The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime
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The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime
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Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime
#2What's needed is to make cracking down on white-collar crime profitable. Like the setup for drug task forces.
Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime
#3What's needed is to make cracking down on white-collar crime profitable. Like the setup for drug task forces.
Isn't it already? Possibly even more so than drug task forces?
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/your-money/vanguard-a-cha...
Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime
#4What's needed is to make cracking down on white-collar crime profitable. Like the setup for drug task forces.
The drug war has been disproportionally devastating along racial and to a lesser extent economic lines and ineffective at its stated goal. Why would we want to reuse this failed strategy to fight another kind of crime?
Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime
#5What's needed is to make cracking down on white-collar crime profitable. Like the setup for drug task forces.
Isn't it already? Possibly even more so than drug task forces? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/your-money/vanguard-a-cha...
The vanguard transfer pricing thing is my favorite conspiracy theory but it's actually true story on the internet.
Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime
#6Obligatory Chickenshit Club reference: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Chickenshit_Club.ht...
Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime
#7What's needed is to make cracking down on white-collar crime profitable. Like the setup for drug task forces.
At ~current funding levels, the IRS brings in ~$3 for every $1 spent on it. The federal government could bring in more tax dollars just by funding the IRS at a higher level; it doesn't, for reasons.
Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime
#8White collar crimes are problematic. I once saw a case where someone was convicted for selling prescription sleeping pills. It shouldn't be illegal to sell under the counter pills, I thought, but otherwise it was hard to fault the prosecution. The accused was caught trying to sell the pills to an undercover officer, fled from the police, and apprehended with a wide variety of illegal substances on his person. There was little doubt that he was at least guilty of the conduct of which he was accused.
White collar crimes are murkier. There is, for example, nothing illegal about getting the upper hand in a transaction. But it can be illegal based on little more than what the seller knew or was thinking at the time of the sale. Even things like false claims to the government often turn on little more than the characterization of certain transactions. A great deal of the white collar prosecutions I've seen have left me unsettled--the evidence was murky or subject to different characterizations, and the "wrong" often turned on the unknowable--the accused's knowledge or intent.
Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime
#9White collar crimes are problematic. I once saw a case where someone was convicted for selling prescription sleeping pills. It shouldn't be illegal to sell under the counter pills, I thought, but otherwise it was hard to fault the prosecution. The accused was caught trying to sell the pills to an undercover officer, fled from the police, and apprehended with a wide variety of illegal substances on his person. There w…
I'm a bit surprised to find someone suggesting that selling prescription pills under the counter shouldn't be illegal. Do you mind elaborating on your perspective?
Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime
#10You'd have to completely reframe the penalty for crimes to be percentage based instead of fixed amounts. Even when caught the penalties are often so low that they don't matter, so white collar criminals go right back to it. When you can routinely make $10 million doing something a $1 million fine the one time you get caught just isn't a big deal.
The cost-benefit analysis almost always favors the criminal for white collar crimes (or any non-violent crime, really) when you have money. If I had $100m+ I wouldn't really pay attention to the law either.