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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

#51

Post by AnthonyMouse »

nrb wrote: post #38
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Here are some of those reasons. $3 for every $1 is an extremely misleading way of putting it, as though the IRS is a business and everything is good as long as it's turning a profit. A better way of putting it is that c…

> It's possible that we could actually raise government income by doing less enforcement, because $3 is the average. It would be a net gain to eliminate the ones where we're spending $1 to raise $.50 (or $0) as long as we keep the ones where we spend $1 to raise $20. Keep in mind the likelihood that the enforcement actions we spend $1 to raise $0.50 are there to deter tens or hundreds of billions in related avoidance…

That's assuming those audits are actually deterring anything. The idea that significant numbers of people are looking at detailed IRS audit statistics before choosing to commit tax fraud is somewhat farfetched. Especially when they're still busting the largest offenders and offering huge bonuses to insiders for reporting fraud.

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

#52

Post by mulmen »

freehunter wrote: post #46
mulmen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, edgy. The end justifies the means eh? What about the part where the war on drugs doesn’t actually reduce drug use? Sure it funds itself by sealing money from innocent people but that’s just another negative externality. It was not necessary for the Nazis to kill millions of people to develop rockets. Oversimplifying that period of human history doesn’t make reusing failed law enforcement programs a better idea.

I don't understand what exactly you're arguing. I would appreciate it if you'd explain clearly exactly what you are arguing for or against and how it relates to the comments you're replying to. 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 al…

I’ve been very clear in my statements in this thread and I stand by them.

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

#53

Post by mattnewton »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #48
mattnewton wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that doesn't work for small businesses. If you sell hamburgers, the majority of your customers won't have informed the IRS of the transaction. Hamburger joints getting extra scrutiny at the government’s expense doesn’t seem like a problem to me, especially since they often already do. The people who aren’t getting audited often enough are not Mom&Pop hamburger joints, no one is arguing that. The premise of the…

> Hamburger joints getting extra scrutiny at the government’s expense doesn’t seem like a problem to me, especially since they often already do. 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 t…

It sounds like we are in violent agreement about better tax laws, and where we differ it’s only on the cost of auditing small businesses. Someone should do a study :)

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

#54

Post by freehunter »

mulmen wrote: post #52
freehunter wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what exactly you're arguing. I would appreciate it if you'd explain clearly exactly what you are arguing for or against and how it relates to the comments you're replying to. 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 al…

I’ve been very clear in my statements in this thread and I stand by them.

Okay because it kinda sounds like you're saying "the war on drugs and Nazis are bad". Which no one here is arguing against. So congratulations, you win.

This is the weirdest trolling I've ever seen.

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

#55

Post by nostrebored »

harryh wrote: post #15
themagician wrote: post #10

You'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 c…

What is an actual example where you can make more money committing a crime than you would be forced to pay back if you are caught and convicted? I don't think your assertion is true.

There was a case only last year involving manipulations of cattle futures. The firm made the decision that the cost of being caught was less than the potential penalty, and they were right.

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

#56

Post by AnthonyMouse »

buzer wrote: post #40
jstanley wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's a willing buyer, and a willing seller, and the goods aren't stolen, and the seller isn't lying about what the goods are, then who is the victim? If there's no victim, there's no crime. (And, yes, identical logic does apply equally to illegal drugs).

It depends. Most (all?) antibiotics aren't sold without recipe. If they were and people started using them without good reason, we could end up in situation where there are no longer any effective antibiotics for the species (this is already the case to some degree, but accelerating it certainly isn't ideal).

When something has negative externalities, the answer isn't to ban it, it's to tax it in proportion to the pro rata share of the negative externalities (and then maybe waive the tax if you have a prescription; but maybe not -- they seem to be overprescribed as it is, and the negative externalities don't disappear when you have a prescription).

If you want to pay $2000 for useless antibiotics, no problem. But the price will deter enough people that we don't get the scale required for widespread negative consequences, especially when insurance companies won't cover it without a prescription. Then the money can go to subsidize medicine in general so there is no net consequence for overall medical costs or insurance premiums.

And we could do the same thing for heroin with the money going to drug treatment etc. and do without all this business of SWAT teams and drug cartels.

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

#57

Post by forapurpose »

rayiner wrote: post #8

White 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…

There are white collar crimes that are just as clear as the pill example you gave, and there are non-white-collar crimes that are murky. The examples don't demonstrate anything.

The U.S. has prosecuted white collar crimes in the past, and has underfunded and hamstrung its enforcement now. They could prosecute them again.

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

#58

Post by forapurpose »

Kaveren wrote: post #34
cronix wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with this. Take the recent Tesla fiasco. Do you think a $20M fine means a damn thing to Musk? That's like $0.01 for most people. Now a $20M fine and a year in prison would make them think twice. More often than not, they make more in the commission of their crimes than they are fined, so they still come out in the black. In other words, they aren't truly punished.

I don't think Elon Musk deserves to go to prison for any length of time for that. I understand that he may have been very hasty and made fraudulent claims to investors (arguable considering you can't tell his state of mind). The United States needs to reduce its prison population, not increase it. Suggesting he be banned from serving as CEO would be much more reasonable, though I think the fine was more than enough.

> The United States needs to reduce its prison population, not increase it.

I don't think most people are concerned with CEOs of large corporations overflowing the prisons.

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

#59

Post by Kaveren »

forapurpose wrote: post #58
Kaveren wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Elon Musk deserves to go to prison for any length of time for that. I understand that he may have been very hasty and made fraudulent claims to investors (arguable considering you can't tell his state of mind). The United States needs to reduce its prison population, not increase it. Suggesting he be banned from serving as CEO would be much more reasonable, though I think the fine was more than enough.

> The United States needs to reduce its prison population, not increase it. I don't think most people are concerned with CEOs of large corporations overflowing the prisons.

It's about a mindset of the purpose and necessity of imprisoning so many people, not an individual case.

Aside from that, do you believe that Elon Musk in particular deserves to have his freedom restricted, be in a potentially dangerous situation (even in low security), and be locked away from society because of a series of tweets that heavily jumped the gun and stated funding as "secured" when it wasn't?

Being barred from serving as Chairman for three years and being forced to step down in addition to a $20m fine doesn't seem to satisfy some people's bloodlust, I have my doubts that being forced to step down as Tesla CEO would.

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

#60

Post by smadge »

harryh wrote: post #32
csdreamer7 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is an actual example where you can make more money committing a crime than you would be forced to pay back if you are caught and convicted? > I don't think your assertion is true. I think you just haven't bothered to look. First, our prosecutors arn't convicting, they are settling. HSBC paid 5 weeks of yearly profit for cartel money laundering. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-exa... Th…

"of yearly profit" is not the relevant comparison. What is relevant is the amount of money they made from the cartel money laundering. I am preeeeety confident that HSBC didn't make ~10% of it's profits from these transactions.

“Moreover, the dollar transfers earned HSBC hefty fees. The Senate investigation quoted an HSBC email lamenting how the bank would lose $2.6 billion in revenue from U.S. dollar accounts that it was forced to close because of the Mexico fiasco.” *

First, apparently HSBC was making 2.6 billion USD (annual?) revenue from these accounts, and was fined 1.9 billion USD. Second, it is not a certainty that a company engaging in illegal behavior will get caught and fined. The company’s “expected value” function would multiply the expected fines by the chance of being caught. We can only observe the world in which they get caught and perhaps pay a fine larger than what they made. We don’t see the world in which they don’t get fined, which makes the illegal behavior on average profitable.

* https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/03/20/291934724/...

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