Tag: Taxes

Pass the Popcorn

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A federal appeals court ruled Monday that President Donald Trump’s tax returns must be turned over to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who had subpoenaed the documents from Trump’s accounting firm as part of an investigation into the pre-election payoffs to two women who alleged affairs with Trump.

Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow said he would appeal the case to the Supreme Court. Trump had earlier lost the initial case before a federal district court, and it was since fast-tracked.

………

The three-judge panel wrote in their decision that “any presidential immunity from state criminal process does not extend to investigative steps like the grand jury subpoena at issue here,” affirming the lower court’s ruling on that question.

Vance is seeking to obtain eight years of Trump’s tax documents through his account firm, Mazars USA, to evaluate the Trump Organization’s role in the payouts to porn star Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal, as well as the reimbursements made to Trump’s former longtime attorney Michael Cohen, who is now serving a three-year federal prison sentence for a litany of crimes, including campaign finance violations. Daniels and McDougal claimed to have had affairs with Trump, allegations he has denied.

Because the tax documents were requested under a grand jury subpoena, it’s unlikely they will become public if turned over. Trump is engaged in a series of legal battles across the country to keep his tax returns private.

I don’t think that it’s going to be resolved before the election, but I hope that will be.

Of Course She Is

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Nancy Pelosi has a plan for additional stimulus, and the details, that it will only put meaningful money in the pockets of people who make significantly more than $100,000.00 a year should surprise no one:

As lawmakers prepare for another round of fiscal stimulus to address economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested the next package include a retroactive rollback of a tax change that hurt high earners in states like New York and California.

A full rollback of the limit on the state and local tax deduction, or SALT, would provide a quick cash infusion in the form of increased tax rebates to an estimated 13 million American households — nearly all of which earn at least $100,000 a year.

………

The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated last year that a full repeal of the SALT limit for 2019 alone would reduce federal revenues by about $77 billion. Americans earning $1 million a year or more would collectively reap $40 billion of those benefits. Most of the rest would go to households earning $200,000 or more.

Well, we now know who her REAL constituency is.

As an aside, this change is literally the least bang for the buck possible as a stimulus, but it does appeal to overpaid pundits living in places like DC, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and I guess that this is all that matters to her.

Of Course He Does

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It appears that Donald Trump’s plan for dealing with economic disruption from the Covid-19 outbreak is a waiver of the payroll tax, but only through the election.

Why am I not surprised that he is viewing this entire crisis as a nothing more than an opportunity to score political points?

Donald Trump told Republican senators on Tuesday that he wants a payroll tax holiday through the November election so that taxes don’t go back up before voters decide whether to return him to office, according to three people familiar with the president’s remarks.

 Trump spoke to the Republicans at their weekly conference lunch at the Capitol as his administration prepares a package of economic measures to combat the fallout from the coronavirus outbreak. But the administration does not have a particularly detailed plan, several Republicans said including John Thune of South Dakota.

Other Republicans are suggesting a bailout of the fracking industry, because that never profitable industry faces a more immediate reckoning* over collapsing oil prices.

*The investments have not passed from the Vampire Squid and its Evil Minions™ down the financial food chain to ordinary investors, and the Republicans must prevent that.

From the Department of “About F%$#ing Time”

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There is a bill in California which would tax companies with overpaid CEOs:

In response to growing income inequality, some California lawmakers are looking at the possibility of tying tax rates for corporations to the gap between how much they pay their CEOs and what their average employees take home. That’s the idea behind state Senate Bill 37, legislation first introduced by Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) in December 2018.

Currently, California taxes corporations at a rate of 8.84 percent, and financial institutions at a rate of 10.84 percent. Under SB 37, corporations making over $10 million annually would be subject to a tax rate between 10.84 and 14.84 percent (12.84 and 16.84 percent for financial institutions), depending on the ratio of their CEO salaries to average worker wages. Companies with a ratio of more than 300 to one would pay the highest rate. SB 37 would also increase these tax rates for companies outsourcing to independent contractors or workers in foreign companies.

Revenue generated by the law would go to educational and early childhood programs. “The goal of SB 37 is to shrink income inequality,” said Sen. Skinner in a January 2020 hearing, adding, “The design of SB 37 … recognizes that reliance on state services increases when corporations underpay their workers.”

Personally, I’d just start levying a payroll tax on companies for a salary over $400,000.00 (The Salary of the President of the United States), but I’ll take what I can get.

Oh the Huge Manatee!

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The EU is going to black the Cayman Islands as a money laundering nation.

This will be a big problem for the folks working in the City of London, since a big part of their business is tax evasion and money laundering through former British colonies:

The Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory, is to be put on an EU blacklist of tax havens, less than two weeks after the UK’s withdrawal from the bloc.

………

The EU’s blacklist is an attempt to clamp down on the estimated £506bn lost to aggressive tax avoidance every year but member states are not “screened” in the process of drawing up the blacklist.

Territories linked to member states have also avoided the blacklist and the UK had heavily lobbied to protect its overseas territories from such scrutiny in the past.

On Wednesday, EU ambassadors judged that the islands in the western Caribbean Sea are not effectively cooperating with Brussels on financial transparency, the Financial Times reported.

The Cayman Islands will join Fiji, Oman, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, Vanuatu and the three US territories of American Samoa, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands, on the “non-cooperative” list.

For the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, think of the poor bankers, who will have to find productive work.

The horror ………

Thank You Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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It has now been revealed that New York State offered even more taxpayer money to Amazon than was previously revealed:

State officials offered Amazon.com Inc. almost a billion dollars more of incentives than was previously known to win its second-headquarters contest and were even prepared to pay part of some employees’ salaries if the tech company developed a campus in New York.

Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the scope of what state and local officials initially put on the table as part of the 2017 HQ2 competition, in which more than 200 cities submitted bids to host a facility that Amazon said would house 50,000 jobs.

The company said in November 2018 that sites in Northern Virginia and the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens would split the new headquarters. New York state and city officials agreed to give $3 billion of incentives to the e-commerce giant to hire as many as 40,000 employees.

Facing opposition from some local elected officials, Amazon abandoned its plans for New York on Valentine’s Day last year.

The Journal obtained the records through a Freedom of Information Law request to Empire State Development, the state’s economic development authority.

The documents show that in its first formal bid to Amazon, in October 2017, the state offered to provide up to $2.5 billion of incentives to the company for a campus in New York. The offer also applied to sites that state and local leaders proposed in the Hudson Valley, Albany, Central New York, Buffalo, Rochester and on Long Island.

The state’s initial offer included $1.4 billion of tax credits based on the number of employees hired and $1.1 billion of various grants. That was $800 million more than the ESD agreed to in a memorandum of understanding signed a year later: The state provided $1.2 billion of tax credits and $505 million to reimburse some construction costs.

………

On top of the state’s final $1.7 billion package, New York City ultimately offered Amazon up to $1.3 billion of extra incentives through two programs open to any company.

………

ESD initially proposed to spend $500 million to create a Center for Commercial Innovation near the selected site that would let Amazon partner with various colleges for research relevant to its business. The site would also subsidize job-training programs, according to the proposal, and the state pledged to pay 25% of certain graduates’ first-year wages with Amazon to help it achieve workforce diversity.

………

State Sen. Mike Gianaris, a Democrat from Queens and one of the leading opponents of the Long Island City campus, said news of the initial offer underscored his call to re-examine state incentive programs.

“The more we learn about this twisted process, the worse it appears,” Mr. Gianaris said. “I think it’s good we didn’t have to provide any incentives to get Amazon here, because they appear to be coming anyway.”

Taxpayer incentives are a scam.  They never pay for themselves, and when the additional taxes to pay for them on other, smaller, employees are factored in, they don’t generate any jobs either.

Unfortunately, without federal legislation to prevent this, companies like Amazon will continue to play states and localities against each other, and everyone will lose but robber barons like Jeff Bezos.

What a Surprise

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Won’t you look at that: Amazon is coming to NYC anyway – *without* requiring the public to finance shady deals, helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos, & corporate giveaways.

Maybe the Trump admin should focus more on cutting public assistance to billionaires instead of poor families. https://t.co/BbqhXbB9MM

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 6, 2019

Well, what do you know, after Amazon’s subsidies were threatened, and the company took its marbles and went home, Amazon just brought its marbles back:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested the Trump administration “focus more on cutting public assistance to billionaires instead of poor families” after news broke Friday that Amazon was expanding its presence in New York City without the state giving the company billions in tax incentives.

The decision by the online giant to lease 335,000 square feet of office space in Manhattan and employee 1,500 employees in the consumer and advertising departments was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The announcement came roughly 10 months after Amazon announced it was ditching its widely condemned plan to locate a second headquarters site in Long Island City, Queens—a plan for which New York state would have given the online giant nearly $3 billion in tax incentives.

Ocasio-Cortez was among that plan’s most vocal critics, asking at the time, “Why should corporations that contribute nothing to the pot be in a position to take billions from the public?”

In a Twitter thread Saturday morning, the New York Democrat said that Amazon would now be “bringing work without the welfare.” Ocasio-Cortez also countered the Republican talking point that the city was losing out on thousands of jobs.

What a surprise.  Subsidies don’t make a difference.

And Amazon dot com is the biggest welfare cheat in the nation

Ireland’s Economy is Based on Tax Evasion

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This probably applies to even a greater degree to Luxembourg.

This is why they, and 10 other nations, torpedoed a proposal to add transparency in transnational tax avoidance:

Twelve EU countries, including Ireland, have blocked a proposed new rule that would have forced multinational companies to reveal how much profit they make and how little tax they pay in each of the 28 member states.

The proposed directive was designed to shine a light on how some of the world’s biggest companies – such as Apple, Facebook and Google – avoid paying an estimated $500bn a year in taxes by shifting their profits from higher-tax countries such as the UK, France and Germany to zero-tax or low-tax jurisdictions including Ireland, Luxembourg and Malta.

Ireland is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the current rules. The country hosts corporate offices that collect revenue and profits generated by many multinational companies across the EU bloc. Ireland allows global technology companies to pay corporation tax at rate as low as 6.25%, compared with 19% in the UK.

Ireland’s decision to vote against the proposed directive – which would have forced companies to report their revenues and profits on a country-by-country basis – came as the Irish tax-and-spending watchdog warned that the country’s economy could collapse if there was a global clampdown on tax avoidance.

The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (IFAC) warned on Thursday that the country’s economy has become so reliant on taxes paid by multinationals that half of all of corporate taxes paid in the nation come from just 10 global companies. The firms are not named, but they are believed to include US technology giants Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Dell, Google and Oracle.

Other countries that have set themselves up as low-tax environments helping to shelter the profits of the world’s biggest companies were also among those that voted against. They include Luxembourg, Malta, Cyprus, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Croatia.

………

The vote came more than three years after the European commission promised to expose multinational corporations’ tax avoidance measures following the Panama Papers revelations. The proposal would have made country-by-country reporting mandatory for companies with an annual turnover of more than €750m.

Elena Gaita, a senior policy officer at anti-corruption charity Transparency International, said: “It’s an outrage that member states have once again put the interests of big business above those of citizens.

………


The IFAC said corporation tax receipts had risen to account for one in every five euros of tax collected by the Irish government. It warned that between €2bn-€6bn (£1.7bn-£5bn) of the €10bn total corporate tax take is what it calls “excess”. “In other words, beyond what would be expected based on the economy’s underlying performance and historical and international norms.”

The budgetary watchdog said the Irish government had become increasing reliant on corporate tax receipts, which rose to a record €10.4bn last year, more than double the amount collected in 2014. “The reliance on these volatile receipts leaves the government vulnerable to changes to the global tax environment, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) base erosion and profit shifting initiative,” IFAC said.

The OECD is trying to force big-tech companies, such as Facebook, Amazon and Google, to pay more tax in countries where they actually sell their products and services.

Ireland’s corporate tax rate is 12.5% but it charges only 6.25% for profits linked to a company’s patent or intellectual property.

Ireland’s tax base is based on tax evasion and money laundering. So is much of its economy.

Celtic Tiger, my ass.

Today in Hack Journalism

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The New York Times uncritically reports on a study that shows that a wealth tax would slow down the economy.

The study assumes that none of the money collected will be spent on other programs, so this tax, like ANY tax will have a contractionary effect.

It’s only a few paragraphs down that they mention this.

It’s called burying the lede:

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax would slow the United States economy, reducing growth by nearly 0.2 percentage points a year over the course of a decade, an outside analysis of the plan estimates.

The preliminary projection from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which was unveiled on Thursday in Philadelphia, is the first attempt by an independent budget group to forecast the economic effects of the tax that has become a centerpiece of Ms. Warren’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The assessment found that if the tax raised as much new federal revenue as Ms. Warren intends, and if the proceeds went toward reducing the federal debt, annual economic growth would slow from an average of 1.5 percent to an average of just over 1.3 percent over a decade.

The model did not assess growth effects from Ms. Warren’s spending plans, which critics said undercut its findings. Economists who favor Ms. Warren’s plan said the analysis did not accurately account for the economic boost from programs she would fund with the tax revenue, including universal child care, increased education funding and student loan forgiveness.

Instead, it assumed that the tax revenue would be used to reduce the national debt, a move that encourages growth in the Penn Wharton simulation. Had the Penn Wharton model factored in the money’s going into programs rather than paying down debt, it most likely would have produced an even larger drag on growth from the wealth tax.

So, their model calls upon the austerity fairy in order to make their numbers.

This analysis is complete bullsh%$, and the report is even more cow excrement.

It’s Called Obeying the Law, Everyone Else Does It

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Once again, the “Disruptors” from Silicon Valley are whining about having to follow the law like ordinary people.

In this case, it’s the food delivery services, who have decided that taxes are too hard to figure out.

Hire a f%$#ing accountant you f%$#ing f%$#s, and stop asking for a subsidy, which is what the real agenda is here.

And while your are at it, stop f%$#ing your employees who deliver the actual food:

Grubhub Inc. Chief Executive Matt Maloney says his food-delivery rivals need to charge more sales taxes on their delivery fees. They disagree.

Delivery fees administered by companies like Uber Technologies Inc.’s Uber Eats division, Postmates Inc., DoorDash Inc. and Grubhub are receiving increasing attention from local officials who have watched the industry grow quickly in the past several years. Food-delivery companies were projected to charge $10.4 billion in delivery fees in the U.S. by 2023, compared with $4.4 billion in 2017, according to analysts at Cowen & Co.

If such fees get taxed more uniformly, customers could shell out tens of millions of dollars more for the newly popular delivery services. Already customers can find themselves paying different amounts for the same order, depending on which service they use, and those delivery costs could rise further as the companies shift away from incentives and aim to improve profitability.

Meanwhile, some of the services could face tax liability for incorrect collections in the past.

………

An Uber spokeswoman said the company collects sales tax on delivery fees where required. A Postmates spokeswoman said the company is complying with all regulations and tax laws, and a DoorDash spokeswoman declined to comment.

Grubhub’s Mr. Maloney said he is confident that his company is collecting the appropriate sales taxes.

“The 34 states that have told us to tax our service and delivery fees need to audit everyone in our industry to make sure we’re following their tax laws,” he said in an interview. “I’m happy to be audited with the rest of them.”

………

A Wall Street Journal analysis of dozens of test food orders across the four states and Washington, D.C., showed that Grubhub’s three major rivals typically collect sales tax on the food subtotal, whereas Grubhub charges tax on food plus fees. In some cases, the same restaurants sold the same food at the same price on all four websites, but the totals varied widely based on the added fees. Only Grubhub collected sales tax on delivery and service fees in all of the instances.

This is an opening salvo in attempt to to make lobby lawmakers for a tax carve out.

Screw that.

Pity the Persecuted Billionaires

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Pied-a-Terre is a tax on non primary residences, and in this case, and it would apply to purchases greater than $5 million.

Needless to say, real estate developers are completely losing their sh%$ over this:

New York’s pied-a-terre tax, left for dead earlier this year, is back on the table and the real estate industry is gearing up for a fight.

Fresh off imposing an increased “mansion tax” and eliminating privacy protections favored by well-heeled buyers, state lawmakers are reviving efforts to tax second-home purchases of $5 million or more.

There’s a growing desire among Democrats to address wealth inequality, and for them, the idea of slapping an annual tax on the uber rich who scoop up Manhattan apartments is long overdue. But for William Zeckendorf, whose firm built some of the city’s most expensive condo towers, the proposal is the wrong idea at the wrong time.

He and other developers — and the lawyers, appraisers and brokers who cater to millionaire clients — argue that going after pied-a-terre buyers would further dent demand in the already struggling luxury real estate market. Thousands of new high-end condos are on their way, adding to a glut, and takers for them have all but disappeared. New rules that promote a political environment where buyers feel targeted would push even more of them away, Zeckendorf said.

Zeckendorf’s clients use city roads, bridges, and services, but they do not pay city income tax.

F%$# Zeckendorf, and f%$# his clients.

New mansion and transfer tax surcharges, which took effect July 1, will raise an estimated $365 million annually, dedicated to shoring up the city’s crumbling transportation system. But there are more public-spending needs, and it makes sense for people who can afford the most expensive apartments to help foot the tab, said State Senator Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat.

Hoylman has been trying to pass a pied-a-terre tax since the heady condo boom days of 2014, when high-end buyers from other countries thought nothing of sheltering their millions in the safe harbor of Manhattan apartments.

“They use our system of laws to protect their international investment in real estate, and I think there should be a premium on that,” said Hoylman, who hasn’t yet released a revised version of the bill. “This is a way to capture that purchasing power and use it for some common good.”

Indeed.

If this can help stop New York from becoming London, where whole blocks are full of mansions that are empty most of the year.

Yeah, He Went There………

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Donald Trump’s lawyer William Consovoy just claimed that a sitting president cannot be investigated even if he were to shoot someone on 5th Avenue.

It should be noted that there is no precedent for this position. Even the OLC opinion only forbids indictments, not investigations:

A federal appeals panel on Wednesday expressed skepticism that President Trump had a right to block state prosecutors in Manhattan from enforcing a subpoena that sought his personal and corporate tax returns for the last eight years.

 The judges on a three-member panel in Manhattan peppered a lawyer for Mr. Trump with questions, expressing skepticism about the president’s argument that he was immune from criminal investigation. A lower court judge earlier this month rejected Mr. Trump’s claim, which has not previously been tested in the courts.

 Carey R. Dunne, the Manhattan district attorney’s general counsel, cited the president’s famous claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing political support.

 Mr. Dunne asked what would happen in that extreme scenario? “Would we have to wait for an impeachment proceeding to be initiated?” he said.

 Later, Judge Denny Chin posed the Fifth Avenue hypothetical to William S. Consovoy, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, and asked for his view.

 “Local authorities couldn’t investigate? They couldn’t do anything about it?” Judge Chin asked, adding: “Nothing could be done? That’s your position?”

 “That is correct. That is correct,” Mr. Consovoy said.

So, in the aforementioned hypothetical, they could not collect the gun, or look at the ballistics on the bullet, or collect surveillance video from the area according to Trump’s lawyer.

Mr. Vance’s office in late August subpoenaed Mr. Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, for his personal and corporate tax returns dating to 2011.

 The district attorney had been investigating whether any New York State laws were broken when Mr. Trump and his company, the Trump Organization, reimbursed Michael D. Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and fixer, for payments he made to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who had said she had an affair with Mr. Trump.

………

Mr. Trump went into federal court last month, trying to block the district attorney’s subpoena. The president argued that the Constitution prevented a sitting president from being “investigated, indicted or otherwise subjected to criminal process.”

It should be noted that the OLC opinion is only binding on the US Department of Justice, not state prosecutors, and it;s argument had nothing to do with the constitution, they claimed that an indictment would be too disruptive to government.

Even if there were a separation of powers argument, that would not apply to state courts, and it would not apply to investigations.

Rather unsurprisingly, Robert Bork (יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ) was at the center of this 1973 memo, and it illustrates the utter moral and constitutional bankruptcy of the concept of the “Unitary Executive”.

It should be noted that this opinion ignored a very clear precedent, the arrest of Ulysses S. Grant for speeding and driving recklessly in 1872, but Bork and his ilk were never one to allow precedent, or the law, or the actual text of the Constitution, inform their arguments.

Yeah, and He’s Mobbed Up Too

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The good folks at ProPublica have looked at Donald Trump’s property tax filings and his statements to banks, and find conclusive evidence of fraud:

Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax.

For instance, Trump told the lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building as he reported to tax authorities during the same year, 2017. He also gave conflicting occupancy figures for one of his signature skyscrapers, located at 40 Wall Street.

Lenders like to see a rising occupancy level as a sign of what they call “leasing momentum.” Sure enough, the company told a lender that 40 Wall Street had been 58.9% leased on Dec. 31, 2012, and then rose to 95% a few years later. The company told tax officials the building was 81% rented as of Jan. 5, 2013.

A dozen real estate professionals told ProPublica they saw no clear explanation for multiple inconsistencies in the documents. The discrepancies are “versions of fraud,” said Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. “This kind of stuff is not OK.”

New York City’s property tax forms state that the person signing them “affirms the truth of the statements made” and that “false filings are subject to all applicable civil and criminal penalties.”

The punishments for lying to tax officials, or to lenders, can be significant, ranging from fines to criminal fraud charges. Two former Trump associates, Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, are serving prison time for offenses that include falsifying tax and bank records, some of them related to real estate.

This is the least surprising thing that I have heard in at least a month.

Even if he weren’t Donald Trump, we would find this going on, because this, and exploiting political connections for profit, is pretty much what all real estate developers do.

Well, Congress Has a Real Justification for Trump’s Tax Returns Now

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An Internal Revenue Service ­official has filed a whistleblower complaint reporting that he was told that at least one Treasury Department political appointee attempted to improperly interfere with the annual audit of the president’s or vice president’s tax returns, according to multiple people familiar with the document.

Trump administration officials dismissed the whistleblower’s complaint as flimsy because it is based on conversations with other government officials. But congressional Democrats were alarmed by the complaint, now circulating on Capitol Hill, and flagged it in a federal court filing. They are also discussing whether to make it public.

The details of the IRS complaint follow news of a separate, explosive whistleblower complaint filed in August by a member of the intelligence community. That complaint revealed Trump’s request of Ukranian leaders to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, a political rival. It has spurred an impeachment probe on Capitol Hill.

The IRS complaint has come amid the escalating legal battle between the Treasury Department and House Democrats over the release of President Trump’s tax returns. Part of that inquiry from Democrats is over how the IRS conducts its annual audit of the president’s and vice president’s tax returns. That process is supposed to be walled off from political appointees and interference.

Of course political appointees are trying to interfere with Trump’s audits.

The Mad Emperor must be appeased, after all.

Congress needs to review all of Trump’s audits, which means that they need his tax returns.

Making a List and Checking it Twice

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I am not referring to Santa Claus, I am referring to Jeff Bezos and Amazon who have created an enemies list.

How charming:

When Amazon scrubbed plans to build a second headquarters in New York City earlier this year, the reason appeared rooted in a debate about unions, tax subsidies and housing costs.

Then there was the burn book.

In a private dossier kept at the time, whose existence has gone previously unreported, Amazon executives cataloged in minute detail the insults they saw coming from New York politicians and labor leaders, according to a copy viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

By late January, Amazon executives had been pummeled at two public hearings. The burn book, which was kept in a Microsoft Word document called “NY Negative Statements,” had separate sections for a half-dozen politicians and officials who had gone from thorns in the company’s side to formidable opponents of a deal that now looked to be in jeopardy.

The document recorded how opponents mocked the helipad Amazon planned to build, pushed the Twitter hashtag #scamazon, and brought up the company’s work for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a sore spot among some Amazon employees. It was an eight-page, bullet-pointed, Calibri font testimony to Amazon’s sensitivities.

………

After this article was published online, an Amazon spokeswoman said the document was compiled as preparation for city council hearings.

No, it wasn’t a prep for council meeting, it was the airing of grievances by and for a billionaire and a company that believe that they should be lauded as visionary prophets, and not the abusive and extortative sh%$-heels that they actually are.

Reality, Bitches, Kansas Edition

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We all know that Sam Brownback promised that his radical program of slashing taxes would unleash an economic powerhouse.

Rather unsurprisingly, it turned into a complete sh%$ show, with Kansas’ budget, economy, and infrastructure turning into a complete sh%$ show.

Well, now that he has been replaced by someone who is ……… well ……… sane, Kansas’ economy and budget have made an impressive turn-around:

Residents of one midwestern state can be forgiven if they have a feeling they are not in Kansas anymore. The Sunflower State finishes a respectable No. 19 overall in this year’s CNBC America’s Top States for Business rankings. That is a 16-place jump from 2018, making Kansas this year’s most improved state.

One year ago Kansas was still nursing a hangover from a disastrous tax-cutting experiment by former Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, who slashed individual income-tax rates and eliminated taxes on “pass-through” income from certain businesses. Even though a bipartisan super-majority of the state legislature had repealed the Brownback program over his veto in 2017, the state was still dealing with a residual $351 million revenue shortfall for fiscal 2018, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In addition to its No. 35 overall ranking last year, Kansas finished a dismal No. 45 in the Economy category.

This year the full force of the repeal has taken effect: The state is running a budget surplus. In addition to the 16-point improvement in its overall ranking, Kansas rises 16 points in the Economy category.

“We are returning to our roots as a very progressive, thoughtful, forward-looking state,” Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, told CNBC in an interview. Kelly was elected last year as part of the backlash over the Brownback plan.

Delusiona economics are a cruel mistress.

Took Long Enough

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The House sued the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday, demanding access to President Trump’s tax returns and escalating a fight with an administration that has repeatedly dismissed as illegitimate its attempt to obtain the financial records.

The lawsuit moves the dispute into the federal courts after months of sniping between the Democratic-led House Ways and Means Committee, which requested and then subpoenaed the returns, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The case may ultimately go to the Supreme Court, and its outcome is likely to determine whether financial information that Mr. Trump has kept closely guarded in spite of longstanding presidential tradition will be viewed by Congress and, ultimately, the public.

In Tuesday’s filing, the House argued that the administration’s defiance of its request amounted to “an extraordinary attack on the authority of Congress to obtain information needed to conduct oversight of Treasury, the I.R.S. and the tax laws on behalf of the American people.” It asked a judge to order the defendants to comply.

………

In almost every instance, the Trump administration has argued that Congress’s power to gain access to those materials is inherently limited to information that would serve “legitimate” legislative purposes — defined by the executive branch to be limited to materials needed to help draft new laws and to exclude uncovering potential wrongdoing.

Congress retorts that its powers to compel information are far more sweeping than that and encompass oversight of important matters in general — and that its decisions about what information it wants to subpoena are not to be second-guessed by the White House.

The same dispute is at the center of a pair of lawsuits over subpoenas to accounting and banking firms for other financial records involving the Trump Organization. So far, two Federal District Court judges have swiftly rejected the argument offered by Mr. Trump’s private legal team that those requests did not carry legitimate legislative purposes. Mr. Trump has taken those losses to appeals courts.

There is a clear statutory case for getting Trump’s tax returns, as well as decades of court precedent on the role of Congress investigating the executive, but this should have gone to court on Day 1, because this will make it all the way to the Supreme Court, which takes time.

I’m not particularly sanguine about Congress’s chances in the Supreme Court, at least 4 of the justices would rule in favor of the White House under the theory that it’s OK if you are a Republican, but if they had filed suit earlier, it would get there sooner.

The Lie of Business Incentives

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Even though Amazon pulled out of iths “HQ2” proposal, including Jeff Bezos’ notorious helipad, it looks like Amazon is expanding in New York City anyway.

The lesson to be learned here is that the best way to win when companies pit cities against each other for subsidies is not to play that game:

Amazon is reportedly back in the market for office space in New York City, which, if true, is a sweet bit of vindication for critics of the company’s whole HQ2 fracas.

In February, Amazon dropped its plans to build a massive office complex in Queens amid political blowback over a package of state and city subsidies the project would have received. Now, according to the New York Post, the company is shopping for real estate on the West Side of Manhattan. “The tech giant has been in talks with owners of two shiny new skyscrapers located just one block west of Penn Station — the newly built One Manhattan West and its soon-to-be sister project, Two Manhattan West,” the paper reports, citing “sources.” The company, which already has 5,000 employees in the city, is apparently looking for 100,000 square feet or “much more.”

That footprint is significantly smaller than the 4 million to 8 million square feet of space Amazon planned to build out for its HQ2 project. But the fact that the company is still planning to grow its New York presence without a large, specially crafted subsidy package seems to prove the basic point many of the deal’s critics made, which is that major cities with large pools of business and engineering talent do not need to stoop to corporate welfare in order to attract major tech companies, which tend to go where they can find enough employees.

Actually, it’s not even that, Amazon’s locations were, as tends to be the case, where their CEO already had a house.

Seriously, city fathers, do not play that game.

Pass the Popcorn

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The New York legislature just passed a bill authorizing Congressional access to Donald Trump’s state tax returns, and Governor Andrew “Rat Faced Andy” Cuomo is expected to sign it:

New York State lawmakers on Wednesday gave their final approval to a bill that would clear a path for Congress to obtain President Trump’s state tax returns, injecting another element into a tortuous battle over the president’s refusal to release his taxes.

The bill, which is expected to be signed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat and regular critic of Mr. Trump’s policies and behavior, will authorize state tax officials to release the president’s state returns to any one of three congressional committees.

The returns — filed in New York, the president’s home state and business headquarters — would likely contain much of the same information as the contested federal returns, though it remained unclear whether those congressional committees would use such new power in their investigations.

The Legislature’s actions put the state in a bit of uncharted legal territory; Mr. Trump has said that he is ready to take the fight over his federal tax returns to the Supreme Court, and it seems likely that he would seek to contest New York’s maneuver.

Republicans have called the effort in Albany a “bill of attainder” — an unconstitutional piece of legislation aimed at a single person or group — while also decrying the potential invasion of privacy, suggesting that federal officials would conduct improper “fishing expeditions.”

………

Once signed into law by Mr. Cuomo, the legislation would require the commissioner of the New York Department of Taxation and Finance to release returns to the chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee and the Joint Committee on Taxation for any “specified and legitimate legislative purpose.” Such a request would be have to be made it writing, and only after a request for federal returns has been made to the Treasury Department.

While the bill clearly targets Donald Trump’s particular circumstances, it does not appear to my non lawyer eyes to rise to the level of a bill of attainder.

The real question is whether any of the members of the Ways and Means Committee have the stones to actually make the request, as the other two committees would have such a request blocked by Republicans.

My guess is that Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-MA) won’t have the requisite intestinal fortitude to actually make a formal request, because Democrats.