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Will These Lawsuits End Trump’s Tariffs? More Than 3,500 U.S. Companies Hope So.

More than 3,500 American companies have filed lawsuits asking a federal court to cancel the Trump administration’s tariffs on Chinese-made goods—by far the most significant legal challenge yet to the president’s trade war.

The lawsuits were filed over the past two weeks in the U.S. Court of International Trade, a special federal court that hears cases involving customs laws and duties, on behalf of several major American companies. The plaintiffs include retailers Target and Home Depot, car manufacturers Tesla and Ford, and several major manufacturing firms. The companies are challenging what Dana Incorporated, an auto parts manufacturer and plaintiff, calls an “unbounded and unlimited trade war impacting billions of dollars in goods,” Reuters reported.

The companies argue that the Trump administration failed to meet certain deadlines for imposing tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, a federal law that gives the president authority to impose tariffs for the purposes of enforcing trade agreements or countering anticompetitive behavior by foreign countries. Trump invoked Section 301 when slapping an escalating series of tariffs on imports from China starting in 2018, but the lawsuits contend that the administration made procedural mistakes that should invalidate those tariffs.

Essentially, the court is being asked to determine whether Section 301 allows the White House to engage in what the plaintiffs call an “open-ended trade war,” or if it merely allows a president to take distinct actions to counter perceived “discriminatory” actions by a foreign government, The National Law Review explains.

The companies concede in their lawsuit that Trump acted within his authority when he imposed 25 percent tariffs on about $50 billion dollars of annual Chinese imports in mid-2018. Those tariffs were implemented to counter what the Trump administration said was unfair practices by the Chinese government having to do with the theft of intellectual property from American-owned businesses.

But when the administration expanded the trade war to include 10 percent tariffs on another $200 billion of annual Chinese imports in 2019, the plaintiffs say it went too far. Section 301 allows a president to “modify or terminate” tariffs at any time, the plaintiffs argue, but it does not allow the government to expand tariffs beyond the initial action.

If the legal challenge is successful, the court would likely order the federal government to remove that second round of tariffs on Chinese imports and refund, with interest, the import taxes paid by American companies. “Duties paid by U.S. importers, by the way, not ‘The Chinese,'” writes Dan Ikenson, director of the center for trade policy studies at the Cato Institute, a free market think tank.

This isn’t the first legal challenge to Trump’s trade war, but it is the first one to target Section 301 tariffs against Chinese-made goods. A previous effort filed by steel importers against tariffs imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 helped expose the hypocrisy of imposing tariffs for “national security” purposes on imports from allied countries, but their lawsuit failed to overturn them. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case after the Trump administration prevailed at the U.S. Court of International Trade.

Even if the new legal effort succeeds, it would not revoke all of Trump’s Section 301 tariffs and would not touch the Section 232 tariffs on aluminum and steel.

Congress, meanwhile, has been completely useless when it comes to reining in Trump’s tariff powers. That means the best hope for ending Trump’s tariffs probably lies with whoever occupies the White House next year.

Could a second-term Trump be more willing to abandon his failed trade war now that he no longer needs to appear “tough on China” to win reelection? Unlikely, but possible.

Alternatively, a newly inaugurated President Joe Biden could lift the tariffs with the stroke of a pen, though Ikenson warns that Biden could “perceive certain strategic and domestic political advantages in maintaining some, if not all, of those tariffs.”

Ultimately, unless Congress takes steps to reform and limit presidential authority over trade, it seems like American businesses will continue to be at the mercy of whomever occupies the White House.

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This Time, We Really Should Think of the Children

The ongoing debate over whether to reopen K-12 schools amid the pandemic has pitted teachers unions against frustrated parents, white people against people of color (who are disproportionately at risk of COVID-19), and, of course, cautious Democratic politicians against the Trump administration, which pressured the Centers for Disease Control to support a reopening agenda, according to a new report in The New York Times.

But the one group whose opinions on the matter have received very little attention is the group most directly harmed by virtual learning: the students themselves.

There aren’t many youngsters writing op-eds for major newspapers, or appearing on cable news to air their views on reopening. Kindergarteners don’t usually attend town halls or participate in drive-by protests (except, occasionally, as props). “There are no polls of six-year-olds,” laments Meira Levinson, a professor of education at Harvard University.

Levinson’s comment appeared in a terrific, though horrendously depressing New Yorker article about “the children left behind by virtual learning.” Reporter Alex MacGillis notes that many private schools are currently open while public schools in large, inner-city districts are mostly closed. The result is a two-tiered education system: Wealthier families can provide their kids with something approaching a normal school experience, while the less privileged must “attend” school from home via Zoom. But for many kids, including and especially marginalized kids, virtual learning has been an absolute failure.

MacGillis details the frustrations of one specific Baltimore child who is frequently shuffled between the households of a mother with drug addiction and a grandmother with many other youngsters to wrangle. In-person education was a source of stability for this child—without it, he’s socially neglected, intellectually under-stimulated, and rapidly falling behind his peers. He may be protected from COVID-19, but he will likely be at greater risk of all sorts of socially undesirable consequences simply because he can’t go to school. It’s a heartbreaking story that probably describes the terrible situation in which countless economically disadvantaged children now find themselves.

That remote learning is likely harming a significant number of children and worsening existing inequalities should be front and center in any policy discussion about reopening schools. MacGillis’s article includes the perspective of the most anti-reopening faction—teachers unions—but gently suggests that their wariness is extreme given current scientific understanding, which holds that young children are not likely disease vectors. (An influential study from South Korea that purportedly reached the opposite conclusion was seriously flawed, according to multiple experts MacGillis consulted.) Any advocate for keeping public schools closed in Baltimore, New York City, Washington D.C., Chicago, or elsewhere must grapple with the fact that schools are open in Europe, “including in towns and cities whose test-positivity rates were well above those in Maryland and many other parts of the U.S.” MacGillis goes on to report that:

Schools were also opening in roughly half of all districts in the U.S., and so far there was little evidence of the virus spreading inside school buildings. In Connecticut, many small towns and suburbs were offering in-person instruction—but not New Haven, which is heavily Black and Hispanic. In Texas, Florida, and Georgia, where many schools had been open since mid-August, COVID-19 case numbers and hospitalization rates generally continued to decline from their summer highs, despite reported outbreaks at some schools. In Wisconsin, where teachers’ unions had been hollowed out by Governor Scott Walker, schools were opening in much of the state (though not in Milwaukee). A middle-school teacher in Sheboygan told me that kids were spending the whole day in the same classroom, and the smell of sanitizer was overpowering. But so far there had been no confirmed cases at the school.

College reopenings, on the other hand, have produced significant COVID-19 spread—though outbreaks can be managed, quite successfully, by frequent testing of the entire student body. But for K-12, it’s mostly good news thus far.

Given all this, the Trump administration’s effort to push for school reopenings is hardly misguided: Many children who are currently at home in front of their laptops would be much better off in a classroom. And yet The New York Times would like readers to believe that there’s something nefarious going on here, thus the recent article, “Behind the White House Effort to Pressure the C.D.C. on School Openings.”

The Times largely rests its assertion that the administration improperly pressured the CDC to greenlight school reopenings on a single verifiable piece of information: White House staffers asked the agency to create a chart specifically showing that young kids and teenagers were overwhelmingly unlikely to die from the coronavirus. According to the Times:

The White House seized on a bar chart the C.D.C. distributed that week to other agencies, which showed that 60 percent of coronavirus deaths were people over the age of 75. Officials asked the C.D.C. to provide a new chart to show people 18 and under as a separate group—rather than including them as normal in an under-25 category—in an effort to demonstrate that the risk for school-age children was relatively low.

The Times obscures that this is a completely reasonable request given the available medical evidence about the effect of COVID-19 on different age groups. Why, given the scientific consensus, would it be “normal” to lump everyone under 25 in the same risk category? The death rate for 20-somethings is not the issue here. The White House was perfectly justified in asking for a chart showing the near-zero death rates for the actual K-12 set.

“If the CDC was refusing to provide age breakdowns on COVID risks in a discussion about *K-12* school openings, pointlessly lumping in the 18-25 *ADULTS* in there and not separating out 1-5, 5-12 & 12-18, it would be CDC who was terribly in the wrong,” writes Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist and professor at the University of North Carolina, on Twitter. “This is baffling by the NYT.”

The Times also lambasts physician Deborah Birx, of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, for asking the CDC to include information about negative mental health outcomes for children learning remotely. While most people would agree that the mental health of children living below, at, and near the poverty line is objectively important information when discussing a policy that has made their mental health worse, the Times reporters treat this consideration as nefarious and unscientific.

Consigning disadvantaged children to weeks or possibly months of virtual learning would be a devastating choice—one that American cities are thus far quite alone in making. The school reopening debate might be the first in living memory where an appeal to “think of the children”—often a lazy and emotional rhetorical tool—should probably be made more loudly and in earnest.

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Trump Still Doesn’t Have a Health Care Plan. He Does Have a $6.6 Billion Medicare Bribe for Seniors.

At long last, President Donald Trump has announced his health care plan. The problem is, it’s not a health care plan. It’s an empty promise attached to a federally funded bribe.

The saga of how we got here is a long and annoying one, filled with policy arcana that is both incredibly important and almost entirely irrelevant since it is so often discarded in favor of political imperatives. Trump has rendered the entire health care debate into a glum farce.

From practically the moment he began running for president, Trump promised to repeal and replace Obamacare, the health care law signed by his predecessor, Barack Obama. Republicans in Congress spent most of the first year of Trump’s presidency working on various repeal and replace plans, but they never coalesced around a single proposal, and the final attempts were essentially legislative shells structured so that the details could be filled in later. Even as the GOP attempted to pass actual replacement legislation, it could not, in the end, describe what that replacement would be. No major health care bill was ever signed into law.

Still, Trump persisted in promising that a new health care plan was forthcoming, saying on multiple occasions over the last several months that it was imminent—just two or three weeks away.

At no point did Trump provide any substantive details about what would be in his new plan; at most, he would promise that it would offer some form of protection to people with preexisting health conditions, without explaining precisely how. That promise was complicated by the fact that Trump was backing a legally dubious lawsuit to overturn Obamacare, including its rules governing how insurers must treat people with preexisting conditions.

There were legitimate arguments to be made that those rules raised premium prices for buyers of individual market health insurance, and even that they provided some incentives for insurance companies to provide worse coverage to the chronically ill. But Trump wasn’t making those arguments. Instead, when asked about Obamacare’s preexisting conditions rules, he would say, with characteristically jumbled syntax, something that sounded roughly like a promise to keep those rules in place. Trump was not teasing an alternative mechanism, or offering a critique of Obamacare; he was trying to have it both ways, pushing to strike down Obamacare in the courts while insisting that he would preserve its core insurance regulations.

Last Thursday, with the election barely more than a month away, Trump revealed his vision for health care, including his plan for protecting preexisting conditions. It is exactly as substantive as his earlier promises to protect preexisting conditions, which is to say that it is almost completely without substance. To protect people with preexisting conditions, Trump said he would sign an executive order declaring that it is the policy of the United States to protect people with preexisting conditions.

That is not a policy mechanism. It is not legislative edict. It is a statement of intent, backed up by nothing. It is equivalent to declaring that it is the policy of the United States that henceforth all watermelons shall be seedless. That might be desirable, but it is not going to happen without a mechanism in place to make it happen. It is not a plan, because Trump—still—does not actually have one.

Instead, he has a gimmick. At the same speech last week, Trump said he would send 33 million seniors $200 prescription drug gift cards. Think of it as the political equivalent of a retailer offering a holiday promotion, except the holiday in question here is the election. That is Trump’s preelection pitch to seniors: Here’s $200.

If enacted, Trump’s gift card program would cost about $6.6 billion. In theory, that money would come from savings from a prescription drug program referred to as “most-favored-nation” pricing, which would guarantee the United States doesn’t pay more for drugs than other countries. But that program hasn’t gone into effect yet, and the administration has been tellingly quiet about the specifics, with one White House official telling reporters: “Unfortunately, the details of the offsetting requirements [of the Medicare drug pricing program] are still yet to come. Expect more details out of the White House in the near future.” As always with Trump and health care, the specifics will arrive later.

Nor is it clear whether the program could even legally operate through Medicare’s demonstrations program. That program was intended to allow small-scale experiments with payment models, which, if successful, could then be scaled up to provide savings to the program as a whole. Trump’s plan to give $200 gift cards to 33 million seniors looks less like a small-scale experiment designed to find a way to save Medicare money and more like a program of taxpayer-funded bribery.

Which, needless to say, is also not a health care plan in any meaningful sense. Because Trump never really has a plan. He has gimmicks and delaying tactics. That’s it.

Occasionally, when I complain that neither Trump nor most of his fellow Republicans have health care plans to speak of, libertarian-minded readers respond that politicians shouldn’t have health care plans, because the federal government shouldn’t be in the business of managing American health care at all.

I agree that the federal role in health care should be significantly diminished. The problem with this is that the federal government is already in the business of managing American health care. One could plausibly argue that spending money on health care is the primary thing the federal government does.

In 2019, the federal government spent about $630 billion on Medicare alone, an amount projected to rise to about $1.3 trillion in 2029. One of Medicare’s key trust funds is set to become insolvent in 2026, yet Trump has promised not to touch the program. Major health care programs—particularly Medicare and Medicaid—are among the largest federal budget items and biggest drivers of long-term federal debt. About one-sixth of the total economy is devoted to health care, and by the end of the decade it will be closer to one-fifth; about half of that spending comes from the federal government. Meanwhile, health insurance post-Obamacare has remained unaffordable for many middle-class families; longstanding tax incentives for employer-subsidized health insurance create logistical headaches and problematic incentives for insurers. Pricing for health care services is opaque and maddening.

No plan means no effort to address any of those issues. It means leaving the status quo, with all its problems, in place. Which, on the evidence, appears to be Trump’s actual plan.

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We’ve Reached “The Endpoint” – Monetary And Fiscal Policy Won’t Help

We’ve Reached “The Endpoint” – Monetary And Fiscal Policy Won’t Help

Tyler Durden

Tue, 09/29/2020 – 14:25

Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

Remember all those “green shoots?”

That was the ubiquitous phrase used by White House officials and TV talking heads in 2009 to describe how the U.S. economy was coming back to life after the 2008 global financial crisis.

The problem was we did not get green shoots; what we got was more like brown weeds.

The economy did recover, yes, but it was the slowest recovery in U.S. history.

After the green shoots theory had been discredited, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner promised a “recovery summer” in 2010.

That didn’t happen either.

The recovery did continue, but it took years for the stock market to return to its previous highs and even longer for unemployment to come down to levels that could be regarded as close to full employment.

And after the worst of the 2020 pandemic (so we hope), we’ve gotten the same happy talk. But those hopes have been dashed, which the latest jobs numbers bear out.

Can monetary and/or fiscal policy lift us out of the new depression? Let’s first take a look at monetary policy.

Fed money printing is an exhibition of monetarism, an economic theory most closely associated with Milton Friedman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics in 1976. Its basic idea is that changes in money supply are the most important cause of changes in GDP.

A monetarist attempting to fine-tune monetary policy says that if real growth is capped at 4%, the ideal policy is one in which money supply grows at 4%, velocity is constant, and the price level is constant. This produces maximum real growth and zero inflation. It’s all fairly simple as long as the velocity of money is constant.

But money velocity is not constant, contrary to Friedman’s thesis. Velocity is like a joker in the deck. It’s the factor the Fed cannot control.

Velocity is psychological: It depends on how an individual feels about her economic prospects. It cannot be controlled by the Fed’s printing press. It measures how much money gets spent from people to businesses.

Think of when you tip a waiter. That waiter might use that tip to pay for an Uber. And that Uber driver might pay for fuel with that money. This velocity of money stimulates the economy.

Well, velocity has been crashing for the past 20 years. From its peak of 2.2 in 1997 (each dollar supported $2.20 of nominal GDP), it fell to 2.0 in 2006 just before the global financial crisis and then crashed to 1.7 in mid-2009 as the crisis hit bottom.

The velocity crash did not stop with the market crash. It continued to fall to 1.43 by late 2017, despite the Fed’s money printing and zero rate policy (2008–15). Even before the pandemic, it fell to 1.37 in early 2020.

It can be expected to fall even further as the new depression drags on. As velocity falls, the economy falls. Money printing is impotent. $7 trillion times zero = zero. There is no economy without velocity.

The factors the Fed can control, such as base money, are not growing fast enough to revive the economy and decrease unemployment.

Spending is driven by the psychology of lenders and consumers, essentially a behavioral phenomenon. The Fed has forgotten (if it ever knew) the art of changing expectations about inflation, which is the key to changing consumer behavior and driving growth. It has nothing to do with money supply.

The bottom line is, monetary policy can do very little to stimulate the economy unless the velocity of money increases. And the prospects of that happening aren’t great right now.

But what about fiscal policy? Can that help get the economy out of depression? Let’s take a look…

We’re seeing more deficit spending in 2020 than the past several years combined. The government will add more to the national debt this year than all presidents combined from George Washington to Bill Clinton.

This spending explosion comes on top of a baseline budget deficit of $1 trillion. Combining the baseline deficit, the approved spending and the expected additional spending brings the total deficit for 2020 to over $3 trillion at the minimum.

That added debt will increase the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio to over 120%. That’s the highest in U.S. history and puts the U.S. in the same super-debtor’s league as Japan, Greece, Italy and Lebanon.

The idea that deficit spending can stimulate an otherwise stalled economy dates to John Maynard Keynes and his classic work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).

Keynes’ idea was straightforward.

He said that each dollar of government spending could produce more than $1 of growth. When the government spent money (or gave it away), the recipient would spend it on goods or services. Those providers of goods and services would, in turn, pay their wholesalers and suppliers.

This would increase the velocity of money.

Depending on the exact economic conditions, it might be possible to generate $1.30 of nominal GDP for each $1.00 of deficit spending. This was the famous Keynesian multiplier. To some extent, the deficit would pay for itself in increased output and increased tax revenues.

Here’s the problem:

There is strong evidence that the Keynesian multiplier does not exist when debt levels are already too high. In fact, America and the world are inching closer to what economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff describe as an indeterminate yet real point where an ever-increasing debt burden triggers creditor revulsion, forcing a debtor nation into austerity, outright default or sky-high interest rates.

Reinhart and Rogoff’s research reveals that a 90% debt-to-GDP ratio or higher is not just more of the same debt stimulus. Rather it’s what physicists call a critical threshold.

The first effect is the Keynesian multiplier falls below 1. A dollar of debt and spending produces less than a dollar of growth. Creditors grow anxious while continuing to buy more debt in a vain hope that policymakers reverse course or growth spontaneously emerges to lower the ratio.

This doesn’t happen. Society is addicted to debt, and the addiction consumes the addict.

The endpoint is a rapid collapse of confidence in U.S. debt and the U.S. dollar. This means higher interest rates to attract investor dollars to continue financing the deficits. Of course, higher interest rates mean larger deficits, which makes the debt situation worse. Or the Fed could monetize the debt, yet that’s just another path to lost confidence.

The result is another 20 years of slow growth, austerity, financial repression (where interest rates are held below the rate of inflation to gradually extinguish the real value of debt) and an expanding wealth gap.

The next two decades of U.S. growth would look like the last two decades in Japan. Not a collapse, just a slow, prolonged stagnation. This is the economic reality we are facing.

And neither monetary policy nor fiscal policy will change that.

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JPM Pays Record $1 Billion Fine; Admits Spoofing Of Gold And Treasuries

JPM Pays Record $1 Billion Fine; Admits Spoofing Of Gold And Treasuries

Tyler Durden

Tue, 09/29/2020 – 14:15

As expected, JP Morgan has just agreed to pay $920 million in fines – a record penality for allegations of systematic market manipulation – as part of a deferred prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors in Connecticut, bringing to a close a yearslong investigation into “spoofing” and other market manipulation tactics in the precious metals and Treasury markets.

Over the past decade, holding megabank trading desks accountable for routine manipulation of FX, Libor and other markets has been a priority for prosecutors, ever since – it seems – the springtime “flash crash” of 2010 shone an uncomfortable spotlight on ‘spoofing’ a technique whereby traders submit orders they never intended to fill solely for the purpose of trying to move the price of a given currency, futures contract etc. in a direction that favors one of their positions. For example, a trader who’s looking to sell a big slug of front-month gold futures might layer in dozens of “buy” orders to try and push the price up to hit his sell ‘offer’. The trick is, traders need to make sure none of these fraudulent offers ever get filled.

At trial, JPM’s former top precious metals trader argued that “spoofing” was an inevitable adaptation by sell-side dealers to fend off high-frequency market makers. One Deutsche Bank trader argued that the behavior was so commonplace, he didn’t realize it was wrong, or illegal.

Tuesday’s settlement addresses “two distinct schemes to defraud”, according to a press release from the DoJ. Under the terms of the DPA, JPMorgan will pay over $920 million in a criminal monetary penalty, criminal disgorgement,= and victim compensation. The criminal penalty paid by the bank will be credited against payments made to the CFTC under a separate agreement with the CFTC being announced today and with part of the criminal disgorgement credited against payments made to the SEC under a separate agreement with the SEC being announced today.

“For over eight years, traders on JP Morgan’s precious metals and US Treasuries desks engaged in separate schemes to defraud other market participants that involved thousands of instances of unlawful trading meant to enhance profits and avoid losses,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Today’s resolution – which includes a significant criminal monetary penalty, compensation for victims, and requires JP Morgan to disgorge its unlawful gains – reflects the nature and seriousness of the bank’s offenses and represents a milestone in the department’s ongoing efforts to ensure the integrity of public markets critical to our financial system.”

“JPMorgan engaged in two separate years-long market manipulation schemes,” said US Attorney John Durham. “Not only will the company pay a substantial financial penalty and return money to victims, but this agreement requires JPMorgan to self-report violations of the federal anti-fraud laws and cooperate in any future criminal investigations. I thank the FBI for its dedication in investigating these deceptive trading practices and other sophisticated financial crimes.”

According to admissions and court documents, between approximately March 2008 and August 2016, numerous traders and sales personnel on JPMorgan’s precious metals desk located in New York, London, and Singapore engaged in a scheme to defraud in connection with the purchase and sale of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium futures contracts (collectively, precious metals futures contracts) that traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange Inc. and Commodity Exchange Inc., which are commodities exchanges operated by the CME Group Inc. Prosecutors identified “tens of thousands of instances” where JPM traders placed fraudulent orders in attempts to manipulate market prices.

Aside from the bank, three JPMorgan traders, Gregg Smith, Michael Nowak, and Christopher Jordan, and one former salesperson, Jeffrey Ruffo have been charged with running a corrupt criminal enterprise within America’s largest bank. A

Moreover, between April 2008 and January 2016, traders on JPM’s Treasuries desks in New York and London used similar “spoofing” techniques to place fraudulent orders in Treasury futures with the Chicago Board of Trade (another commodity trading venue operated by the CME), as well as for notes and bonds in trading in the spot secondary market for Treasury securities. These traders also routinely misled markets about the price and supply of Treasury securities.

Over the span of eight years, 15 traders at the biggest US bank caused losses of more than $300 million to other participants in precious metals and Treasury markets, according to the court filings. JP Morgan has admitted responsibility for the traders’ actions. The three-year DPA will allow the bank to walk away from the scandal – and two counts of wire fraud – so long as it self-reports any future violations.

Meanwhile, the woman who was overseeing JPM’s global commodity business when some of this wrongdoing was ongoing all this went down wasn’t hardy mentioned even once during the proceedings.

Read the DPA below:

JPMDPA by Zerohedge on Scribd

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Biden Releases 2019 Tax Returns Hours Before First Debate; Paid $300,000 In Taxes

Biden Releases 2019 Tax Returns Hours Before First Debate; Paid $300,000 In Taxes

Tyler Durden

Tue, 09/29/2020 – 13:57

With just over 8 hours to go before the first debate, Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, released their 2019 tax returns. The filings shows that the Bidens reported $985,233 in adjusted gross income in 2019, a year in which he was mostly running for president; out of this they paid nearly $300,000 in federal taxes, an effective tax rate of just over 30%, consisting of a $346,204 tax payment offset by a $46,858 refund. The release is Biden’s last minute attempt to differentiate himself from President Trump, who as the NYT reported, paid a modest $750 in taxes in 2016 and 2017 due to the application of net loss carryforwards. It is safe to say that the issue of tax payments will be among the top debate subjects at 9pm tonight.

Biden’s income in 2019, when he spent most of the year as a presidential candidate, was substantially less than it was in 2017 and 2018. He and his wife reported adjusted gross income of more than $11 million for 2017 and nearly $4.6 million for 2018.

Of note, a revision in Trump’s 2017 tax law that capped the deduction for state and local taxes at $10,000 prevented the Bidens from deducting all of the $111,717 in local levies they paid in 2019. In all, the Bidens had $40,496 in itemized deductions. That included $14,700 in charitable contributions – about 1.5% of their adjusted gross income.

Biden’s campaign said the latest release means he has now released 22 years of tax records, covering years when he served in the Senate representing Delaware, as vice president and his time after he left the Obama administration:

“This is a historic level of transparency and to give the American people faith, once again, that their leaders will look out for them, and not their own bottom line,“ deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said on a pre-debate call with reporters. Quoting comments Biden made last year, she added “Mr. President, release your tax returns or shut up.”

Trump has refused to release any of his tax returns, breaking a 40-year tradition of major-party candidates and presidents, claiming he is precluded from doing so by an ongoing IRS audit. In a report published on Sunday which showed that Trump paid just $750 for 2016 and 2017, the New York Times detailed a series of questionable transactions by Trump, including deductions for hair styling, claims of large losses and consulting payments to his daughter, Ivanka Trump, although it did not find any outright illegal transactions.

The full 38-page tax return is below (pdf link)

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Ignoring Clinton Charity Frauds To Attack Trump for Paying Taxes: Ortel

Ignoring Clinton Charity Frauds To Attack Trump for Paying Taxes: Ortel

Tyler Durden

Tue, 09/29/2020 – 13:52

Op-Ed authored by Charles Ortel via American Thinker (emphasis ours)

Yesterday, the New York Times published 10,000 empty words on Donald Trump’s taxes, a barrage of self-inflicted wounds gutting the integrity of the editorial staff and management of this publicly traded, yet family influenced company. Yet it was not an effective indictment of any Trump family member.

It is not a crime to offset losses against income, a fact that has been true for decades. And, it is profit-seeking businesses, and their owners and employees that produce the bulk of taxable income, yielding revenue needed to defray expenses of government.

Over decades, generations of Trumps employed thousands of New Yorkers directly and indirectly producing incomes and spending that filled tax coffers at federal, state, city and county level. But instead of cultivating the Trump family and other profit-seekers, city and state government officials decided to persecute them, something Mayor DeBlasio and Governor Cuomo II, seemingly delight in doing.

A Welcome Mat for Grifters

While the Trump family hails from the Empire State, Bill and Hillary Clinton formally arrived there officially as a pair of carpetbaggers from Washington, DC in 2001, having plucked their previous domiciles clean.

Like her predecessor Eric Schneiderman, New York Attorney General Tish James relentlessly pounds the Trump family for charity offenses but so far has turned a blind eye to the biggest illegal enrichment scheme using “charities” since Tammany Hall.

Meanwhile, editors at The New York Times refuse to look through publicly available filings concerning a supposed charity now called “The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation” that began hustling in New York in 1998, while the Clinton’s and their lawyers needed vast sums to fend off impeachment, and pay overdue legal bills.

When it comes to the Trumps, authorities enforce strict laws regulating charities and their money-raising appeals, but not so for the Clintons. This is especially true of Robert Mueller and James Comey, who “missed” the early period of Clinton charity fraud, when they “investigated” the Clinton Foundation with grand juries from 2001 to 2005, according to documents available online at the FBI Vault website.

By 2005, Bill Clinton boasted in the paperback edition of his book on page 958 that he spent time since January 2001: “building my library in Arkansas and my foundation in Harlem.”

But hard facts suggest otherwise.

Documents available in Arkansas and on the Clinton Foundation website prove that the original entity — The William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation — operated from 23 October 1997 through 22 December 1997 without adopting Bylaws, in violation of Arkansas state law. This is not a minor, technical matter.

The crucial organizing document makes clear that the original nonprofit corporation was intended to be a public charity. Public charities must formally exist and cannot be governed by one family or used to raise sums from corrupt donors looking to purchase influence.

So how, for example, did Bill and Hillary Clinton select a specific site for “their” foundation in Arkansas on Nov. 7, 1997 as a C-SPAN interview of Skip Rutherford (first president of Clinton Foundation) claims? Bill did not become a trustee or director of any Clinton charity until 2009, while Hillary waited until 2013.

A Long Trail of Dubious Missteps

A fair analysis of public documents by the IRS, if it were politically neutral, would have denied federal tax exemption for the Clinton Foundation. Of course, that did not happen when Bill Clinton was in the White House. Instead, the IRS “ignored” obvious defects in the application and granted conditional exemption on Jan. 29, 1998 as the Clintons together fended off Bill’s Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky problems.

Then, by mid 1998, the Clinton Foundation filed a materially false registration statement in New York, failing to explain why the entity did not file an IRS return on Form 990 covering its partial year operation in 1997. Importantly, this registration did explain, before Hillary announced her ambition to represent New York in the U.S. Senate, that the Clinton Foundation would operate only in a Little Rock city park and not all over the world.

Ever since 1998, the Clintons have violated legions of laws that might protect New Yorkers from charity and tax frauds. For example, a public charity must further specific, tax-exempt purposes. If it wishes to alter its geographic focus, it ordinarily must secure IRS approval, in advance, before making such a change. And, states including New York legally require charities to make prompt, publicly available notification of such changes.

The Clinton “charities” never have complied with crucial charity laws and did not even bother to file independent certified audits of their financial results for 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, or 2003 in New York, as is specifically required. Thereafter, purported audits for 2004 forward are each materially false and incomplete. Without effective audits, no outsider can know what actually happened to donations sent towards a charity.

Does “The Clinton Foundation” Exist?

Forgetting grievous accounting “errors,” no Clinton “charity” bothered to register with the New York Secretary of State until 2009. Before then numerous appeals went out supposedly using names associated with the Clinton family. These “fictitious names” have not been properly registered in each New York county where they have been used to solicit funds or to operate. The possibility that bank accounts may have been opened many places in these names is one that must be considered.

Real New Yorkers will remember when so many street corners in Manhattan had folding tables with gigantic glass jars on them supposedly seeking cash donations for the homeless. There was no actual charity in that case. Grifters pulled on heartstrings, and then harvested donations for themselves using glass jars instead of fake bank accounts.

Correcting the Record

What Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton have done in New York and internationally with their many fake “charities” is far worse.

Ask people in India, Asia or Haiti, what happened to billions of dollars raised and, in theory, sent for natural disaster relief efforts overseen by the Clintons. To this day there has never been an honest accounting of these activities.

By what authority and in what guise was all this money solicited, raised and spent?

New York has pushed out a family of billionaires who fell afoul of charity offenses resulting in penalties of less than $30 million.

Meanwhile, they welcomed technically bankrupt Arkansans to foist a set of charity frauds on taxpayers that is at least $3 billion in size.

And what do the many preening “investigative journalists” at The New York Times do?

They stubbornly ignore the largest, as yet unprosecuted fraud and corruption scandal in American history.

When you say you are giving money away, no one checks carefully enough to see how much money you truly raised and where it actually went.

And when celebrities or politicians are involved, donors let down their guard.

The Trump Administration should not only make sure that all charity frauds are prosecuted aggressively, it should make harsh examples particularly of U.S. charities, real or fake, that solicit donations trading on the actus or imagined plight of others.

As for The New York Times, rest in blind partisanship but don’t forget to register as an agent of the imaginary Biden for President campaign.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GdgDHJ Tyler Durden

Major Hospital System Hit With Paralyzing Ransomware Attack, Potentially Largest In US History

Major Hospital System Hit With Paralyzing Ransomware Attack, Potentially Largest In US History

Tyler Durden

Tue, 09/29/2020 – 13:38

Computer systems for Universal Health Systems (UHS), a major hospital and healthcare provider with over 400 locations across the U.S., was hit with what appears to be one of the largest medical cyberattacks in U.S. history, according to NBC News.

UHS released a statement on Monday, confirming that its “I.T. Networks” were “offline” due to a security incident.

“The I.T. Network across Universal Health Services (UHS) facilities is currently offline, due to an I.T. security issue,” the statement said. “We implement extensive I.T. security protocols and are working diligently with our I.T. security partners to restore I.T. operations as quickly as possible. In the meantime, our facilities are using their established back-up processes, including offline documentation methods. Patient care continues to be delivered safely and effectively.”

Adding that, “No patient or employee data appears to have been accessed, copied or misused.”

UHS did not elaborate on the hack attack, but someone familiar with UHS’ response efforts who wasn’t authorized to speak to the press said it “looks and smells like ransomware.”

A couple of UHS nurses, who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized by the company to speak about the incident, said the attack began over the weekend and had left medical staff paralyzed, resulting in doctors and nurses to work with pen and paper.

One of the nurses, who works at a hospital in North Dakota, said computers at the facility initially became sluggish then completely shutoff by Sunday morning.

“As of this a.m., all the computers are down completely,” the nurse said.

Another nurse at an Arizona hospital who worked this weekend said, “the computer just started shutting down on its own.”

“Our medication system is all online, so that’s been difficult,” the Arizona nurse said.

Readers may recall, a hospital in Germany was hit with a severe ransomware attack in early September, which resulted in “extensive I.T. failure,” preventing one patient from receiving urgent care, marking a rare instance in which ransomware directly contributed to a death.

Cybercriminals have targeted hospitals and medical facilities with ransomware attacks because critical I.T. systems and databases of these facilities increase the probability the victims will pay their extortionists. However, recent attacks against medical facilities have surely been increasing in size.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Gk5VyK Tyler Durden