Over the last half-century or so, the share of corporate stock that is owned by investors with taxable mutual funds or brokerage accounts has fallen dramatically. Steven M. Rosenthal and Livia Mucciolo tell the story in “Who’s Left to Tax? Grappling With a Dwindling Shareholder Tax Base” (Tax Notes, April 1, 2024).
Here’s their figure showing a breakdown of who owns stock in US publicly traded corporations. Back in the 1980s, 80% of this ownership was in the form of taxable accounts. But the share of US corporate stock held by foreign investors and retirement accounts has risen substantially, and nonprofits own a chunk of US corporate stocks as well. So in the last two decades, only 20-30% of US corporate stock is in taxable accounts.
Rosenthal and Mucciolo offer some additional discussion of how these groups are taxed. For example, dividends paid by US firms are taxable, even when paid to foreign investors, but these payments are governed by international treaties. They explain: “However, the rate is often reduced by tax treaties between the United States and the home country of the foreign investor: from 30 percent to 15 percent on portfolio investment dividends, for example, and 5 percent or even 0 percent on dividends from direct investments.” Foreign investors do not pay capital gains on stocks to the US government–instead, such gains are taxable in their home country. If US firms use the increasingly common practice of distributing funds to their investors by repurchasing their shares, then such payments are treated as capital gains, not dividends.
For retirement accounts, the common practice is that the money is not taxed when it goes into the account, and the returns are not taxed as they occur over time. Instead, retirement money is taxed as income to the taxpayer when it is received after retirement. Nonprofit, of course, are not subject to income taxes.
With these patterns in mind, proposals for taxing owners of corporate stock as a group–not just the minority who hold their investments in taxable brokerage and mutual fund accounts–are going to run into complexities. Dramatic changes in retirement accounts or international tax treaties are not a simple matter, in politics or economics. Jacking up taxes on the 20-30% of shareholders who are taxable would created incentives to push their share even lower. One can make an argument that a reason for an explicit tax on corporate income is that it has become so difficult to tax the gains to shareholders of those firms.
The authors describe the challenges without trying to spell out policy recommendations. They note: “The transformation over the past 60 years in the nature of U.S. stock ownership from overwhelmingly domestic taxable accounts to overwhelmingly foreign and tax-exempt investors has many important policy implications, including how we can most effectively tax corporate profits; who is affected by changes in corporate taxation; and the form of corporate payouts to shareholders. Policymakers must continue the process, only now beginning, of grappling with the dwindling shareholder tax base.”
Donald Trump, the presumed Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election, held a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday and demonstrated exactly why voters should be concerned about his mental state, as signs of the increasing encroachment of dementia were disturbingly evident in his speech to the crowd.
As he usually does, the multiply-indicted former president made up exceedingly unlikely events out of thin air.
He claimed, for instance, that a group of immigrants had illegally arrived in the U.S. from the Congo via the southern border, insisting with no evidence whatsoever that they were sent from prisons, although he wouldn’t reveal what he thought their crimes were.
(It’s a claim he’s made before, and the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo has denounced it as a lie, according to CNN.)
In further xenophobic rants, he seemed to try to tell a story about an “illegal alien,” but struggled to pronounce the word “alien,” instead coming up with something like:
“An illegal adleeitathin, and you just look at this what’s happening, it’s it crazy? Really?”
Critics of Trump point to episodes like this as examples of the aphasia that is often a precursor to full-blown dementia.
That was followed up by musing about how much better things would be if suspected drug dealers were executed quickly. So much for due process and the rule of law.
On the other hand, Trump seemed to admit he doesn’t actually care about the transphobic attacks he makes about gendered sports. He said he’s “always embarrassed” when he talks about transgender women (he calls them “men”) being allowed to participate in “women’s what,” because, he asks, “Who the hell would care?”
His Pennsylvania audience was treated to some of Trump’s greatest hits as he dipped into his quiver of other tried and tested lies, including the false claim that District Attorney Alvin Bragg was appointed by financier George Soros, the bogeyman of many MAGA conspiracy theories.
He added the assertion that a vote for President Biden is a vote for the end of the rule of law — an ironic utterance coming from the man who mused about suspending the Constitution — and repeated his favorite fib that wind power isn’t feasible because it kills all the birds.
Trump repeated his lies about the 2020 election being “stolen,” pushed propaganda to set up the same claims about 2024, and reiterated his usual false claims about the gag orders in his court cases. Contrary to his claims, the New York gag order doesn’t prevent him from talking about the case, only from attempting to interfere by attacking witnesses and court staff, which he hasn’t stopped doing.
In other apparent moments of confusion, Trump seemed to struggle with remembering anything about the battle of Gettysburg (except that he’s pretty sure it was “vicious” and “interesting”), and seemed to speak in the present tense about General Robert E. Lee’s current feelings about the Civil War, perhaps attempting to reference Lee’s unwillingness to have Confederate monuments after they surrendered.
He seemed to confuse Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary run with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s in the current election cycle, grumbling about “what they did to Kennedy.” Or maybe he was he was rambling about the assassination of JFK for some unknown reason?
Trump also complained about the “United States Seal Company” being “sold to Japan.” Rather than the off-shoring of America’s valuable pinniped business, he seems to have been attempting to refer to the U.S. Steel Company, which is closing a deal for a merger with a Japanese company, though stockholders are not unhappy about the deal, according to CBS.
In another oddity — one that caught the attention of President Biden’s campaign — Trump griped about a “magastine” that he says he’s never read, but assumes is “left-wing” and “doesn’t like Trump.”
Describing Trump’s mentally challenged gaffes isn’t nearly as good as seeing them for yourselves. Take a look:
Trump claims immigrants are entering the country who don’t know where they come from, and that former inmates from the Congo showed up recently.
"We're not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024!" — Trump is lying about the 2020 election being stolen, but it's worth noting that while he proclaims he won't let Dems steal another one, he has no plan to prevent it from happening. It's all vibes. pic.twitter.com/agYeIhLix6
Trump: On Monday in New York City. I will be forced to sit fully gagged. I'm not allowed to talk. Can you believe it? They want to take away my constitutional right to talk pic.twitter.com/KktFkkjUar
With his schedule for the weeks ahead tied up in his felony trial in Manhattan, Trump will have to cut back on his campaign rallies. It will be interesting to see, however, how the stress of his trial — as well as the three other major legal proceedings he faces — will affect his already rapidly deteriorating mental state.
For clarifications, comments, & typos, email: editor@occupydemocrats.com.
Donald Trump just hates the issue of abortion. It’s messy. It’s nasty. It deals with women’s stuff down there, the part he has always just wanted to grab and then brag about. The big problem with abortion for Trump has been that that he has never wanted to take a position on it. When he said he would appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade, all he wanted to do was take the votes of the MAGA masses and move on.
The stickiness of abortion as an issue has never been as clear as it is right now with the Alabama Supreme Court essentially declaring that life begins at conception and applying that principle to IVF, and the Arizona Supreme Court concluding that they’re happy breathing life into an anti-abortion law that was written before Arizona was even a state.
The Arizona law was like those some states, mainly in the South, have on the books that make adultery illegal or forbid women or Black people from signing contracts or holding a bank account. The Republicans are like, yeah, sure, we know those ancient statutes are still around, but we’d rather just ignore them and move on, because we’re only trying to turn the clock back to the 1950’s, not the 1860’s.
But these two Supreme Courts blew the lid off the pro-life movement’s decades-long wish to seem reasonable and exposed the anti-abortion movement for what it has always been. It’s why they came up with the name “pro-life” rather than “anti-abortion.” They were trying to make it seem like they didn’t just want to ban women from getting an abortion; what really concerned them were the babies.
But even that was a lie. Babies, once they are born, never interested them. They want women either on the birthing table or at the sink scrubbing those pots and pans. In Texas, the desire to control women was so strong that the legislature wrote a law turning women’s neighbors into spies and giving them the power to sue women who aborted children as well as any person who helped or enabled women to abort a pregnancy after six weeks of pregnancy.
Watching the Republican Party, and especially its Maximum Leader, Donald Trump, try to tap dance around these two state Supreme Courts is providing us with some welcome opportunities for Schadenfreude. You almost have to feel sorry for the poor fools serving on the Supreme Court of Alabama, with nine Republican justices either elected or appointed by Republican Governor Kay Ivey. They have got to be sitting there today thinking, wait a minute! What just happened? I just did what my party expected me to do, in fact, what they put me on the court to do! And now they’re getting roasted for it.
The analogy that pundits have seized to describe the current moment for Republicans is the proverbial dog who caught the proverbial car. What does the dog do now? Well, it turns out that what the dog does is look wildly around for a way to dislodge the car from its jaws, the car being the Dobbs decision and its rapid fall-out around the nation, all those anti-abortion laws that sprang to life in state after state, some of them truly draconian. The stories of women’s lives being endangered by the new anti-abortion laws have proliferated, including the one about the 10 year old girl in Ohio who was raped and had to travel out of state for an abortion because Ohio didn’t have an exception for rape or incest, even for a little girl.
All those Republican legislators and governors are sitting there today patting themselves on the back congratulating each other because they did what they were elected to do. And now comes the scrambling, not to fix the ugly laws they passed, but to repair the damage they know they’re going to suffer at the ballot box.
Donald Trump, bless his black heart, is leading the way. Look at this nonsense he posted on Truth Social today:
Trump is so panicked, so afraid of actually taking a position that would have any real meaning and effect, he is reprising his wishful thinking that the whole thing has been solved by the return of control of laws on abortion to the states. Well, here’s a state, asshole, and it’s a battleground state, Arizona, and what’s he calling for as a “remedy?” Exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother which aren’t in the 1864 nightmare of a law the Arizona Supreme Court just put back on the books. Boy, that’ll get it done, huh?
This kind of reshuffling of the deck of cards isn’t going to work, especially with an amendment enshrining the right to abortion in the Arizona constitution expected to be on the November ballot…along with the name of Donald Trump, the dog trying to get that damn car out of his mouth who is running for president.
If you want to see some professional-level reshuffling, allow me to recommend the David French op-ed published in the New York Times yesterday. Here we have one of the preeminent pro-life intellectuals lamenting the fact that his movement doesn’t have a political party to call its own anymore, because Alabama Republicans quickly did an about-face on IVF after the Supreme Court shut it down in that state. Of course, legalizing IVF necessitates the destruction of fertilized embryos, which are, according to French, unborn children, and “the unborn child must not be intentionally killed.”
French, of course, is supposed to be one of the New York Times “reasonable” conservatives, in this case, the “reasonable” pro-life one, who assures us elsewhere in his thousand-plus-word lament that he has been pro-life for “my entire adult life,” and defends his movement against charges that what it’s doing is seeking to control women’s lives, French assures us he has “never seen a desire for subjugation and control” in the pro-life movement.
Well, thank goodness for that. We all feel so much better now.
What French and the rest of them are doing is backing and filling now that the nation’s Supreme Court and the supreme courts of two states have dug the gigantic abyss they’re staring into. They’re trying to say, gee, we didn’t mean for this whole thing to go that far! We thought we’d throw these exceptions into the anti-abortion laws and that would take care of it for us! We didn’t know there would be this stuff like women going into sepsis! What the hell is sepsis, anyway?
This is what happens when men write laws about women’s bodies they don’t understand any better than the Chief Pussy-Grabber does. The thing that for decades they had treated like a simple issue to garner votes has turned out to be more complicated than they thought. If you want every embryo to be a little person, there are consequences, and as they discovered in Alabama, consequences demand compromises. As David French now whines, compromises are not pure and simple, they involve moral choices you once thought were easy and clean and now discover are messy and icky.
The dogs who caught the car are not happy. Boo fucking hoo.
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Inside the Complex Process for Trump’s High-Profile Trial
Every defendant is entitled to a fair and impartial jury.
But the process to find one can be long and taxing, particularly in a high-profile trial such as the one in New York, in which Donald Trump stands accused of fraud in his efforts to cover up his relationship with porn star Stormy Daniels by paying her US$130,000 in hush money.
In this case, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged the former president with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump entered a plea of not guilty.
Since then, Trump has unsuccessfully tried to delay the trial, including a last-minute attempt on March 18, 2024, when Trump’s lawyers claimed in a motion that he needed more time because of “prejudicial” publicity that made it nearly impossible for Trump to receive a fair trial.
Despite those attempts to postpone the trial, jury selection is scheduled to begin on April 15, 2024. Once the members are selected, the trial is expected to feature testimony from both Daniels and Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who has admitted making the unlawful payments to Daniels.
In an unusual move, Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the case, had already released the questionnaire for potential jurors and said he would use an anonymous jury. In his ruling on March 7, 2024, Merchan cited “a likelihood of bribery, jury tampering, or of physical injury or harassment of jurors.”
Given all the news coverage of Trump’s legal woes and antics, just how does the court select a fair and impartial jury?
An Imperfect System
Regardless of how long it may take, selecting an impartial jury is fundamental to a defendant receiving a fair trial and is enshrined in the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed …”
In order to select an impartial jury, judges and lawyers engage in what is called “voir dire,” a French phrase taken from the original Latin that means “to speak the truth.”
A civil or criminal trial presents the opportunity for the judge, prosecutors and defense lawyers to ask potential jurors questions to ensure that each meets the constitutional requirement of being impartial and able to deliver a decision free of any prejudice and based on the evidence.
A popular misconception is that an impartial juror is one who does not know anything about the case before them.
That is inaccurate.
Through a series of questions asked by judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys and answers from potential jurors, the judge will ultimately have to decide whether a prospective juror can put aside any beliefs, biases or preconceptions and render a verdict based only on the evidence presented at trial and in accordance with the judge’s rulings.
The process often starts with potential jurors completing a questionnaire before a trial starts. Typical questions include whether a potential juror has been involved in a criminal case either as a defendant or victim. Another question might ask whether a potential juror has been convicted of a misdemeanor or felony.
Once the questionnaires are reviewed by the judge and attorneys on both sides, the pool of potential jurors is reduced by certain automatic disqualifications, such as no longer residing in the jurisdiction or being related to a court officer involved in the case. Once those disqualifications are completed, the judge and lawyers can then ask questions of potential jurors in the courtroom until they agree on 12 jury members and one or two alternates.
In the case against Trump, lawyers may ask questions that would allow the lawyers to draw inferences about the ability of the prospective juror to be fair and determine which jurors are more disposed to vote for their side of the case.
They could include questions such as: “What station do you watch for your news?” “What newspapers and magazines do you read?” “What part of town do you live in?” “Did you attend the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally?” “Did you attend the ‘Black Lives Matter’ rally?” “What clubs and organizations are you in?” “Do you believe that the election was stolen?” “Do you believe Biden is the lawfully elected president?” “Do you believe Trump is being treated unfairly by the legal system?”
Potential Juror Disqualifications
There are two ways that prosecutors and defense attorneys can remove a prospective juror from the jury pool.
The first is disqualifying a juror “for cause.” This is permitted when a potential juror responds to a question in a way that makes the court believe that the juror cannot be impartial. For example, a juror may say that he has made up his mind on the case from media accounts and no amount of evidence could sway his opinion. Such a juror would be disqualified for cause.
The second way to remove a juror from the pool is known as a peremptory challenge, in which a potential juror can be disqualified for almost any reason, even if the juror is otherwise eligible and not susceptible to be removed for cause. One important limit on the peremptory challenge is that the Constitution forbids the use of race as the basis for excluding a juror.
Significantly, while the number of “for cause” strikes is unlimited, each side is given only a few peremptory strikes to use.
In the New York case, for instance, the lawyers on both sides will look for political affiliations, among other factors, in order to determine whether to exercise their peremptory strikes. The prosecutor might reasonably infer that a prospective juror who watches Fox News, reads the local conservative newspaper and volunteers as an organizer for the Republican Party is pro-Trump. Because of that, the prosecutor might exercise a peremptory strike.
The same is true for the defense lawyers. If many details about the prospective juror’s life suggest they are a liberal Democrat, then the defense lawyer would consider a peremptory strike, even if that juror swore under oath that they could be fair.
The Role of a Judge
As a longtime criminal law scholar and a practicing criminal defense attorney, I have seen how judges tend to be more concerned with quickly empaneling a jury than making sure potential jurors are able to be impartial. Consequently, judges tend to rehabilitate borderline jurors by asking them questions that nearly always elicit a “yes” answer.
A conversation like the following is not uncommon:
Judge: Mr. Smith, even though you told us that you have followed this case closely on the news and firmly believe that the defendant is guilty, can you set aside those beliefs and render a verdict based on the evidence produced at trial?
Juror: Yes.
Judge: I find this juror qualified to serve.
Judges often limit and restrict lawyer questioning during voir dire. This disserves the criminal legal system. If lawyers were more involved in the questioning, they would ask more probing questions and expose disqualifying biases. But to do a full and robust voir dire takes a long time.
The point here is that the voir dire process is imperfect, even if it does work to ferret out the deepest and most strongly held biases.
We can and should do better. The Constitution demands nothing less.
The Heritage Foundation is the outfit behind all manner of far-right baloney. These days they're most notable for dropping big bucks to create Project 2025, the right wing Cliff's Notes for the nest Trump Presidency (including dismantling education).
In February, Heritage released a brief (with fewer dollars and a smaller audience, we'd just call it a blog post) arguing that undocumented immigrant children should be charged tuition to attend US public schools.
It comes, of course, with a large helping of Joe Biden Let All The Illegals In, a disingenuous baloney argument. Immigration has been a problem for a few decades now, and no administration has addressed it with anything resembling success. So every four years or so we get sudden squawking from folks on the right, from the xenophobic racist rants of Trump to the old "Well, if they would just come in legally" argument. New rule: you can only use that If Only argument if you can describe what that actually involves. Also, you can only add "like my ancestors" if you know what your ancestors did to enter "legally" (spoiler alert: it was probably "show up").
Plyler v. Doewas the SCOTUS decision that in 1982 declared that children could not be denied an education because of their immigration status. The Heritage Foundation speculates that their tuition plan would prompt a legal challenge which would in turn give them a chance to bring Plyler before the current Supreme Court, who might overturn it because of course they would. Chalkbeat talked to Patricia Gandara at UCLA's graduate school of education, who says this more likely just to be an election year stunt, like the infamous immigrant caravan that often threatens the US just before election time, and then never quite appears.
Undocumented immigrants in schools fits in with the scarcity mentality, arguing that Those People are draining our American resources. That argument fails to note that plenty of undocumented migrant workers pay taxes, but because of their status rarely extract services. But it certainly strikes a chord with folks who don't want to pay for the education of any children but their own.
We could get into the question of whether immigrants (documented or not) are a net plus for the country (spoiler alert: they are), but let's focus on the real issue here, which is education for children.
Education. For. Children.
This is the ultimate expression of some of certain worst people, the idea that "I should not have to pay for an education for Other People's Children." It is the narrow, confused idea that an education is a narrow benefit only for the children involved, as if living in a country with an educated population is not a benefit for everyone.
Michael Petrelli, head honcho of the right-tilted Fordham Institute (and with whom I disagree on so many things), actually had an absolute on-point tweet about this Heritage idea today. Spinning off Cardinal Hickey's old line about why Catholic schools serve certain populations, Petrelli tweeted
Likewise, we don't educate migrant children because they are American, but because we are American.
Damn straight. This is informed by a larger truth--that how we treat other people says far more about us than about them. The Heritage Foundation ought to be embarrassed to be saying this about themselves.
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