hungry, so presumably she is referring to the thorny challenge of how best to respond when parents (or, in these cases, there’s almost always just a mother involved) don’t do a good job of providing for kids.

    …no child should ever have to grow up in poverty.

    A laudable sentiment, for sure, but it’s important at this point to ask what is meant by “poverty.” If we’re talking about wretched material deprivation, what’s known as “absolute poverty,” then we have good news. Virtually nobody in the United States is in that tragic category (indeed, one of great success stories in recent decades is that fewer and fewer people around the world endure this status).

    But if we’re talking about the left’s new definition of poverty (promoted by the statists at the OECD), which is measured relative to a nation’s median level of income, then you can have “poverty” even if nobody is poor.

    For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume we’re using the conventional definition of poverty. Let’s look at how Mrs. Clinton intends to address this issue.

    She starts by sharing some good news.

    …we’re making progress, thanks to the hard work of the American people and President Obama. The global poverty rate has been cut in half in recent decades.

    So far, so good. This is a cheerful development, though it has nothing to do with the American people or President Obama. Global poverty has fallen because nations such as China and India have abandoned collectivist autarky and joined the global economy.

    And what about poverty in the United States?

    In the United States, a new report from the Census Bureau found that there were 3.5 million fewer people living in poverty in 2015 than just a year before. Median incomes rose by 5.2 percent, the fastest growth on record. Households at all income levels saw gains, with the largest going to those struggling the most.

    This is accurate, but a grossly selective use of statistics.

    If Obama gets credit for the good numbers of 2015, then shouldn’t he be blamed for the bad numbers between 2009-2014? Shouldn’t it matter that there are still more people in poverty in 2015 than there were in 2008? And is it really good news that it’s taken Obama so long to finally get median income above the 2008 level, particularly when you see how fast income grew during the Reagan boom?

    We then get a sentence in Hillary’s column that actually debunks her message.

    Nearly 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience a year in poverty at some point.

    I don’t know if her specific numbers are accurate, but it is true that that there is a lot of mobility in the United States and that poverty doesn’t have to be a way of life.

    Hillary then embraces economic growth as the best way of fighting poverty, which is clearly a true statement based on hundreds of years of evidence and experience.

    …one of my top priorities will be increasing economic growth.

    But then she goes off the rails by asserting that you get growth by spending (oops, I mean “investing”) lots of other people’s money.

    I will…make a historic investment in good-paying jobs — jobs in infrastructure and manufacturing, technology and innovation, small businesses and clean energy.

    Great, more Solyndras and cronyism.

    And fewer jobs for low-skilled workers, if she gets here way, along with less opportunity for women (even according to the New York Times).

    And we need to…rais[e] the minimum wage and finally guarantee… equal pay for women.

    The comment about equal pay sounds noble, though I strongly suspect it is based on dodgy data and that she really favors the very dangerous idea of “comparable worth” legislation, which would lead to bureaucrats deciding the value of jobs.

    Then Hillary embraces a big expansion of the worst government department.

    …we also need a national commitment to create more affordable housing.

    And she echoes Donald Trump’s idea of more subsidies and intervention in family life.

    We need to expand access to high-quality child care and guarantee paid leave.

    And, last but not least, she wants to throw good money after bad into the failed Head Start program.

    …we will work to double investments in Early Head Start and make preschool available to every 4-year-old.

    Wow, what a list. Now perhaps you’ll understand why I felt the need to provide a translation of her big economic speech last month.

    The moral of the story, based on loads of evidence, is that making America more like Europe is not a way to help reduce poverty.

    P.S. The only other time I’ve felt the need to fisk an entire article occurred in 2012 when I responded to a direct attack to my defense of low-tax jurisdictions.

    Republished from Dan Mitchell’s blog.

    Daniel J. Mitchell


    Daniel J. Mitchell

    Daniel J. Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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