Buyer's Remorse

Drawing by Chan Lowe, July 2016.

Can't help feeling some Schadenfreude on this, via Bloomberg:

Wall Street traders who rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or more eagerly awaited a Republican overhaul of the U.S. tax code. Now, many are huddling with accountants and concluding the real gains will go to billionaires and other captains of the industry. Those in trenches -- the merely wealthy -- are grousing.

Atop their list of worries: New limits on deductions for mortgage interest and state and local taxes -- relatively high throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut -- will cost them thousands of dollars annually while depressing the value of their homes. That would chop local tax revenues and erode the quality of schools and other amenities traders expect for their families.

I could have told them. Most New Yorkers are getting a much less terrible break than feared a couple of weeks ago, because the first $10,000 in state and local tax is deductible, and while our income tax rates seem pretty high, they're also pretty progressive, only very few paying the scary marginal rate of 10.3% (state and city combined), and the property tax is actually quite low (effective 0.72% in NYC). But a lot of us, and not necessarily just the wealthier, are going to see at least slightly higher taxes, and not just in New York and California and Maryland and New Jersey and Oregon—it's Iowa and Nebraska, Idaho and Maine, Wisconsin and South Carolina, where I expect quite a number of deduction-itemizing Trump voters are going be a bit surprised to see their taxes going up as well:

Why the Treasury?

.@realworldrj That's where the Internal Revenue Service is. @realDonaldTrump designing the government to keep his tax returns secret.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 9, 2017

The Vanity Fair post doesn't say this, but what else would it mean? When Trump takes the trouble to think coherently, he's always thinking about Trump. And it's not much different from the way his avatar Silvio Berlusconi worked, driving legislation to benefit his companies and protect himself from criminal prosecution and lawsuits. Keeping his tax returns secret is now the administration's central goal.

Breaking badder

Finally! RT @foxnation: Study finds IRS suppression of Tea Party swung 2012 election http://t.co/Ng2pVrRS2x
— digby (@digby56) November 12, 2013

Stop the presses! Fox News has just learned that the Washington Examiner published five weeks ago a report according to which American Enterprise Institute hack Stan Veuger published on June 20th a hypothesis that the IRS swung the 2012 elections Barack Obama's way in what remains the all-time Greatest Obama Scandal of Forever by their relentless two-year persecution of 501(C)(4) organizations with the words "Tea" and "Party" in their names:

Tea party, from the flickr of Alberto.Gar.

Selective fail

Albertito Gonzales just crept out of the woodwork to warn us that our president might be in violation of the oath of office:

“To halt through executive order the deportation of some undocumented immigrants looks like a political calculation to win Hispanic votes,” Gonzales told the crowd at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C. Saturday, “and subjects him to criticism that he is violating his oath of office by selectively failing to enforce the law.”

Image by Harpyen at DeviantArt.

Before you start throwing up in your mouth, just take a moment to remember that when the Bush administration started selectively failing to enforce the law they weren't doing it for aliens but for job creators—

The federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others.

The administration plans to cut the jobs of 157 of the agency’s 345 estate tax lawyers, plus 17 support personnel, in less than 70 days. Kevin Brown, an I.R.S. deputy commissioner, confirmed the cuts after The New York Times was given internal documents by people inside the I.R.S. who oppose them. (New York Times, July 23 2006)

—and not to win votes, that's for the little people, but to win campaign contributions.  (Check out what Jim Cook said at the time. And here's some more evidence.)

Not to be confused, of course, with when they were selectively breaking the law.