It’s a tantalizing headline from investigative journalism group ProPublica:  “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax.”

The source material for the report is an alleged “vast cache of IRS information” which may have been illegally leaked. A spokesperson for the US Treasury says that angle has been referred to the FBI, federal prosecutors, and other investigative bodies. And the title was clearly crafted to get our outrage gears turning.

But digging into the details, the promised revelation is … well, kind of boring. How do the wealthiest Americans “avoid” income tax? By not having “income.”

Yes, really. Words mean things, and the IRS spills a lot of ink defining those things.

How much ink? As of 2017, according to PolitiFact, the Internal Revenue Code was 6,550 pages long —  not including (Politifact cites the Tax Foundation)  6.6 million words of additional IRS regulations and 60,000 pages of case law.

And, as it turns out, most of the most wealthy’s wealth isn’t “income” according to the IRS’s definitions.

I’ll use Jeff Bezos as the example, because everybody does, right?

You’ve probably seen the headlines after a big stock move: “Bezos’s wealth increases by $4 billion” and so forth.

The obvious way of visualizing this headline is that a truck full of $100 bills pulled up to Bezos’s house and a crew carted those bills to the room where Bezos likes to roll around in money a la Scrooge McDuck.

What really happened is that the prospective sale value of stock that Bezos owns went up. Until and unless he actually sells that stock, he hasn’t made a dime. If he does sell that stock for more than it was worth when he got it, he’ll get hit for capital gains taxes of up to 20% on the price difference. Which is nowhere near the top income tax rate of 37% … but Jeff Bezos didn’t write the tax code, did he?

As a libertarian, I’d prefer to do away with taxes altogether. If the Navy wants a new aircraft carrier, let it hold a bake sale, or maybe send the Marines out to knock on doors and sell subscriptions to Rolling Stone to raise the money.

But if we’re going to have taxes, it’s kind of silly to blame people who pay what the tax code says they have to pay, rather than more, just because the amount paid doesn’t seem like “enough.”

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

Was SARS-COV-2 — the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic — created (or at least weaponized by being made transmissible to and between humans) in a Chinese research lab? Was it then leaked, accidentally or intentionally, from that lab into the human population? It’s impossible to overstate the explosive potential of a provable “yes” answer to those two questions.

Seventeen months into the news cycle surrounding those questions (they were first publicly hinted at in a tweet on January 5, 2020), they’re still putting off lots of heat and very little light. And that’s likely to remain the case, because the “Wuhan Lab Leak theory” is not a theory.

A theory has to be objectively testable such that if it’s false it can be PROVEN false. Otherwise, it’s just a hypothesis.

If my car keys go missing, I can hypothesize that little green faeries (who have the power to fool security cameras) took them in the middle of the night, then forgot to put them back after taking my car out for a joyride, filling the gas tank back up, parking it back where they found it, and rolling back the odometer.

My hypothesis “explains” the missing car keys. But it can’t be falsified. If I find the keys in my jacket pocket, well, the faeries obviously put them there, dummy!

Many “conspiracy theories” are just hypotheses which continuously change to accommodate any evidence that might disprove them.

No, I’m not saying the “Wuhan Lab Leak” hypothesis is a wild-eyed “conspiracy theory.” But it’s also not likely testable or falsifiable.

For one thing, the Chinese regime, while notable for many things, is not notable for its likely willingness to let western investigators poke around Wuhan at will, actively assisting those investigators in determining whether it accidentally or intentionally killed  millions of human beings and cratered the global economy.

For another, the regimes urging such an investigation have a long record of lying about pretty much everything (does “Saddam has WMD” ring any bells? How about “the NSA doesn’t spy on Americans?”), and have already spent a good deal of time setting  China up as their latest  “adversary.” It’s hard to imagine any situation in which those who WANT to believe in — or stand to gain political power from selling — the “Wuhan Lab Leak” hypothesis would concede that they were mistaken.

It’s a hypothesis, not a theory, and it’s likely to stay that way. When dealing with hypotheses, our best analytical tool is Occam’s Razor. Simple version: The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the likeliest.

Which explanation requires fewer assumptions?

That, like most human infectious diseases (60% according to the US Centers for Disease Control), SARS-COV-2 jumped from animals to humans via random mutation?

Or that, unlike (almost — the 2001 anthrax attacks may be an exception) any other past disease, SARS-COV-2 was weaponized in a lab and released into the human population?

Occam tells us to choose Door Number One. And good sense tells us to stop obsessing over questions we cannot hope to provably answer.

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 June 7, the US Food and Drug Administration granted “accelerated approval” to Biogen’s new Alzheimer’s medication, aducanumab, two years after the company halted its first set of Phase 3 clinical trials over “disappointing” results. Accelerated approval is based not on the usual required finding that a drug is proven “effective,” but instead on a finding that it is “reasonably likely to predict a clinical benefit.”

The decision comes with some  controversy. FDA advisor Dr. Caleb Alexander is “surprised and disappointed” by the decision, saying he thinks the FDA “gave the product a pass” despite lacking good evidence for its efficacy.  Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research acknowledges “residual uncertainties,”  but holds that “the data supports patients and caregivers having the choice” to try aducanumab.

In a free society, FDA would have no authority to come between doctors, patients, and medical treatment choices in the first place.

Private certification mechanisms,  like those provided by Underwriters Laboratories for electrical equipment, would almost certainly do a better and cheaper job of ensuring the safety and efficacy of medications and treatments. Doctors, insurers, and most patients would likely heed the findings of such mechanisms.

As for those who choose “alternative medicine,” home remedies, and even potentially dangerous black market drugs, they already make those choices now, regardless of what FDA says, and they would likely continue to do so.

Nonetheless, “accelerated approval” of  aducanumab is a good sign and hopefully the beginning of a trend.

FDA foot-dragging has likely killed tens of thousands of patients every year for decades. It takes far too long and costs far too much to get government approval of life-saving medications. From beta blockers to human body glue, Americans have paid for FDA’s skewed incentives and bureaucratic delays with their lives.

That continuous but largely unnoticed cost became, tragically, much higher and much more obvious last year. More than 300,000 Americans — including my mother — died in the six-month interregnum between Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine  establishing its basic safety and FDA finally granting an emergency use authorization.

We’ll never know how many departed friends and loved ones might still be with us if FDA had applied a “reasonably likely to predict a clinical benefit” standard to medications we count on today but had to wait years for.

Can FDA make itself more useful and less deadly? Only time will tell. Here’s hoping the answer is yes.

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