Browsing PBH By Articles

I Stand With Rand In The Cayman Islands

The Article: Rand Paul Wants to Loosen Laws on Offshore Tax Evasion by Erika Eichelberge in Mother Jones.

The Text: ate Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced a bill that would repeal part of a law aimed at fighting offshore tax evasion.

The law, called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, was passed in 2010 and is supposed to go into effect on January 1, 2014. It requires foreign financial institutions to report information about Americans with accounts worth more than $50,000 to the IRS. Firms that don’t comply will be fined.

Tax policy watch dogs say the FATCA is essential to rooting out tax cheats. “The increased bilateral exchange of taxpayer information that…[is] crucial to cleaning up the worldwide shadow financial system,” Heather Lowe, director of government affairs for the advocacy organization Global Financial Integrity told Accounting Today earlier this month. “[F]oreign financial institutions should not harbor the illicit assets of U.S. tax evaders.”

But Paul's bill to weaken the law was immediately hailed as "heroic" by the biggest independent financial advisory firm in the world. In an email press release from the deVere group, chief executive Nigel Green said, "Senator Paul’s heroic stance against this toxic, economy-damaging tax act is a landmark moment in the mission to have it repealed. He has taken a courageous stand against FATCA, [a law that] will impose unnecessary costs and burdens on foreign financial institutions."

Paul, generally a die-hard anti-taxer, says the intent of his bill "is not to disrupt legitimate tax enforcement." Instead, he says he objects to FATCA because it "violates important privacy protections," by giving foreign governments too much access to US citizens' tax information. Paul says he is only in favor of repealing those provisions.

But Paul has a long history of fighting the offshore-tax evasion law. Since FATCA was signed, the Treasury Department has been negotiating and signing treaties with over 50 countries to implement the law's provisions. Paul has put a hold on Senate approval of all tax treaties since he was elected in 2010, and as such has been blamed for trying to block FATCA.

A companion version of Paul’s bill is expected to be introduced in the House soon.

Bill Gates On Who Should Really “Fix The Debt”

The Article: Gates Says Wealthy Should Pay More to Help Reduce Deficit by Heidi Przybyla in Bloomberg Online.

The Text: Microsoft Corp (MSFT). co-founder Bill Gates said the wealthy should pay more as the U.S. continues to grapple with how to rein in its budget deficit.

“There’s no doubt that as you look at balancing budgets to the degree you need more revenue” that lawmakers will need to look to the wealthy “to get a little bit more from them proportionately than you get from people as a whole,” Gates said in an interview with Bloomberg Television before speaking at the Peterson Foundation fiscal summit in Washington today. “I think that’s pretty likely.”

Later, Gates, the world’s second richest man and co-chairman of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the U.S. is compromising its “values” in its approach to reducing federal spending.

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Notes On A (GOP) Scandal

On September 14, Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes sent an e-mail to President Obama that has recently caused the hackles of the GOP spin machine to rise substantially. In it, Rhodes said that “there is a ton of wrong information getting out into the public domain from Congress and people who are not particularly informed” and that “we need to have the ability to correct the record, as there are significant…ramifications that would flow from a hardened mis-impression.”

While Rhodes most likely intended to limit his words to the importance of politely presenting the facts (and no, not their carefully re-sculpted, ass-saving impostors) amid congressional investigations into that week’s tragedy at Benghazi, the same could be said about a handful of GOP-driven “issues” making national headlines day after day after day.

It should therefore come as no surprise that it wasn’t Rhodes‘ dogged pursuit of promoting accuracy that inspired the ire of pitchfork-and-torch wielding Benghazi “truthers”; rather, it was the fact that this e-mail struck a fatal blow to yet another factually flimsy theory to which Republicans have held tightly and perpetuated on the Hill and in high definition broadcasts.

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Donald Trump, Rape Apologist

The Article: Donald Trump: The Rape Apologist by Tina Dupuy in The Contributor.

The Text: Donald Trump thinks it’s a no-brainer that so many American servicewomen are raped by their fellow soldiers. This week when the increase of these crimes is the subject of a Senate hearing, Trump tweeted: “26,000 unreported sexual assults (sic) in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”

I normally ignore The Donald as a publicity-hound half-wit celebrity shill. But now that he’s a rape apologist, he deserves a response:

The natural product of men and women together is not sexual assault. Rape is not an eventuality. It’s not a method of conception as (thankfully still-a-Congressman) Paul Ryan likes to refer to it. It’s not a means of god “gifting human life” like former Senator Rick Santorum believes. There’s not illegitimate rape and legitimate rape as former Congressman and 2012 senatorial candidate Todd Akin felt the need to clarify.

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How The War on Drugs Is Far More Immoral Than Most Drug Use

The Article: The War on Drugs Is Far More Immoral Than Most Drug Use by Connor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.

The Text: In the Washington Post, Peter Wehner advises the Republican Party to reassert itself as the anti-drug-legalization party. “One of the main deterrents to drug use is because it is illegal. If drugs become legal, their price will go down and use will go up,” he writes. “And marijuana is far more potent than in the past. Studies have shown that adolescents and young adults who are heavy users of marijuana suffer from disrupted brain development and cognitive processing problems.” Of course, no one is advocating that adolescent marijuana be made legal. And does Wehner understand that prohibition creates a powerful incentive for upping drug potency?

But rather than focus on mistaken arguments common to drug prohibitionists, I want to address a relatively novel claim: “Many people cite the ‘costs’ of and ‘socioeconomic factors’ behind drug use; rarely do people say that drug use is wrong because it is morally problematic, because of what it can do to mind and soul,” Wehner writes. “In some liberal and libertarian circles, the ‘language of morality’ is ridiculed. It is considered unenlightened, benighted and simplistic. The role of the state is to maximize individual liberty and be indifferent to human character.”

What he doesn’t seem to understand is that many advocates of individual liberty, myself included, regard liberty itself as a moral imperative. I don’t want to ridicule the “language of morality.” I want to state, as forcefully as possible, that the War on Drugs is deeply, irredeemably immoral; that it corrodes the minds and souls of those who prosecute it, and creates incentives for bad behavior that those living under its contours have always and will always find too powerful to resist. Drug warriors may disagree, but they should not pretend that they are the only ones making moral claims, and that their opponents are indifferent to morality. Reformers are often morally outraged by prohibitionist policies and worry that nannying degrades the character of citizens.

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