This is ridiculous. Okay so let's leave all the rich people alone who claim they are unstable. McAfee made millions, from what I understand, he paid little taxes on that. That's stupid. I don't care how unstable you are, or how good you are donating your "fair share". You're still not excused from paying your taxes.
We do a lot of counter-intuitive things to keep the rich people on board.
We haven't evolved from aristocracy, I'm not sure we can.
Injustice is valid, that is why people appeal against justice and other people appeal for it.
We haven't actually agreed on what justice and injustice mean.
You can't take one part of the dichotomy and ignore the rest.
He wasn't indicted for unpaid taxes, but for tax evasion, which is a different thing (and securities fraud.)
He announced he waa on the run from the tax investigation before he was criminally indicted for invasion (Jan 2019, the indictment was issued in 2020.) Why do you think he would come back after being indicted?
Still, you're probably leaving money on the table if you don't file with no income, especially this last year with all the stimulus.
About whether McAfee could prove no income, I guess he would've had his day in court to show it.
I would say the burden of proof is on the government.
I've never met the guy but when there's evidence he killed someone and another person claiming she was raped by him, it seems like maybe he's not so great?
That said, he never had a trial for those crimes. The media has lied about stuff before. He seems pretty shady to me but I'm not pretending to have all the facts.
> The US Justice Department alleged that McAfee evaded tax liability by having his income paid into bank accounts and cryptocurrency exchange accounts in the names of nominees. He was also accused of concealing assets, including a yacht and real estate property, also in other people's names.
> In recent years, McAfee repeatedly claimed that there was a plot to get him - however the [Spanish National] court said there was "no revealing evidence" that he was being prosecuted for political or ideological reasons, El Pais reported.
Not saying that he didn't avoid taxes egregiously enough to get caught, just interesting to consider.
The IRS are consummate bureaucrats. They don't write the tax code, they just enforce it. They enforce it quite firmly, but if you happen to get a loophole written into the tax code and drive a billion-dollar LLC through it, they aren't going to care.
McAfee made the mistake of open defiance of the tax code, and that's a big no-no. If the government starts letting open defiance slide, everyone will openly defy it, and there won't be a government. That's why they threw the book at him.
1. Tax evasion and tax avoidance are not the same thing.
2. Most people who think McAffee didn't pay enough taxes probably also believe Bezos doesn't pay enough taxes.
I am completely onboard with the position that the rich don't pay enough taxes. I also agree that it is unfair how much control over the political system their money gives them and how that power can be used to add in even more tax breaks. However it is silly to pretend that rich people should pay more in taxes than they are legally required to pay.
Yes I remember when I still believed this.
Funny thing is this is demonstrably false, as in you can try to study the correlation between voter's opinions and legislation (and find virtually no correlation) and the correlation between opinions of the 1% and legislation (orders of magnitude better correlation).
Edit: evasion > avoidance.
I totally understand that there is legal means of essentially not paying taxes. That still does not make it okay. As I mentioned, I, as a lone tax payer, who made less then £100k, paid more in taxes in FAANG combined in the UK. That FAANG, who made billions. I probably paid more in the UK than FAANG paid in federal taxes (in the US) combined. The fact that Bezos was able to claim tax refunds despite him literally being the richest person in the world and to hear/read people defending him because "he legally did so" is absolutely mind boggling.
Only true if you think companies shoulder none of the burden of VAT, income tax etc.
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
I've always used this as an excuse for what might be considered being weird (at least that's what my family tells me).
Anyways---you don't poison a guy's dogs.
(Yea--I know, I'm suspose to be compassionate over rich dead guys. By rich dead guys, I mean the neighbor who was constantly complaining over John's dogs whom was found dead. As far as today, they had no evidence against John.)
I liked John. I liked he was different than most rich guys. I painfully remember him stating he doesn't pay taxes. I remember wishing he didn't say that in a documentary.
Yeah, you don't poison a dog. To be clear, they weren't poisoned fatally, they were made sick. Still not okay. McAfee put them down (debates on necessity ensued).
Was he found guilty? No. Because he immediately made a run for the border, crossed illegally into another country. He wasn't found guilty because Belize didn't try him in absentia, not because he faced justice.
A civil suit found him, like OJ, liable for the other guy's death.
"Not like other rich dudes", uhh, we have plenty of other eccentric rich people, like Richard Branson or Elon Musk, etc... I am sure there are plenty more examples out there.
> Anyways---you don't poison a guy's dogs.
When was the neighbor found guilty for that?
And she'd be right.
If you go after anyone, you have to go after everyone in my view. If anything, you should go soft on the low income people rather than the wealthy. But on the federal level, going soft on a famous and wealthy person when you have the exact same evidence is just not something you can do in a rule of law society. Particularly in today's environment. You can do that on a state and local level, but on a federal level the IRS, FBI and the prosecutors would be crucified.
Does it? Or is it just that kooks are likely to commit crimes in ways that result in them getting caught at a higher frequency than non-kooks, especially rich kooks compared to other equally rich people, since rich non-kooks exploit their resources to either structure their misdeeds within the law or arrange means to avoid accountability for their crimes?
But do it for poor people first. There are a million people without millions suffering from similar treatment in the US.
Not sure why you are being downvoted, you make a good point.
Im not cool working for the government 4 months/year while rich assholes run off screaming “taxation is theft!” and using personal instability as a defense.
He could have renunced US citizenship and found something else, could have made money elsewhere. Im in Hong Kong with French citizenship and it s clear if France starts making me pay taxes while im abroad, Ill just find a way out of the citizenship.
No instead he paraded everywhere saying taxes were illegal... idiot.