The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime

I think GP's point is that a $60M fine (against $520M in earnings) is not a an effective deterrent against such antisocial behavior.

I don't know why the justice department didn't pursue charges here. Maybe HSBC wasn't guilty? Maybe there wasn't sufficient evidence to win? Who knows. But this isn't an example of a caught party with a "so low that they don't matter" penalty.

Neither I nor Animats ever stated that the war on drugs (or Nazism for that matter) were good things. I think that's entirely clear from even a cursory reading of our comments. In fact, I even stated that you can throw away all the bad stuff but keep one good thing.

It sounds to me like you're arguing that since the war on drugs is bad, we should never do anything affiliated with the war on drugs again. That's silly, and isn't an argument to anything anyone even came close to saying. Computers and cell phones are used in the war on drugs, should we get rid of them too?

Again, you're massively misrepresenting every argument that's been stated in this thread and using it to hold the moral high ground with the easy "Nazis are bad" argument. Of fucking course they are. Maybe read past that? Because it's not edgy. It's not "ends justify the means". It's an actual fucking argument that you're completely ignoring for an easy win.

Shame on you. You should aspire to be better than that.

The problem with "at government expense" is that it annihilates the premise that this is going to increase government income. If you audit someone, they not only have to hire a tax professional, they have to spend their own time on it because they're the only one who knows their own business. But because they're the only one who knows their own business, they also need to spend their time running the business. So the amount you would have to properly compensate them would be at something like the overtime rate, but worse because it's involuntary, and for someone whose time may already be valued at six or seven figures.

The government would never actually pay that full cost, so the idea that everything's fine because the government is paying for it is silly, and if they did it would immediately put the program deep underwater.

> The premise of the parent poster is that the IRS is underfunded to deal with real large scale white collar crime, and as I understand you argue that’s not possible without splash damage to small buisinesses. But they're unrelated: you can specifically target large buisinesses, and you can make the government pay for audit services for small buisinesses.

The problem is large businesses largely aren't the ones committing tax fraud -- hardly anybody is. Large businesses pay very low taxes because they hire very good accountants, not because they have fraudulent returns. The problem isn't that we need more audits, it's that we need better tax laws.

> The large Republican doners not only have large tax bills at stake but believe they should not.

Is it surprising that the people with the most money are the largest donors? It's basically a prerequisite.

> Each one of these doners individually spends hundreds of times more than the national small buisiness association on lobbying

Because small businesses don't have huge margins to be spending on lobbying. They're not a constituency because they donate, they're a constituency because they vote.

> The idea is we should be outraged at the tax law and fix it, instead of celebrating the loopholes for billionaires.

But that isn't where the outrage is directed. Nobody is actually fixing the laws -- either party. Even the Republican proposals (tax simplification, flat tax etc.) would fix it, but they never get enough votes to pass it because it's impossible to pass anything like that with the current level of polarization. If you can't get a single vote from the other party then it only takes a small handful in your own party to be corrupted by special interests and it's impossible to fix the problem.