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.