How could I prove to you that I say what I mean? What evidence could convince you?
Trump's income taxes published by NYT
- Thread starter Agema
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Of course they're saying that.
The president is quite free to answer the problem by doing what his precessors have for so many years, and releasing his tax returns. But they know why he won't, don't they? Deep down, they know. The NYT report is almost certainly right, at least in the broad picture and most major details. The president who sold himself to all those voters angry at being cheated by the rich and powerful is every bit the rich and powerful man who cheats them - and more than most.
To be fair, for a paper to get at least some of the details wrong in a complex matter would not be surprise. If it takes courts years to resolve this sort of thing, a journalistic analysis is hardly likely to get everything perfect.
The tax affairs of the president most certainly qualify as public interest, especially in terms of potential tax fraud.
1) You're hearing these things from who exactly?
2) Whoever told you the NYT report is illegal or an invasion of privacy is a fucking idiot. It's neither, and there's decades (centuries?) of case law in the U.S. protecting the press when reporting on public figures/elected officials and using government documents to do so.
Perhaps you should try living up to your so called neutrality? You cannot say that it is okay to minimise tax payments and then proclaim that you are neutral on the matter of a man reducing his tax payments, whether by legal or illegal means. That isn't neutrality, you are quite literally stating an opinion.
And not posting pointless replies that are basically arguments over semantics could probably help with your credibility as well.
Neutrality doesn't mean "doesn't have an opinion". Neutrality is not apathy or indifference. I means I am not in support of, or against any political candidate, among other things.
Also, I didn't say "it is okay to minimize tax payments..." I said it's not necessarily immoral. There's a a big difference.
So I shouldn't have objected when kwak told me that I was "defending this"? That would have made it clear that I was neutral?
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*80% of CE turns to dust, blown away in the wind to the fading sounds of raging screeching*
This is the kind of investigative reporting the NYT is really good at. The piece investigates what not even the IRS could puzzle together. The emperor doesn't have any clothes. People defending Trump's finances at this point have really abandoned all rational thought.
That's some amateur gaslighting when it comes to your opinion on being taxed less.
And you sure don't seem neutral when you only ever crawl out of the woodworks to remark on how unfair people are being to certain politicians or dismiss their arguments because of some semantic disagreement.
I am well aware of what I said and what I believe. If you want to point out a contradiction, you'll have to use your words and explain it in full. Just quoting me and giving the camera knowing look isn't going to cut it. "I'm neutral" and "this keeps happening to people and companies, but nothing ever happens because it's all legal" are not contradicting statements.
Make some threads unfairly criticizing Biden, or Bernie Sanders, then, and watch what I do.
But wait, that doesn't happen because they're on your "team", and the rules of the game are:
1) "always criticize your opponents and never praise them when they do something good", and
2) "always praise your team when they do something good and never criticize them".
So that'll never happen.
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Did you even read the actual NYT article? I'm guessing not, because I'm sure you would've spotted this:
"The Times examined and analyzed the data from thousands of individual and business tax returns for 2000 through 2017, along with additional tax information from other years. The trove included years of employee compensation information and records of cash payments between the president and his businesses, as well as information about ongoing federal audits of his taxes. This article also draws upon dozens of interviews and previously unreported material from other sources, both public and confidential. All of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it."
Also, in terms of the NYT, it has no bearing on *how* its sources obtained the data. The NYT and its reporters are only criminally liable if they directly took part in the theft of the data -- see the Julian Assange charges related to Chelsea Manning for more on that scenario. And even then, the legality of prosecuting journalists for assisting sources in that way is still being debated. But there's no indication that the Times reporters were involved in the acquisition or extra-legal theft of the tax data. And you can't charge journalists with reporting classified or confidential information EVEN IF IT WAS OBTAINED ILLEGALLY BY SOURCES (see Snowden and the Guardian, Washington Post, etc.).
P.S. Who the fuck are Viva Frie and Robert Barnes, and why are you investing anything in what they say on this matter when they can't get one of the most basic facts right?
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Except that this player A) demanded that poor people who don't currently pay income taxes be made to do so, so that "they feel like they have skin in the game", and B) claimed that he paid large amounts of taxes in the very same year that this article claims he paid zero.
Technically the article suggests some tax was paid.
I think paying some tax (even if a small amount) could help people feel more invested. It wouldn't have to be much.
Also technically Trump could have paid a lot of tax and then got most of it refunded too.
How invested in society do you feel after paying tax? Cuz I gotta tell you, I live in conservative, fairly well-to-do circles, and all I ever hear is bitching about how the government takes the production of labor to squander it on the useless bureaucracy.
Unrelated: anybody who thinks this is gonna make a difference in the election is dreaming. Conservatives actively cheer for getting out of tax by any means possible, and will regard Trump as a hero. And they'll look at how he did that through business failure as just playing hyper-dimensional chess.
Viva Frie is a lawyer. I think Barnes is as well.
I find the idea that the NYT just pieced together something as complex as a billionaires tax returns from scraps they collected over the years ridiculous on its face.
Tell me something: if the someone steals a dick pic of Trumps, can the Times publish it?
Barnes is a lawyer who specializes in getting rich people off the hook for tax evasion, and Vrie is a former lawyer turned Youtube personality who calls mainstream media fake news, and is a "non-partisan" who "supports Donald Trump", i.e. he loves "triggering the libs".
- Apr 1, 2009
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Don't you see, Houseman is a devils advocate because that guy totally needs an advocate.
Then Frie and Barnes should get their money back from whatever fucking college they allegedly graduated from.
1) You find it ridiculous, yet you clearly didn't read the article. Can you at least do that much before criticizing out of hand and relying on bullshit commentary from a couple of hacks? And also acknowledge the fact that Trump's tax returns have been a major topic and hotly pursued material for about five years?
2) I'm not sure what you're hoping to prove with your dick pic analogy, but you're reaching. No one "stole" anything here, and Trump's tax returns and financial dealings are 100% newsworthy.
- Apr 1, 2009
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It depends on the context. Like if they got it from a Russian server and the Russians were threatening to release it if he didn't give them favorable trade terms or something then it would be relevant, aside from the fact that no one wants to see his tiny orange pecker.
Well he's certainly got a lot of people vehemently hating him willing to believe pictures of kids in small cages were Trump's doing, or he deliberately and rudely overfed koi carp or that he stole a small childs hat and threw it into the crowd...........
I mean I think we all had enough talk about it and it being brought up constantly during the stormy Daniels revelations............ also what happened to all that I thought that was meant to be going somewhere with something big but it just died out................