$70,000 is cheap for achieving topological miracles and apparent cranial hirsuteness. One dreads to think how much it cost Trump to embellish his skin into that of a First Nation individual. Well on the way to being a Six Million Dollar Man, except for the teeny weeny matter of a potential $100 million tax liability in his future. So no Lee Majors then.

More on the whiter than white Biden family - and the FBI:

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/09/27/senator-ron-johnson-eviscerates-fbi-director-chris-wray-with-documents-to-support/

The George Floyd/BLM protests were overwhelmingly peaceful and you are still far more likely to be shot by a US policeman than vice versa, even more so if you're black.

Denis Healey famously said that 'The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall' but that difference can be a legal grey area. When I was a company director I practised avoidance. My accountant would calculate the optimum combination of salary and dividends that gave the lowest overall tax burden. HMRC were fine with that. But like many outside PAYE I was aware of and occasionally approached by, various schemes to further reduce my tax bill. These varied from 'grey area', such as loans that would be forgiven at some unspecified future date, to blatently taking the p*ss, such as fees paid directly into an offshore bank account ('No cheques, don't use cash points"). I always put the phone down.

There was (is?) a company named Montpelier who offered various schemes including one where fees were paid to an Isle of Man trust or partnership. Under double taxation rules if you pay tax in one country you can be exempt in the UK, and Montpelier argued that tax was being paid offshore - at 5% from memory - and so no tax was due here. The HMRC were definitely not happy about this, but for years took no action other than declining to close users' tax returns. But then after a test case the law was clarified and it was ruled that the scheme was illegal and always had been. The industry online forums were abruptly full of scheme members who were liable for six figure sums, homes were lost, marriages ended. I don’t recall a huge amount of sympathy.

Then, famously, there was Rangers football club who thought they could get away with paying players using a dodgy loan scheme

So it is not always clear - cut and it will come as no surprise to anyone who is even slightly familiar with Trump's approach to business that he has been aggressively exploiting every ambiguity and loophole, from the Times:

Seven Springs, his estate in Westchester County, N.Y., typifies his aggressive definition of business expenses.

Mr. Trump bought the estate, which stretches over more than 200 acres in Bedford, N.Y., in 1996. His sons Eric and Donald Jr. spent summers living there when they were younger. “This is really our compound,” Eric told Forbes in 2014. “Today,” the Trump Organization website continues to report, “Seven Springs is used as a retreat for the Trump family.”

Nonetheless, the elder Mr. Trump has classified the estate as an investment property, distinct from a personal residence. As a result, he has been able to write off $2.2 million in property taxes since 2014 — even as his 2017 tax law has limited individuals to writing off only $10,000 in property taxes a year.

But I don't suppose this will all hurt him much politically. Most people, I suspect, have made their mind up. 'Billionaire who pays bobbins in tax' is undoubtably not a good look, but his supporters - without irony - will dismiss this as fake news from the liberal elite, while his critics will be left unshocked by this revelation, after all the news is no more than Hillary predicted four years ago.

Yah, was an outfit ever more ironically-named than Project Veritas? Even the Daily Mail knows better than to trust O'Keefe.

According to O’Keefe, a Minneapolis resident, Liban Mohamed, illegally collected some 300 ballots from primarily Somali immigrants to help his brother, City Councilman Jamal Osman.

On Twitter, Mohamed claimed O’Keefe doctored the video and that the voice heard on the Project Veritas is not his, as is claimed.O’Keefe has frequently been accused of selectively editing videos secretly filmed in undercover sting operations aimed at catching liberals in compromising situations.

In 2010, O’Keefe pleaded guilty in federal court to a misdemeanor count of using a fake ID to enter a federal building. O’Keefe and three others posed as telephone repairmen in order to sneak into the office of Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, in New Orleans.

He was sentenced to three years probation, 100 hours of community service, and was hit with a $1,500 fine.

In 2017, Project Veritas tried to get The Washington Post to run a false story about US Senate candidate Roy Moore by having one of its female operatives claim that the former judge from Alabama impregnated her when she was a teenager.

O'Keefe and Project Veritas are now claiming that Democrats are engaged in rampant voter fraud. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8779895/Donald-Trump-demands-attorneys-launch-investigation-Ilhan-Omar-harvested-ballots.html

Omar's response to Trump :-)

https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1310436509980426240

Clarky
care to remind is of how many retractions O'Keefe has on his wall of shame from the MSM?
Sep 28, 2020 at 4:05 PM tomo

O'Keefe believes in Mann's Hockey Stick and Steele's Dodgy Dossier, and has been paid by the lie aswell.

care to remind is of how many retractions O'Keefe has on his wall of shame from the MSM?

Why don't you? My impression is that most if not all of his hits were botched, compromised or withdrawn due to egregious fakery.

Then there's the sleaze.

Sep 28, 2020 at 3:08 PM Phil Clarke
97 %of Climate Scientists are incompetent but Obama trusted them. Do you think you have a credibility problem?

Comment on Trump's tax affairs from a CPA:

"1) There is no such thing as illegal tax avoidance. By definition tax avoidance is the reducing of tax by legal means. By definition, the reduction of tax by illegal means is tax evasion.
2) The tax code is neither moral nor immoral. It is a mechanism by which citizens pay for the governmental services provided.
3) Tax returns are not designed to provide information regarding the financial results of business activities or the financial health of a taxpayer. They are designed to calculate the tax due. And while tax returns will contain a certain amount of financial data in them, that data will most probably not be presented in a manner that conforms with IFRS or GAAP. So, drawing any conclusions about Trump’s business affairs from tax returns is fraught with peril and most probably result in an erroneous conclusion."

and -

"1) Real estate development nearly always involves large amounts of borrowed money. It is the norm. So looking at a real estate developer’s tax return and noting he’s carrying large amounts of debt is exactly what you’d expect to see. Such debt doesn’t convey anything in the way whether the taxpayer’s level of debt is a matter of concern. To come up with that sort of assessment, you’d need to review each project separately using financial data not contained in the tax return.
2) Real estate tax law is designed to generate large tax losses. There are a variety of perfectly legitimate public policy reasons for this, but given that you don’t know the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion, I’m going to assume that getting into the nitty gritty of those policy reasons is well beyond your level of comprehension.

Anything can look evil to you if you don’t know what you’re looking at."

I think Phil Clarke is in the "don't know what you are looking at" group.

All citizens/subjects of HMQ have a moral duty to minimise their tax liabilities. If on reflexion they believe that they should pay more, they can do so. Surprisingly, very few do.

Um, my post above was on the theme of why the border between evasion and avoidance is frequently not clearcut and often comes down to who has the better lawyer.

I think Trump is more amoral than evil. I doubt very much he intentionally committed evasion, he has no need to, a man with those legal resources can claim allowances not available to the average Joe. Claiming a family residence is an investment property being just one. A lot of those same electors are now reading that their billionaire president pays less in income tax annually than they do in a month.

Like I said, not a good look. Trumps' odds just slipped a few points.

#onelawforthem.

"Um, my post above was on the theme of why the border between evasion and avoidance is frequently not clearcut and often comes down to who has the better lawyer."
Sep 28, 2020 at 7:57 PM Phil Clarke

In Mann's cases, it was because he lied. It does seem to be a recurring theme for his supporters too.

This from Clarke -

Sep 28, 2020 at 7:57 PM | Unregistered CommenterPhil Clarke

"Like I said, not a good look. Trumps' odds just slipped a few points."

Yet...

"But I don't suppose this will all hurt him much politically."

No more Laffer curve. Now it's the Through the Looking Glass Clarke curve.

"When I was a company director I practised avoidance. My accountant would calculate the optimum combination of salary and dividends that gave the lowest overall tax burden".

You could do that on the back of a fag packet. You paid an accountant for it?

https://monsterhunternation.com/2020/09/28/no-you-idiots-thats-not-how-taxes-work-an-accountants-guide-to-why-you-are-a-gullible-moron/

Sep 28, 2020 at 7:57 PM Phil Clarke
Climate Scientists have already stolen the Peace Dividend from Taxpayers, and now they are after $100bn pa, but they need crooks and liars in The White House.

https://youtu.be/C05QwvTkM7M