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How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

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Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#61

I know, I know, "bounties" are a fraught concept. Some people find "snitching" odious. But this is a tantalizing use case. All the author of this piece got out of their legwork was another article, but it also yielded some money for the federal government: > Two days after I emailed Finwall in April inquiring about the Xie Foundation’s purchase of the house, the foundation filed records with the California attorney g…

Another thought: What if all corporate accountants were required to be government employees? We can start with transnational companies first. Then LLCs and Incs.

Disincentivize the massive fraud that we see today.

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a brief look at Gates Foundation spending and it does not look like tax dodge to me: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/financials/annual-repo... It spent about 10% of its endowment for charity last year.

Yeah because the Gates Foundation is going to come right out on their website and say that they are a tax dodge...

Mind furnishing some evidence of their alleged wrongdoing then?

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#63
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our roads suck and they were created 100 years ago. Can we talk about effective use of government money from the past half century at least? And can we at least show a pattern of competency rather than a pattern of waste?

You’re obviously coming into this discussion with a pre-existing viewpoint and have no actual interest in hearing alternatives. Why does it matter when roads were created? They require near constant maintenance, something public funds do. And “our roads suck” is just an absurd generalisation and is obviously not true. Of course parts of the road system suck but it’s an integral part of keeping the country running and…

> Why does it matter when roads were created?

Because we are talking about how our money will be spent now.

> And “our roads suck” is just an absurd generalisation and is obviously not true.

I disagree and I believe that "terrible roads" is public sentiment. I've never heard anyone praise our roads.

> You’re obviously coming here with a perspective and you have no actual interest in hearing counterpoints

I have a very strong opinion obviously and am open to being proven wrong but I am not going to just accept terrible arguments. The political class of this country is just completely inept. Everyone thinks in terms of "taxing the rich" as if some billionaires are going to be fund all these public mega projects. The billionaires do not have enough cash, the people that will get hammered with taxes are the middle and upper middle class.

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a brief look at Gates Foundation spending and it does not look like tax dodge to me: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/financials/annual-repo... It spent about 10% of its endowment for charity last year.

Yeah because the Gates Foundation is going to come right out on their website and say that they are a tax dodge...

These are annual financial reports, a very good first step for an investigation. At some point, if someone claims it is a tax dodge, they need some modicum of evidence. None was provided.

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#65
post #10

As a side note: One of the primary reasons of how the rich get richer and how public services (our society) degrade is, that we stopped taxing them. For decades now. Imho, its a shift of the represented interests in policies. We should stop pondering enshitification or greedflation an start seeing it as a systemic issue, that we can observe everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Commodification#In_Marxist_th...

The bigger problem is a fear of public spending because of perceived incompetence. The stigma comes from a time when only governments had run big bureaucratic systems. Now we can see there is little difference between public and private bureaucracies except for a lack of oversight on the latter. Still the stigma remains and all public spending is filtered through a profit making entity.

The big difference is that I can choose not to pay a company I don't like, and that's fine.

Governments will happily make my life crap if I don't pay taxes. I dislike greed as much as the next person, but the monopolized incarceration powers of governments are not to be forgotten.

For some services, collective funding makes sense, like having hospitals that can stop the spread of diseases, or forcing pooling of money to locally maintain an even standard of infrastructure.

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#66

I know, I know, "bounties" are a fraught concept. Some people find "snitching" odious. But this is a tantalizing use case. All the author of this piece got out of their legwork was another article, but it also yielded some money for the federal government: > Two days after I emailed Finwall in April inquiring about the Xie Foundation’s purchase of the house, the foundation filed records with the California attorney g…

Another thought: What if all corporate accountants were required to be government employees? We can start with transnational companies first. Then LLCs and Incs. Disincentivize the massive fraud that we see today.

I think this would result in really poor accounting since there’s a big disconnect between a government employer and a company being audited and its books kept.

In theory it works because the government auditor would be more interested in justice than corporate interests. In practice, an embedded external employee would not have the relationships to have viable information and would probably end up doing only the most perfunctory level of work to not be fired.

My org had this issue where our cyber group embedded an employee in each organization (we basically had a federation of different groups with separate funding streams and incentives) but their career ladders were disconnected from the local org. So the boss in the cyber org never really knew the work and just wanted safety. The org wanted to produce for their mission. So it led to this weird cycle where the embedded cyber person would stop stop every new project. The cyber boss was happy and promoted and gave raises. But it was bad for the org because no new projects.

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#67
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re obviously coming into this discussion with a pre-existing viewpoint and have no actual interest in hearing alternatives. Why does it matter when roads were created? They require near constant maintenance, something public funds do. And “our roads suck” is just an absurd generalisation and is obviously not true. Of course parts of the road system suck but it’s an integral part of keeping the country running and…

> Why does it matter when roads were created? Because we are talking about how our money will be spent now. > And “our roads suck” is just an absurd generalisation and is obviously not true. I disagree and I believe that "terrible roads" is public sentiment. I've never heard anyone praise our roads. > You’re obviously coming here with a perspective and you have no actual interest in hearing counterpoints I have a ver…

> Because we are talking about how our money will be spent now.

Again: how do you think maintenance happens?

> I’ve never heard anyone praise our roads

Which is a great example of why public sentiment isn’t really worth a whole lot of anything. People love to complain. If we stopped maintaining our highways people would very quickly learn to appreciate how it used to enable full grocery store shelves, receiving packages and so on.

Absurd generalisations are absurd. If I said “I worked at Google, they waste so much money, every private corporation is a total waste of money and should be gotten rid of” would you think my perspective was a sensible, measured one?

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#68
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does it matter when roads were created? Because we are talking about how our money will be spent now. > And “our roads suck” is just an absurd generalisation and is obviously not true. I disagree and I believe that "terrible roads" is public sentiment. I've never heard anyone praise our roads. > You’re obviously coming here with a perspective and you have no actual interest in hearing counterpoints I have a ver…

> Because we are talking about how our money will be spent now. Again: how do you think maintenance happens? > I’ve never heard anyone praise our roads Which is a great example of why public sentiment isn’t really worth a whole lot of anything. People love to complain. If we stopped maintaining our highways people would very quickly learn to appreciate how it used to enable full grocery store shelves, receiving packa…

> Again: how do you think maintenance happens?

Good point, let's get rid of all public programs except social security and road maintenance and lower everyone's taxes 20%.

I'm not actually suggesting that but it's absurd to use road maintenance as the reason why the government needs more money.

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know the last successful, citizen-only driven revolution? I would guess the french revolution ~1790 and it was a bloodbath. Today, the military technology has extended the power gap so much, that chopping heads off is no option for eg. north koreans without support from the outside. I think a violent revolution would only tighten the surveilance state.

The ven diagram of people who tell me that we can't possibly overthrow the government contrasted with people who say January 6th was a threat to democracy is essentially a circle.

I don‘t think those two statements are at odds at all. Consider that the Jan 6th insurrections were trying to keep the then current president, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, in power. That‘s about as far from a citizen‘s only revolution as it could be.

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#70
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because we are talking about how our money will be spent now. Again: how do you think maintenance happens? > I’ve never heard anyone praise our roads Which is a great example of why public sentiment isn’t really worth a whole lot of anything. People love to complain. If we stopped maintaining our highways people would very quickly learn to appreciate how it used to enable full grocery store shelves, receiving packa…

> Again: how do you think maintenance happens? Good point, let's get rid of all public programs except social security and road maintenance and lower everyone's taxes 20%. I'm not actually suggesting that but it's absurd to use road maintenance as the reason why the government needs more money.

Was that your way of admitting that road maintenance is an example of competent public spending while avoiding actually saying those words?
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