On August 23, the Internal Revenue Service announced new rules on the  federal income tax’s State and Local Tax deduction. The rules are intended to thwart an interesting scam several state governments worked up to “save” that deduction. It’s an interesting reversal of the two major parties’ usual talking points.

Republicans love to be seen as taking axes to taxes. “Tax cuts” are their two favorite words. But as part of “paying for” last year’s tax cuts, they capped the SALT deduction. Taxpayers who itemize their deductions can now only strike $10,000 in state and local taxes off their federally taxable income. Republicans are “paying for” their middle class tax cuts by soaking the rich.

Democrats, especially Democrats who govern high-tax states, love to soak the rich. In fact, they have some favorite tax words, too — three of them on the subject of tax cuts that benefit wealthier Americans. Those Americans, Democrats say, need to pay “their fair share.” But they’re against soaking the rich (for “their fair share”) in this particular case.

Why? Well, the SALT deduction allowed those states to soak the rich more, without much of a fight. Think your taxes are too high here? Just grab that federal tax deduction to take the edge off! Pay “your fair share” here — the feds can take it in the shorts or force people in lower-tax states to subsidize you at the federal level. The SALT cap invites state and local tax rebellion.

So the tax-and-spend states came up with and audacious scheme:

They set up “charitable foundations” to do the stuff they do with taxes. Then they offered dollar-for-dollar state tax credits for donations to those foundations … which the wealthy could deduct from federally taxable income as “charitable donations” instead of as “state and local tax payments,” thus avoiding the cap.

A transparent shell game, and one the IRS can hardly be blamed for seeing through and putting the kibosh on.

I’m all in favor of state governments operating as charities, but real charities take actual donations, not donations in lieu of taxes. Why not keep those charitable foundations and use them to replace, rather than offset, state and local taxes?

And while we’re at it, how about we push the feds to do the same thing? Want a new aircraft carrier? Hold a bake sale.

Squabbling over which gang gets the tax take doesn’t change the fact that taxation is theft.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On August 21, US president Donald Trump’s former lawyer entered a guilty plea on several charges. The centerpiece charge: Making an illegal campaign contribution “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office.” Michael Cohen’s own lawyer, Lanny Davis, identifies that candidate, revealing that Cohen “testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime.”

The issue, of course, involves a hush money payment of $130,000 from Cohen to adult film actor Stephanie Clifford, aka “Stormy Daniels.” The legal theory is that Cohen’s payment constituted an illegal and unreported in-kind campaign contribution to Trump. Or, as it is put in the charging documents, Cohen “made a $130,000 payment to [Clifford/Daniels] to ensure that she not publicize damaging allegation before the 2016 presidential election and thereby influence that election.”

I’m going to argue that that last bit — on which the criminal charge hinges — isn’t necessarily true, but first let me clear the deck.

Yes, it was stupid for Trump to pay hush money for silence from Clifford/Daniels. Yes, it was even dumber for him to have a third party make that payment on his behalf. And beyond being stupid, it was politically unnecessary.

Everyone who cared about Donald Trump’s marital infidelities and sexual peccadilloes already had enough — more than enough — information on the subject to reach the same conclusion that they would have reached from this particular incident. And it was therefore clear that nobody who still intended to vote for him as of late October 2016 DID care. Which leads me to question the claim that the purpose of the payment was political (that is, intended “to influence the election”) as such.

Trump paid out hush money — money secured by a confidentiality agreement —  to his first wife in 1992, when he was not a candidate for public office. And again to his second wife in 1999, when he was not a candidate for public office (he did withhold a payment when she threatened to go public as he prepared his failed campaign for the Reform Party’s 2000 presidential nomination, which I guess could be taken as evidence that he “intended to influence the election”).

Who else has Trump paid for silence when he wasn’t a candidate for public office, and why? Who knows?

While it’s obvious that the upcoming presidential election was much on Donald Trump’s mind in October of 2016, it’s not obvious to me that someone paying sex-related hush money on his behalf is a “campaign contribution,” especially if he had other reasons (for example, the potential wrath of his third wife) to not want his sex life on the front page. And his history says he did in fact have other motivations.

If a friend gave Trump a pair of shoes for his birthday on June 14, 2016, and he wore them while accepting the Republican Party’s presidential nomination on July 19, 2016, were those shoes a “campaign contribution?”

Trump has committed any number of impeachment-worthy offenses. Perhaps his tormentors should concentrate on those offenses instead of just looking for the easiest way to “get Trump.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Caricature by DonkeyHotey, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Between her new “tell-all” book and her use of taped conversations to promote it, Omarosa Manigault Newman (former “Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison”) has the White House in a tizzy.

President Donald Trump publicly refers to her as a “crazed, crying lowlife” and a “dog.” There’s quite a bit of pearl-clutching over one recording which seems to have been made in the White House Situation Room, where some of the government’s most secret stuff gets discussed.

All of which is par for the course in Trump’s America.

I can understand why some people were surprised when a reality TV personality got elected president.

I can understand why some people were surprised when that reality TV personality president hired another reality TV personality (in fact, someone he had twice reality-TV-“fired”) to work at the White House.

What I can’t understand is why anyone would expect two reality TV personalities to stop acting like reality TV personalities just because their new show broadcasts from a new set at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Is there a serious side at all to these made-for-reality-TV melodramatics? Yes. The Trump campaign organization has invoked the arbitration clause of its non-disclosure agreement versus Omarosa, and rumors (stoked by Trump, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, and others) imply another NDA specific to her White House employment but generalized beyond the bounds of protecting classified information.

Exposing the likely existence of that second NDA, along with hopefully successfully defying it, makes Omarosa the current front-runner for the title of “Best, Maybe Even Only, Public Servant Produced by the Trump Administration.”

The sustaining fiction of American government is that citizens and taxpayers are the real employers — the ultimate bosses — and that even the top-most government employees are answerable to us.

Fictions like that can only be stretched so far. The idea that Donald Trump can legally interpose himself between Omarosa’s desire to dish on White House life and our desire to listen to her do so stretches this particular tale to the breaking point. A shift manager at McDonald’s doesn’t get to swear the cooks and cashiers to silence should the corporation’s CEO happen along with questions for them.

If it was up to me, the Oval Office and the entire West Wing of the White House would be covered 24/7 by publicly accessible live-streaming web cameras. THEY claim to work for US, remember? The employees don’t get to hide from the employers. What they do on the clock, and how they do it, is our business, not their privileged secret.

Of course, it’s not up to me, and the fiction will likely survive even without turning the White House into an uncut (and probably even more boring) version of Big Brother or Keeping Up With the Kardashians. But Omarosa’s book and its promotion campaign are turning into a much-needed test case for just how far from transparency the executive branch can go without the public, and possibly the courts, finally putting our feet down.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY