Grubstakers - Episode 238: ProPublica Tax Leaks

Episode Date: June 26, 2021

In this one we provide an overview of the recent IRS leaks to ProPublica regarding the tax-avoidance schemes of the 25 wealthiest Americans. We examine the massive crime of releasing personal tax records to the public and demand arrest and public execution for those responsible. The article covered is available here: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax

We find people that basically can't make enough to eat before they go into the fields. I don't believe that. I think that you're looking at other places that are not Central Romana. People actually who focus on and who like getting an orgasm never get one. Pull up your socks and figure out what you're going to do. Any chance we'll ever get to be a complete red state? Oh, yeah. Well, the future's always uncertain. But more uncertain now.

And listen, Blue Ivy is six years old. Beyonce's dead. She tried to outbid me on a painting. Everybody in Atlanta right now at the Louis Vuitton store, if you black, don't go to Louis Vuitton today. In fun. That's why you need to take a meeting with Kanye West, Bernard Arnault. Welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast

about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined today by all of my co-hosts. Steve Jeffries. Andy Palmer. Yogi Poliwog. And so this week we have an update for you. We have an update on some of the billionaires that we have covered in previous episodes, including Jeff Bezos, Carl Icahn, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, and Warren Buffett. And that update is we have to issue a correction to those older episodes we recorded, a correction to our previous reporting on how much tax they were actually paying. See, we quoted them in these previous episodes as paying, you know, ridiculously low tax rates.

We quoted them as paying, you know, 15%, 10%, 5% of their annual income in taxes. And it turns out we were horribly wrong. What? So we just want to start by sincerely apologizing for our error directly to you, the listener, as well as to the billionaires themselves uh we're sorry we'll be drawn and quartered here we just want to say we are so sorry for severely overestimating how much in taxes those billionaires actually pay that's right uh because the actual number is closer to 0.01%. And we know that now

because of new bombshell reporting by ProPublica. Jesse Isinger, Jeff Ernst-Hantz, and Paul Keel at ProPublica released an article entitled The Secret IRS Files, Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax.

They say that in 2007, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, paid zero federal income tax in 2007. And, you know, just on and on. So it's just so funny, because like you remember the Mitt Romney campaign against Obama in 2012, it was like actually a big kind of scandal that he only paid 14%. And right and it's just if the sheeple only knew at the time that 14 percent was actually you know 14 percent more than jeff bezos was paying um but so you know uh pro publica they they it is it is comforting to know though that uh jeff bezos is part of the 47 percent that Mitt Romney does not care about.

But yeah, so ProPublica, they got their hands on a stash of IRS internal documents that showed, you know, the tax rate paid by the 25 richest people in the United States. They went through it in this article. So we'll talk today a bit about the article and some of the revelations within and what this all means, you know, how much these billionaires, these richest people on the planet actually pay in taxes. And to kind of walk us through that, we have our Grubstakers offshore tax correspondent, Andy Palmer, is here to break down the ProPublic article for you, the listener. Minor correction. This is is i am the onshore tax course okay because the beauty of this is that they don't have to offshore um anything except their uh corporate profits uh which i assume are all in ireland right now in uh um in a box yeah

the grubstickers offshore correspondent will be joining us via remote from the island of Jersey later. No, yeah, it's, um, so yeah, ProPublica is Sean said, um,

they really, they received leaked tax info from the IRS, um, of many of the richest people. Um, and in this article they cover, uh, the 25 richest people in America.

Um, though at times they kind of hint that they may have uh data on way more people than that oh right to balance that out they should cover the 25 poorest too just put them on blast got like three people working at 7-eleven and one guy's an uber. They haven't paid federal taxes in 10 years. One of them's an Uber millionaire, but he has like $2 billion in debt. The 25

most middle income. He wrote off depreciation for his new car that he bought to drive for Uber for $2 an hour. He wrote off $15 for his new car that he bought to drive for Uber for $2 an hour. He wrote off $15,000, but the real value is only $10,000, according to Kelly Blue Book. ProPublica has the dirt that the bottom community has been dying to see. There should be, I mean, like, it exists, it's called the Federalist, but there should be an anti-Propublica, which is just like

focuses entirely on the poorest and weakest members of society for investigative journalism. Con-Publica. Middle class text cheats. Anti-Publica. I think the middle class one is the New York Post. Right. Look at these union members having a break. How dare they?

We photographed this MTA official in his car eating a sandwich. He wasn't even wearing a mask. Anti-Publica is like running articles like, look at these migrants making it safely to shore in the Mediterranean. How dare they? They are mocking the god Poseidon ProPublica for this article they have like a

it's a great article everyone should check it out at the top of it they have this little I want to say disclaimer but like you know it's as far as I know it's perfectly legal for them to publish this but whoever they got it from

which it's kind of implied that they don't even know but maybe they do you know they're not it would take a lot of legal force for them to be forced to give up their source on this but you know they're technically

breaking the law I guess and like anti-publica would definitely like home in on that as the as the billionaires covered in this piece some of them have yeah if you do work for the irs um or somewhere else where you have damning tax documents look into tails signal proton mail um and uh also be prepared to uproot your life and become Edward Snowden's new roommate. And if you're the FBI and you're operating like a honeypot encryption app,

we will advertise it on this podcast for the right price. Oh yeah, did you see that Anom? Yeah. It was like a premium criminal app and then it just turned out to be run by the FBI with a man in the middle attack and they just snatched a bunch of people because the open source stuff is more secure than the one that they were forking over thousands a month for i do like that the fbi watches that freeboat

giveaway episode of the simpsons and gets smart ideas from it do you guys hear what mitch mcconnell said about this irs leak i did he said our tax returns are by law confidential because of just this kind of shenanigans these people ought to whoever did this ought to be hunted down and thrown into jail you know the weird thing about that sentiment is that these people ought to whoever did this it's almost like a coy like i know he did this but i know these people i mean whoever did this thing i i don't know but they should be hunted and thrown in jail biden's press secretary when asked about it said like basically the same thing yeah i'm not shocked they they're they're trying

to upheld you shouldn't do illegal things they're like they're asked to comment on just the egregiousness of of the tax shenanigans themselves which everyone wants to know about and then they're like it's like it's a travesty that they were able to find this information i don't think we should be called these shenanigans like just major tax uh loopholes and frauds being committed aren't fucking he stole a candy bar from a 7-eleven you know what i mean yeah well they're legal frauds because of uh a distinction that um really is never made in american media um between uh capital and labor right um and i mean what's so interesting about this article is that uh it only really makes sense if you read it kind of from a marxist perspective oh so like as you're a gay nerd no no it's a pan

geek you read it as if you were a gay nerd and then it makes sense yeah you have to push your glasses up while you're sucking cock i did save that riff like this is how you know we're back to the good stuff that's right that's right because i was like we have to bring that back and then i started thinking about like what if you got like david harvey to go to one of those like capitalism versus socialism debates and then you were just like oh so like socialism is that when you're a gay nerd is oh reading marx is that like something that you do when you're like gay and having sex with men but you're also a nerd and a loser i mean i'm sure he is used to that he was a socialist in the 60s that That's true.

But was he also sucking dick while reading Marx? Just like the most cool guy he might have. He's a geographer, though. The most feared debater at Reason Magazine. He's like paid half a million a year by the Koch brothers to show up, like, you know, debate David Harvey and like Slavov Zizek and stuff and be like yeah slavoj yeah just be like oh oh that's interesting yeah hegelian uh what was that is that for gay nerds and he's wearing like a cardigan and a bow tie and his hair is like very slickly parted right right but also completely like a flat on his head yeah you're like uh yeah

so i'm just gonna read uh what hans herman hop said to uh said to gramsci and the gramscian method uh this shit is for gay nerds i'm pretty sure um uh hayek got his nobel prize for that observation yeah so i i brought a visual representation of the debate i drew a picture of a guy in soy face reddit soy face and he's saying no you shouldn't sell eight-year-olds into slavery uh here's a photo of carl marx um and then it's like it says marx and it's an arrow to the person sucking dick in the damn shawty. More like Marx and gangles. Damn, Marx.

Okay. It's like, yeah, I tried reading theory, but I couldn't get into it. But then I had some balls in my mouth and I really could. Yeah, I brought this picture of a Marxist reading group and then it's just lemon party. A bunch of old guys sucking each other's dicks my sister suggested we do this episode and i was gonna recommend it to her no no no buddy no no no skip the first i don't know however long this is um we've only done three hours um yeah so going to the actually to the thing the thing, um, that Mitch McConnell said about how, you know, these are private citizens and Bloomberg said a similar thing in a statement that we'll get

to. Can I just say, it's pretty fucked up. Mitch McConnell would say that you think he would know better being 150 year old tortoise. It's been around a long time. And also they didn't say any of this when the iCloud leaks happened. You didn't, they didn't do nothing about those celebrities that were exposed on the internet, which I will never look at this filth or this ProPublica filth, because I myself do not participate in illicit illegal activities. No, yeah. By looking at this, you are doing the moral equivalent of staring at Jeff Bezos' shrively balls. No, you're right.

That look a lot like his face. Ladies and gentlemen, this is financial revenge porn. That's right. That're right. That look a lot like his face. Ladies and gentlemen, this is financial revenge porn. That's right. And if you read that ProPublica article, you are engaged in financial revenge porn. You will go to hell of social more if you choose to look at the ProPublica IRS leak. And this is how we really should frame it for people that are not interested because otherwise people will continue to just stuff their fat face with carbs and not ever look at any of this shit yeah fortunately i think people listen to this podcast so that we'll read the article

for them and don't worry you don't have to read the article well we're gonna read the article yeah we're we're gonna we still should yeah instead of reading something that's 15 minutes listen to us talk about it for two to four hours i mean you know what the article doesn't have? Sucking dick jokes. Yeah, that's right. And if you're troubled by the sound of us reading the article, just turn up that bass level a little bit, and then Andy will come in much more pleasant. We're working on a remove nasal filter.

I'm trying to add more in post. Yeah, we need to add more in post. Yeah, we need to add some in for Yogi. I'll go back later and turn it up. Yogi's voice is too clean. It's gravy, baby. That's what I do. Oh, yeah. Now I'm going to intentionally try to make my voice deeper.

No, so about the- Real quick, what are you, a Marxist? There was one episode where Sean was sick and his voice was a bit deeper and someone in the comments was like, damn, did Sean get eight shades of cooler? You know, I already started laughing because when you started saying that,

I thought they were going to say, did Sean get AIDS? Not yet. Once we hit 3,000 patrons, though. Watch out, Sean. Commentator, would you like a job debating for Reason Magazine? I licked the Wall Street Bulls balls. Yogi did a shirtless protest on Billionaire's Row,

and Sean's going to get AIDS. It's only fair. It will get funnier as we go up. That's our ultimate Patreon payoff, is I will give myself AIDS to prove that billionaires have a cure for AIDS. Like come on Elon

Musk you got to help us out. The higher tier ones are just like doing crimes or like contracting illnesses. The idea with giving Sean AIDS is we want to get a jump on Logan Paul because that's definitely the direction he's going. Oh, yeah. His next stunt.

Yeah, he's going to box the AIDS virus. So, okay. Well, so the thing I wanted to say like five minutes ago. Was it about how you were gay nerd? Yeah, it was about how I was gay nerd. No. So the thing that Mitch McConnell said, the reason that that is complete bullshit is because these aren't private citizens. These are functionally the people who run our government.

Right. You know, the 25 richest people, or I'd say even probably the top 20,000 richest people in America are the people who are running the government. They own everything that we spend most of our time in. Like it's not, you don't live in a government apartment. Most of us don't, at least especially since the 60s when they got rid of those

or since the 60s. Like we, and so like the- No, Andy, this is a free episode. So some of the listeners do live in government apartments. Save that. save your elitism for the paywall uh they also they also live in government apartments for the pay ones they just they just listen through an rss link that a friend of a friend got paying for um by the way they just passed new federal penalties on pirating this podcast.

So don't even think about it. Oh, really? Anyone who pirates this podcast will be pursued to the fullest extent of the law. Yeah. Do you know that's why Joe Biden won't share generic vaccines is to protect podcast IP. He's got so many Brooklyn podcasters as constituents. And we know if that he wears down the intellectual property protections for the COVID vaccine, then podcasts will be next. And you got to all work together.

Medicine and podcasting and all the intellectual property arts. Well, the podcasts are medicine. That's the point. That's right. We provide happiness and that makes people live longer. So we are actually a healthcare service. But similar to like pharmaceuticals we also cause depression i ibs and many other uh medical illnesses anxiety

suicidal ideations eventually aids for you domestic partner violence why would you bring that one in that's not even a medical it's just a crime yeah it's just if you play the podcast backwards we're like judas priest yeah you're right though mitch mcconnell saying that shit it's like bro you fucking what are you talking about this ain't fucking private citizens just the motherfuckers that push all the buttons and levers and jinsaki she doesn't. She doesn't get a pass either. Right, right, right. She's clearly speaking for the people

who put Joe Biden in the White House. And then hair Jen, you're not pulling it off. That was like a whole of government. He is. I don't think so. I draw the line.

It was like a whole of government response. They all just said like, who did this? Instead of like, wow, that's fucked up that our system is like that. Right, right.

Now, wait a minute. You're telling me Mitch McConnell is not sincerely concerned about the privacy of the average american taxpayer you're telling me he just went on the floor of the senate and talked about the taxpayer right to privacy and didn't just mean the top 25 richest people in the country when he said that it's funny um how they had such a similar reaction to the Snowden revelations. That's right. They vowed to get to the bottom of the United States spying on everyone in the world.

Yeah, I mean, that just like sums up this article in this episode where it's like, you know, ProPublica comes out and basically we'll get through how, but basically says that the top 25 richest people in america pay almost zero percent right like if you round it's round to zero percent in taxes and the only u.s government response is we're gonna arrest whoever leaked this yeah no other changes i think critically pro publica also says and it's legal it's all legal right and that's part of why it's so disgusting yeah yeah and it yeah the whole thing is like it's the nice thing about the biden administration is that unlike in in the trump administration everything was kind of laid bare and people got mad about it because it was so crass and now in the biden administration all that stuff is still laid out um and biden can't really backtrack from it even though he promised to in his campaign.

Like now that he's in power, he's not really in power. The people who sign his checks are. Yeah, who sign his checks are in power, though not not as salary as we find found out here. That is like kind of my favorite thing I see on conservative Twitter is, you know, they'll post a video of Biden obviously having dementia and they'll like have an all caps tweet like, who's actually running the government? The president isn't in charge. Who's in charge? And it's like, well, who do you think was in charge during Trump? Who do you think was in charge during George W. Bush?

Who do you think was in charge when Ronald Reagan was shitting his diaper at 2 p.m and going to sleep you know like the president this is not the first time the president has not been in charge of the government yeah yeah or the last yes such a it's such a cute understanding of american politics yeah it's like we elect people and they are in charge well that's like you'll just go insane if you you watch like the funhouse mirror of liberal conservative discourse because they both you know they're all paid by either like foundations or billionaires or corporations and so they all have these kind of baked in assumptions that you have to have in order to get that make work you know fake job so they all have

these like complete funhouse mirror discourse discussions all based around these baked in fake assumptions so if you if you look at that and you don't know that you can go insane yeah yeah it's and and you see it in this article too because it um pro publica they have a even though they do very good um investigative journalism they also approach it from a very liberal perspective right and so that perspective is we got to fix it within the system um but what's so interesting is that by the end of this article they're like we don't know how to fix this okay so anti-publica they like run a front page story on like a mass shooting but it's like hooray 20 people were killed this is awesome the bullets and the guns

worked exactly as designed that's what should be taken from this story gun sales expected to be all time high tomorrow buying Remington right now just like the anti-publica front page headline on 9-11 is hell yeah

they just got ads for bump stocks you know to your point andy though like it is something where when you look at the article there is a very like uh rube goldberg s like well as you can see there's balls hitting this domino and it's causing a reaction by the end it's like's like, we don't know how the fuck we're going to solve any of this. There is a labyrinth of dominoes falling and we cannot predict where this is going to end up outside of we're boned. Yeah.

And I mean, I have a few solutions for it. Not many that I can say out loud, but... Do they mostly involve guillotines? I think that technology is kind of... Do they mostly involve... It's past its kind of do they mostly involve it's it's it's past its time do they mostly involve sucking dick being a gay nerd while in a guillotine i mean that's that's how we're gonna celebrate oh yeah um so marie antoinette's about to be executed she's like oh here's my impression of ropes. You're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm a gay nerd sucking dick.

Quietness. And then they cut off her head and her mouth is still moving like, blah, blah, blah. And then she's mouthing, that's you. Yeah, you know, if the head is disconnected from the body with a sharp enough weapon,

the brain is able to continue doing the suck dick motion for another 10 seconds before death. So if you get beheaded, you can get one of those off. Yeah. If you lock eye contact with the person who beheaded you and can pull off the, hey, this is you, in that 10 seconds before the darkness comes, you've won. You still won. That's a great way to go out.

Yeah. And it's very important because they'll ask you, do you have any last words? And you have to say no. No. Then when they cut your head off, you have to go, hey, this is my impression of you.

No, no, no, no, no. And we want to remind the listeners that it is Pride Month. Yes. Yeah. That's why I'm making so many references to our LGBT friends out of appreciation. QI. Yeah.

QI. Yeah. I don't want to forget. LGBTQ plus. And, you know, this is because they have not been recognized enough on Grubstakers. I actually see it as L plus. I saved some time. We covered Peter too.

Yeah. And you're right. We did let Andy lead this episode as the gayest member of the book. I like to think L Plus is a new streaming service that's only LGBTQI plus content. All right,

but enough of having fun and enjoying ourselves. It's time to learn something. Boo. This is where the nerd part of the gay comes in. Yeah, I know. Jesus Christ. It's not all learn something. Boo. This is where the nerd part of the gay comes in. Yeah, I know. Jesus Christ.

It's not all sucking dick over here. Jesus Christ, also a gay nerd. That was what the Roman who put the spear in him said. Like, hey, this is my impression of you getting fucked in the ass. This is you. I'm doing you right now. Mel Gibson was too chicken to tell that part of the story oh what's the stigmata so you can have dicks through your hands

what oh you got stigmata so you could jerk off more guys at once that's right right they're beating him they're like yeah we bet you like this don't you um okay so let's talk about the article um so pro publica uh so they received all the links so here here's some quick uh here's some quick findings uh that they released in 2007 in 2011 jeff bezos paid nothing in federal income taxes wow yeah in 2018 the the same year that we started this podcast and recorded... Yeah, but wait a minute, Andy. During those years that he paid no federal income taxes,

he was supporting a wife and a mistress. So he did need the money. In 2018, Elon Musk paid no federal income taxes. Wow. Michael Bloomberg also paid nothing in taxes in recent years and uh carl icon our old friend not an icon paid no federal income tax three years in a row and we'll we'll get back to him he's he's pretty fun with this um i liked uh i forget if it was pro public or another news outlet but one of them interviewed uh one of the guys who wrote trump's 2017 tax bill and he said something to

the effect of like uh i didn't write the law so that billionaires could pay zero dollars in taxes and it's like well pretty clearly you did like i know you're trying to spin it now but yes like part of why bloomberg was able to recently pay zero in taxes is because of donald trump's tax cut law yeah which was of course written so that billionaires could pay zero in taxes is because of Donald Trump's tax cut law. Yeah. Which was of course written so that billionaires could pay nothing in taxes and do it legally. I think it was written so that it would be a little easier for the people moving money around because they were definitely paying zero in taxes before that law came in. Yes.

But now it's a lot simpler. The loopholes got larger if you will they went from swiss cheese to hula hoops i think it was written to simplify our tax code so that you can now do your taxes just on a postcard the government sends you a postcard and you just fill it out and that's what donald trump promised and that's what his tax bill did well you know okay so this is this is what's interesting is um the article cites um uh this academic paper uh which it's more of another article um that's published as an academic paper it's called uh the death of the income tax or the rise of america's universal wage tax by this um legal professor who specializes in tax law named edward j mccafferty and just imagine like

pro-publica linking to an academic paper like that with like the headline like we promised this is not some gay nerd shit but like this is like real academic research so um the article it's it's very interesting was written before the pro-publica thing came out um but i think it lays a very good foundation for uh the findings in the pro publica article about how uh these billionaires are able to evade taxes in sort of the um ideological direction um that the the country's been working towards uh to enable that and um in the article he he makes a strong distinction, I think I mentioned earlier, between income tax and wage tax. Right. Because when we talk about it today, it's often conflated.

And in this article, he actually comes down on AOC in a way that I think is actually justified, in that when AOC talks about having a top marginal tax rate of 80% or whatever it is, 100%, it's actually not at all effective for addressing this specific problem because the issue that's laid out in here is that billionaires don't really have wages

in the uh normal sense sure uh like steve jobs paid himself when he when he went back to apple in the 90s he paid himself a one dollar salary right and now uh mark zuckerberg and larry page do that too uh jeff bezos his salary at amazon is like 80 000 you know they they give themselves a middle class salary and they have a middle class tax rate on just that salary. But obviously that's not their take home. But dudes, if you're listening, you can on a date say I make more money than Jeff Bezos.

That's right. I make more money than Sergey Brin and Larry Page put together. You have more income anyway. We make more money than Steve Jobs did. So I think that we're pretty cool. I'm going to say it's pretty safe to say that most of our listeners don't make more than Jeff Bezos, even at his low.

I know, I never have. Well, if Steve Jobs is only making a dollar, no wonder he couldn't afford cancer treatment. Or alimony. Or a condom. So basically, the program that is identified here is that there's there's kind of this long-term program to turn or a condom i mean he was paying himself a dollar eventually you could afford a condo this is free ones you'd have to go to the clinic yeah yeah yeah

but you'd have to work for like two years for it i mean that you can still afford it that's how steve jobs got up got away from paying prostitutes and i'm not going to be able to pay you until january i actually only make a dollar a year i can give you a hundred percent of the money i make wow mr jobs oh it's not nearly as large as you think it is the girl's like i have herpes like yeah i'm not gay i'm not gonna wear a condom um oh god this is our first in-person episode by the way yeah and hey we're back to derailing um you thought the remote episodes were derailed in person we can't even keep our own thoughts straight you know it is a lot easier to interrupt with uh homophobic riffs when you don't have to wait for the three second delay for somebody to finish their thought on Skype. That's true.

So the gay nerd who wrote this article. Yeah. Jesse Eisenberg. Yeah. So yeah, in criticizing AOC's approach. And that was what Michael Bloomberg's PR person said in response. This article was written by a bunch of gay nerds. We're not going to respond to it.

Yeah, if you could send us like something that's not written by a bunch of gay nerds. We're not going to respond to it. Yeah, if you could send us something that's not written by nerds, I think we'll respond to that. Oh, man, if Bloomberg were the president, he would have already ordered a drone strike on whoever leaked this. No, he just assumes Jesse Eisenberg wrote it. He fucked up Zuckerberg in that movie and now he's coming after me. Do we still have that drop of him crying when he announced

his concession in the presidency? No. We only played it once. I think I cut that up after the episode. I don't know if we have it. Don't worry about it. Why would you think that? The Blue Boogers are some gems. Because he's so flagrant in his regular interview

appearances. I can't remember the exact quote. I know we've played it on this show. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much. Well, that's a class. And minorities too little. But he's just telling truth there. That being in the intro was our golden years of the Grubstakers.

I think that if anyone's like, oh, check out this show. If that's in the intro, you got a good one right there, baby. I can't remember exactly what he says, but he's like, it out the show if that's in the intro you got a good one right there baby it's i can't remember exactly what he says but he's like it's the spirit of america and he's like we got it because he's like clearly choking up in his concession speech and like crying and you know it's just like the corniest shit in the world and everybody who's like being paid you know half a mil a year by him has to be very solemn and nod. I remember I chopped it up for the outro, and it was so bad, I couldn't even use it as a good drop thing. It was not the quality of the audio, but just like it itself was just wasn't, it was just a poor.

We'll play it in the outro. We'll remind the listeners. Let's talk some taxes here. Okay, going back to the wealth-wage distinction, because the article says the wealth-wage distinction allows us to see the fatal problems with the democratic or liberal tax policy in the post-war era.

Because taxes fall primarily on wages, redistribution, if any, has to occur from the more highly paid to lower paid workers or the non-working poor the middle class is pitted against the lower class while the upper class sits on the sidelines this is not a recipe for social stability which i think is is a very perceptive um uh response to i mean and not just aoc's proposal but bernie sanders campaign proposals uh or elizabeth Elizabeth Warren's like pretty much everyone in everyone at the federal

level at least except Ron Wyden who does propose a wealth tax but and I guess Bernie Sanders and AOC to their credit have also talked about a wealth tax maybe Warren too but that's not usually

at the forefront at the forefront it's higher income taxes and to be fair an income tax of the kind that aoc promotes would obviously be a good thing for it would it would capture the tax the taxable compensation in total for a lot of millionaires like uh like the the subject of the ProPublica article is 25 of the richest people in the country right but like the vast majority of like low to moderate millionaires something like an 80 percent top marginal rate would would definitely hit them like rather hard it would be it would be a lot more useful for that sort of strata of rich people

um the way i see it is it's kind of a second step like first you got to get the people at the top you got to knock them down yeah and they since um like we're beginning to say here they the the very top what are they the tall poppies? Is that the U0 thing? Cut the tall trees, yes. The tall trees. The people at the very top have almost no income in the most assets. And so you have to tax their assets

and not their income. And this is a basic category error that I actually find in some leftist discourse when they're making points that are overall valid. Leftists will be like, Jeff Bezos makes 13 million an hour and like that's not exactly true but I know what you're saying right all right you're saying that his wealth increased at a rate of about 13 and

million an hour for a lot of like a year or maybe a few years. And that's absurd. And that's like that, that, um, that is accurate. It's just not income. He's like, uh, yeah,

that's close, but could you try it again? Like, but not as a gay nerd. So, so in the article, it actually makes the distinct, or at least the,

um, this academic paper, not the pro publica one. Uh, it makes the distinction where that is income um for jeff bezos right but it's not a wage and so whenever people discuss income taxes what they're really talking about is wage taxes um and the another thing that that this article points out is that the drive within america to eventually turn all income taxes into the payroll tax, where it's just a tax directly on your wages.

You know, they could simplify the tax code so that, you know, you don't even have to deal with it. You don't have to deal with tax day or whatever. But effectively, you'll have a regressive tax. And this is what people like Grover Norquist are all working towards, is ultimately just a wage tax so that all passive income that is the primary source of income for the wealthiest, that doesn't get taxed. And not just passive, I guess, yeah, passive wealth growth that is income but in a complex way um well we got to say so that um it lays out a few

kind of key terms that i think people should know about if they don't already uh the wealthy have capital gains as a lot of as a much higher percentage of their income than the regular person does and there's two different kinds of capital gains. There's unrealized and realized. And realized is when you basically cashed out. Like you bought something, it appreciated, and then you sold it. And then that means you've realized it. You've got it into cash. So like if you buy a stock and you just hold it and you never do anything with it, it's unrealized and it's not taxed because you don't have any income from it

yeah that was one thing i saw from the fox news reporting of this because i did not want to look at the illegal report that pro publica put out but you got the patriotic take that's right but in the comments of it people were like well this isn't wages these are you know the capital that they're earning from stocks is not realized yet and and we'll address that in a minute yeah like i i understand the point they're making but it is one of the things where although the financial gain is is potential or theoretical if you will it's still there though it's like it's not unknown or like it's not ephemeral and it is very much um realized in a way that sidesteps any kind of taxation. They don't cash out their stocks.

They take out loans. And we'll go into detail on that in a few minutes. But one final quote from this thing that I wanted to bring up is, which I feel like is the thesis of the article, but he doesn't want to say it's the thesis. He says, indeed, a cynic might suggest that the IRR income tax, the original and future tax that applies to

America's wealthiest, persists only to feed the Wall Street financiers who help their clients avoid paying it and the politicians and lobbyists who benefit whenever tax reform, specifically for the wealthy, is on the legislative table. For the rest of us, the income tax has died and we are all paying for the killing.

That's good, but could you do it again like jesse eisenberg in the social network i'm pretty sure i did paying 15 tax isn't cool anymore you know what's cool paying 0.1 tax i think i found most interesting about some of the uh articles that were posted takes on this is like many billionaires pay 0.9 to 1.2 but Elon Musk pays 3.9% and when you look at how a lot of his money is subsidized funding from the government is that correct is that yeah yeah yeah it's very funny to be like well he plays double the taxes of jeff bezos so he's he's he's not as bad as the worst criminal and it's like three percent fucking grubstickers paid more taxes this year than they did that's right our llc paid more taxes than jeff bezos because that's like as soon as i heard that i was like we got to get offshore we got to get to panama this is ridiculous but it is interesting i mean i wanted to just kind of highlight when we were throwing around

these percentages, just like what ProPublica did here, which is very intuitive and smart, is they got, according to them, they got 15 years worth of tax data for all these, you know, top 25 richest. And what they did is they compared how much in taxes the 25 richest americans paid each year to how much forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period and then they called that the true tax rate and that makes sense you know instead of you know saying their percentage of their declared income when in for bezos it's 80 000 or something ridiculous right you can look at their true tax rate as their annual net worth increase because all their money is in stocks and properties and all this shit and then

of course as andy mentioned they're borrowing against it when they need liquid capital right and of course from a true tax rate perspective when it's um based on wealth uh a good percentage if not majority of americans are probably paying over 100 oh yes um right and like that's the thing you know we talk about like wait i don't understand that sorry i was because so like because the average american's wealth doesn't tend to increase from year to year oh i see for personal experience um then if you uh calculate the um the, um, uh, the tax, or let me say that again.

So if you calculate then the increase in, um, or the tax rate paid divided by the increase in wealth, um, you're going to have a number that's, that's much larger than one. Gotcha. So if you have like student loans and you have a negative net worth and you're

paying a massive multiple hundred percent, 800 percent of your income in taxes every year or of your wealth but it is like you know we've talked about one of the ways that this has been rigged is the capital gains is like charged at a lower rate than wages because of these capital gains tax cuts in the 90s and then people talk about you know the carried interest loophole and all this stuff taking advantage of private equity and hedge funds and that's kind of like what we have talked about is the capital gains rate is more like 15 or 20 whereas the actual wages rate is like 35 or 40 but then you actually get into this pro-public article and it's like they're not even paying the 15 you know the 10 that we've been like bitching about for like three years on this

podcast like no they don't even paying that. Yeah, no, no, they're, they're, they're clowning on Mitt Romney. Oh yeah.

So yeah, for the, from what ProPublica calculated using that true tax rate for the top 25 richest Americans, their wealth rose 401 billion. Oh yeah. From 2014 to 2018. Jesus Christ.

And they paid a total of 13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those years, which amounts to a true tax rate of 3.4%. And so here's a breakdown for Bezos, Buffett, Bloomberg, and Musk. Warren Buffett, his wealth growth in that period was $24.3 billion. His total reported income was $125 million and his total taxes paid was

$23.7 million, which came to a true tax rate of 0.1%. Jeff Bezos, his wealth grew by 99.0 billion. His total income reported is 4.22 billion. His total taxes paid are

973 million and his true tax rate is 0.98%. Wow. Bloomberg? Can you imagine how much more money he would have if he had just cut off his own dick? Like, he just wouldn't have had to pay any taxes and he wouldn't have had to give half of it to McKenzie.

I mean, he's basically doing that with his steroids. McKenzie's basically fulfilling the role of the IRS in Jeff Bezos' life. Like, what the IRS should be doing, his ex-wife is taking care of. They actually reached out to McKenzie for comment through her divorce lawyer and friends.

And she did not comment on this. She also like, they go into detail, I'll go into detail in a second for how much people are dodging this. But even McKenzie Scott, who's being lauded as like, you know, the good billionaire because she's giving a lot away and you know she's running away from her evil ex-husband

like even mackenzie uh is i and i mean she's she's not that she's spent most of her adult life rolling in blood money right of course um but and she still is and and she still, I didn't, I didn't think her novels were that bad. Yeah. Jeff Bezos, he made all that money off her novels. That's right. Uh, that's what kickstarted the bookstore. You know, people, that was the only way people could get her novels.

Um, so Mike Bloomberg, 22.5 billion in that timeframe, um, claimed total income of 10 billion. Uh, interestingly, because he takes all his takes all his profits it takes basically all the profits from his company right and so he has a much higher income than many of the other people listed here but he's got a good accountant and he paid 292 million, which comes out to a true tax rate of 1.3%. Wow. And finally... 1.3% on 10 billion in income. Yeah, it's fucking nothing.

Finally, our good friend Elon Musk, he's been on the pod. He saw his wealth grow by 13.9 billion in that time period. And then he put it all in dog coin. His total income by 13.9 billion in that time period uh and then they put it all in dog coin his total income was 1.52 billion and his total taxes paid were 455 million and so by contrast uh from 2014 to 2018 uh the average wage earners in america in their early 40s saw their net worth increase by about uh 65 000 but since the vast bulk of their earnings were salaries their total tax bills uh approximated about 62 000 oh all right yeah you know the middle

class is so important to democracy we have to have like a large base of you know people who are like in the middle and doing well so that we can maintain the system and i think i think the system is maintaining great and uh yeah the lowest tax rate if you pay zero to uh 9.8 000 if you're a single person you're still paying a 10 tax rate on any income you make yeah it's great that there's no discussion of doing anything about any of this. Right, right. Like, it's just not going to be fixed in the next four years.

Well, here's, we're going to do now a brief history of income tax in the United States. All right. So, this is what people were waiting for. Finally,

I'm going to come in, in a man you could jerk off and just be jerking off to gay sex you don't have to say you have to come in a man that doesn't but then people might not have known it's be gay do accounting the biggest crime of all so in the united states in article one of the u.s constitution it says uh it distinctly forbids um uh any kind of income tax or any tax on an individual the text is taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union according to their respective numbers which shall be determined by adding the whole number of free persons including those bound to service for a term of years

and excluding indians not tax three-fifths of all other persons. Oh, me? Huh? Talking about me? Indians? Yeah, you don't have to pay tax, Yogi. Three-fifths, just like my jokes. Well, okay. That'd be funny. You became like a sovereign citizen Indian guy. You're like,

whenever it says Indians in the Constitution, it actually means me. Well, unfortunately for Yogi, that got removed in the 16thth amendment but we're not there yet sweet 16 my ass the consequence of of that um of that article in the constitution was that the government um in the early history of the united states funded itself through indirect taxes tariffs and levies on consumer goods like tobacco and alcohol. Congress imposed its first

national income tax in 1861 to start paying for something that happened that year. Something that was like civil. And as soon as the... It was like a war, but it was like civil.

Yeah. Some sort of war of aggression launched by the northernmost territories. So, so that's actually Lincoln was like,

I think people should be taxed and the south was like, we don't like that and they were justified and rising up. I did like that.

You did the historically accurate high pitched Lincoln. That's right. A lot of people do low pitched Lincoln and that's justified and rising up. I did like that you did the historically accurate high pitched Lincoln voice. A lot of people do low pitched Lincoln and that's not the right thing. No, no one should do low pitched Lincoln. Yeah, I did. Four score and seven. It was more like four score seven years.

That's part of why he won the election. Yeah, but that's how he lost the Lincoln Douglas debate is Douglas was just like this guy sounds like a gay nerd. It's like, that's like if you go to Oxford debating societies, they'll try to teach you how to like respond to the accusation that you're a gay nerd because it's like unbeatable in debates. It's like spamming the X button with Forrest Law if you're playing Tekken.

It's actually a tool for class distinction because they don't teach at state schools. No, that's true. Only Oxford debaters. So, you've activated my trap card by calling me a gay nerd. Only at a Cambridge education do you learn how to respond to these kinds of accusations in a debate? Immediately after the war of Northern aggression ended, the wealthy joined forces apologized to all the slave owners for taking away their slaves and then immediately forced the repeal of the income tax. That's right.

In 1894 the supreme court rejected a law that would have created an income tax so congress moved to amend the constitution and they managed to do so in 1913 the 16th amendment was ratified and gave the government the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived. My favorite kind of crank libertarian is the kind that says the 16th Amendment was illegally ratified and that the income tax is illegal, which is a very common conspiracy online and Reason magazine type circles that several people have been shot to death by federal marshals over because they just refused to pay income taxes because they say that was not legally ratified and it is not part of the

constitution but numerous federal courts have said yes you do actually have to pay the income tax yeah it's like the five people who took Koch brother propaganda at face value that's right and took it to its logical conclusion, took up arms against the United States government and got Ruby Ridged. So the last part there is especially important from whatever source derived because what that meant was that

an increase in wealth, that was counted as income and taxed as such. Oh, early on in the 16th amendment or yeah yeah once the 16th amendment was passed or income derived from the wealth yeah that's interesting yeah i didn't know that no it wasn't it wasn't just um it that included like uh an increase in your net worth that hasn't been realized. Like if you have, say, if you receive a dividend from a stock. Funny you should mention that. Oh.

Yes. So that was passed in 1913 and 1918. Only 15% of American families owed any tax. And the top 1% actually paid 80% of all the tax revenue raised by the government. Now, wait a minute. Do you know the president who signed that income tax into law? Barack Hussein Obama. Yeah, Barack Obama.

His name was Woodrow Wilson, and he was a notorious white supremacist and racist. And that's when we talk about the income tax, we're talking about white supremacy. Yeah. Steve, why'd you get such a kick out of that stupid joke? I don't know. Whenever there's a president in the question,'re like that's the answer uh what's his vice president uh alexandria albazio it's bocasio it would have been the same oh damn it sean sean thought bocasio wasn't

wasn't hispanic enough so he changed it to Alcasio. That's what she's like. Her district in the Bronx gets redistricted and there's like more Latinos there, so she has to go for the Bocasio. Alexandria Bocasio. So, okay. So, here's where things got all fucked up in 1920 um income tax from increased

wealth the game through investments was deemed untaxable by the supreme court and the reason this happened was from a case eisner v uh mac maycomber where in 20 in 1916, Maycomer owed 2,200 shares in Standard Oil, which Standard Oil at the time declared a 50% stock dividend. And so she received 1,100 additional shares

as the dividend, which... Well, there's your problem right there, she. Which, girl boss, which... Well, there's your problem right there, she. Which, girl boss, which was worth approximately $20,000. And so, this particular form of dividend,

it worked as kind of a half stock split. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court declared that dudes rock. So, So she receives shares instead of cash. Yes. This is what you're saying yeah and so the argument was that because it's kind of like a stock split um it's not a wage yeah it's not a wage because the overall income right the overall value of the company didn't change it was just

more stocks so her overall net worth didn't change she just got more stocks that that was what was argued so i just want to say like an important thing when reading supreme court decisions throughout u.s history is don't try to follow any sort of logic just realize that they're going to side with business and then they're going to figure out how they manipulate the law to get there exactly but are they saying basically it wasn't realized because it wasn't cash it was stock well i'm getting that that was so that was that was the argument that's that's that was her perspective was that it's stock it's not cash and also my income didn't increase between the 20 000 and the 1100 even though um clearly the dividend was paid out of profits.

So the extra stock was more or less the annual profits of Standard Oil, just paid through stock. It is an interesting fact is that around the same time the Supreme Court was issuing this decision, they were also issuing decisions that it was legal to forcibly sterilize the mentally and uh they were this is the same crew yeah that and they were i believe they did also issue a decision that indian people actual indians like yogi could not be u.s citizens uh in the early 20th century there was a racist indian guy who sued uh up to the u.s supreme Court and he said that I'm not black I should not be subjected to

segregation laws I'm Indian and then they were like no you're you're the n-word too I was wondering why you were pointing at me but at least this time it was relevant yeah I did not know that so according to the law at the time those shares were taxable as they should be

so what May Comer did is she pulled the most at the time those shares were taxable as they should be um so what maycomer did is um she pulled the most powerful karen move she paid the taxes and then sued mark eisner who was the collector of internal revenue for the third district uh in other words new york and um as she said that she only received the payment in stock not cash and the supreme court ruled 5-4 in her, stating that a person needed to sell an asset, whether a stock bond or building, and reap actual money before it could be taxed. And this set the precedent that only gains which were, quote, realized can be taxed. And this created a loophole, of course, where wealthy industrials could simply borrow against the value of the stock that they are effectively producing an income from due to their increase in net worth. And they don't have to pay. And because they're taking out a loan,

they don't have to pay taxes on that. Well, see, that's interesting, Andy, that the Supreme Court upheld that precedent from over 100 years ago all the way to today. And, you know, we might be mad at that, but they consistently uphold these precedents no matter what the precedents are. That's right. And I'll tell you an example of the Supreme Court upholding the precedents. So in Montana, in 1910, by citizen ballot, they actually passed an initiative that said that corporations could not donate to political campaigns because, you know, they had a big problem with mining and pollution. And for 100 years, that was the law in Montana, 1910, 2010. And then in 2010, the Supreme Court issued the Citizens

United decision. And then later that year decided that the Montana law is unconstitutional because of the First Amendment after 100 years of it being on the books and so of course this is about consistency and precedent it's not like they pick and choose when it comes to these sorts of precedents it sounds like the girl boss won out yes so yeah it will this is a win for feminism actually what's what's interesting is that this um even though queen even though it set this precedent um it wasn't effectively utilized until the 70s when neoliberalism really started coming into the forefront. And I don't mean neoliberalism the way kind of Twitter edgelords

use it about culture, but like actual like pushing a system where private ownership is the, pushing towards a system where private ownership is the predominant form of government neoliberalism once that's some sort of gay nerd we're back baby so uh here's some individual cases um that they that sean we need you to come in with a hot riff right now we gotta we gotta save the episode sean i don't know why, but during the remotes, he didn't do this, but in person, Sean loves the fake yell into the mic move.

It's a very, very controversial, if I yell into the mic, it makes the bit funnier. Yeah. Well, it's like, you know, it's like once you're back on stage again, there's just so much, so much workout that you can just, you can't do when you're in a Skype room, you know? That's right. That's right. All the act outs. The people, they need full energy from all of us when we're here

we're all we're all rock hard we're all rock hard we're not wearing pants it turns out we can't jerk off in person gonna do a quad dutch rubber second time for me the quad dutch rudder joke does anyone know what a dutch rudder is i don't know what that is. It's I grab your cock. You grab Steven's cock. He grabs Andy's. Andy grabs my arm and my cock and then he moves my arm jerking off your cock. So I'm not jerking your cock. Someone else is moving my hand to jerk off your cock. This was another Supreme Court case. That's right. Wait, is everyone doing that with everyone else's arm? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's not gay. It's just you're moving somebody else's hand that happens to be jerking someone else off. This is a legal loophole. You know what I love about this podcast is you never know by the episode titles which ones are actually going to be educational. Actually, I think it's I grab my own cock

and you move my hand so that it's not gay that's what it is actually like this is gonna be a boring tax policy episode derived from the dutch rudder this is yeah this is anything derived from that's a distinction that's right yeah white dutch i don't know did they have fucked up boats um i mean i guess i'm not the vikings uh okay so their phalanx tactics were very unconventional um by the way we uh we were worried this episode would be homophobic so we did all suck each other off before we started recording none of us came but we sucked each other off yeah like just a little bit just so we can say it yeah i mean there's oloft kind of but damp around things but

listen we're like the secret societies. This is a skull and bone situation, okay? We didn't want to just jerk off on a cookie and eat it or be in a coffin and get anally probed. We made sure to put one another's cocks in our mouths at the same time, mind you. So all three of our cocks were in one mouth at some points. And honestly, we wanted to do a human centipede type of thing but i just felt like you know if all the billionaires don't eat butt why should we that's a patreon tier

actually for for 3 000 subscribers we'll release our uh skull and bones jerk off audio tape that's right it's just a lot of grunting and working out bits yeah so okay have you seen this let's let's let's do some more Gary Seinfeld joins skull and bones what's the deal with jerking off in coffins have you seen this have you sucked on this she was 15 this was last year I knew she was underaged I just didn't give a shit you know 30 rock had this um uh joke with

seinfeld about an island that only rich people know about i and that joke takes a whole new dimension now that all the jeffrey epstein stuff is out oh yeah well not all of it's out yeah i mean as much as okay so jeff bezos in 2007 um amazon stock more than doubled bezos fortune increased by about 3.8 billion uh which he didn't cross the 10 billion line until 2010 and so his fortune also basically doubled um he filed jointly with mckinsey and they had a reported income of 46 million which was primarily from the interest and dividend payments, which was primarily from interest and dividend payments on outside investments because Amazon doesn't give dividend payments.

That must be the best use of a time machine, though, is you just go directly to Bezos and be like, sign this prenuptial, and I get 10%, and then you just chill. But you need both their signatures, though. The the guy's always willing to sign come on now yeah men will sign anything they just like autographing things bezos was able to offset every penny earned uh with losses from side investments and various deductions uh like interest expenses on debts and quote the vague catch-all category of other expenses you know every time i hear like lost uh ventures and uh in capitalism it always especially in the tax code it always reminds me of the play the producers like they're trying to do a loss leading thing

to make money yeah exactly doesn't make any fucking sense it's like betting on a horse to fail to win. So Jeff Bezos in 2011, his wealth held roughly steady at $18 billion. So Bezos filed a tax return reporting that he lost money and um that his income was offset by investment losses and because of these losses he claimed and received a four thousand dollar tax credit for his children wow he which just the the audacity of someone where i'm like i don't want to paperwork. I'm not going to do all the deductions. Fuck it. And this guy, this asshole worth $18 billion gets a $4,000 tax

credit for his kids. Hell yeah. Yeah, he's in poverty. That's right. He's not making enough money. Jeff Bezos from 2006 to 2018 his wealth increased by $127 billion. He reported a total of $6.5 billion in income, paid $1.4 billion total over 12 years, which comes out to a 1.1% true tax rate. Elon Musk,

he paid $68,000 in taxes in 2015, $65,000 in 2017, zero in 2018. And between 2014 and 2018, true tax rate, 3.27%. Carl Icahn in both 2016 and 2017 paid $0 despite reporting a total of 544 million in adjusted gross income. After taking hundreds of millions in deductions for the interest on his loans, Icahn registered tax losses for both years. Icahn had an outstanding loan of 1.2 billion with bank of america among other loans which he said was technically a mortgage secured by his manhattan penthouse apartments and other properties and when asked by pro publica if he took out loans to lower his tax

bill icon said no not at all my borrowing is to win i enjoy the competition i enjoy winning uh he also said and he's kind of the star of this article in this way uh i didn't make money because unfortunately for me my interest was higher than my whole adjusted income and he says there's a reason it's called income tax the reason is if you're a poor person a rich person if you're apple if you have no income you don't pay taxes and a slight correction apple has a lot of income and they still don't pay taxes. And a slight correction, Apple has a lot of income and they still don't pay taxes. And he also added, do you think a rich person should pay taxes no matter what? I don't think it's a germane question. How can you ask me that question? And I always find it fascinating when a billionaire talks to a reporter like they're the help.

Yeah. Well, Icon has that, you know, he went to a tough school in Queens where they used to beat up the little Jewish kids. Right, right. He has that attitude. Yeah. So, you know, I guess at least I respect Icon for directly threatening the reporter instead of doing it through a spokesman like Bloomberg. Everyone in this article

whose tax information was described was asked to comment. Buffett, Bloomberg, and Icon all said that they paid the taxes they owed. A spokesperson for Soros, George Soros, said in a statement, between 2016 and 2018, George Soros lost money on his investments. Yeah, he invested in Antifa and they lost a lot of money. He invested in faking a school shooting in Newton and they didn't get the gun control law passed.

Harvest his tax losses. He wrote off the Newton school shooting on his tax bill. Those child actors aren't cheap. Another one bites the dust. This was a seed grant research lab we uh we put a lot of chemicals in adam lanza as part of the open society foundation i'd make it back on that pillow stuff to try to get gun control passed and you know we had to write that off at zero you know it's when you're a venture

capitalist not everything succeeds. That's right. Sometimes your false flag doesn't get the gun control laws passed because of patriot resistance and the Second Amendment. His spokesperson continued, therefore he did not owe federal income taxes in those years. Mr. Soros has long supported higher taxes for wealthy Americans. It's so funny.

Like, you know, I know it's like partly anti-Semitism, but like the right wing media has made his name just sound evil. Like as soon as you say like George Soros, like, or just Soros, in your head, you just see like the puppet master strings. Like the web. It's a pendulum. Yeah. like the puppet master strings like the web going through yeah it's like barack obama and like you know several gay prostitutes that he's using to control the white house and you know all this master manipulation plans i love that puppet master is is it's such a menacing statement

but if you actually see a puppet master in public it's just joyful couple of gay nerds gay nerds whatever yeah well you know what george soros has every reason to fight against public transits and train systems in the united states based on what he saw them do when he was a child that's right so that's why the car culture you can't have a genocide if you have a car culture. Public rail is the first step on the road to annihilation. Do I mention that the first jet gas chambers were in the back of trucks where the exhaust was just ported into the trucks? No, but that is a good chance to remember that when we were,

when we were doing our, our Nazi four 20 episode riffs, we did forget to riff about the gas chambers that the cool Nazis would have, and they would, like, drive you out, and it would just, like, play a boombox. And you would hotbox. It would be, like, the mobile killing vans

would just be hotbox vans. And then they would just, like, play speakers, and they would play speakers, and then just let you out in the woods, and you could, like, walk around. They're just like, you can leave can leave yeah it's explosive words visit chill nazis nazi is just leaking into this right right uh personal and corporate representatives of bezos declined to receive detailed questions from pobob they didn't even they declined to receive even questions

about it right i hate when amazon support does that uh one star and uh similarly as we mentioned earlier um mackenzie scott through her divorce they tried to contact her through their divorce attorney uh and personal representative she didn't say anything can we hit up these reporters and see how you get in contact with Mackenzie Scott? Because I would like to get in contact with Mackenzie Scott. We know her husband's at Lakeside teacher. We'd probably find someone that knows her. Oh, that's right. She is married. Nevermind. I don't want to talk to her. Oh, really? That was the only reason you want to talk to her? Hey, what's that on your left hand?

Look, my wife would understand. Look, honey, just let me do this and then we'll be rich. Finally, we've got our good friend, Elon Musk, who presumably they asked him, they like DMed him on Twitter because they say that he responded to the initial inquiry with a single question mark. What a beta cock move. And then after they sent more detailed questions he did not reply it seems to me that your research is not correct at this time that's a good impression so bad i did you know i made this point on twitter but like we were pretty harsh on elon musk in the the two episodes we did but in hindsight like, I've actually come to respect him a little bit more as he's

realized that he's so plugged into the military industrial complex. Oh, yeah. He can just do blatant crypto pump and dump scams in public and nobody can stop him. Oh, yeah. Well, I remember like during those episodes being like, oh, he's making rocket fuel that returns. But these are just missiles that you don't need to waste. They're recyclable

missiles they're green guys but but i mean you know his whole fucking empire is built on a corner of the military industrial complex funding him forever really i don't see any any chance that i mean if he could figure out how to make fucking tanks electric which he you know can it's not it's not that far-fetched like this is everything that's able to kill people except the fucking munitions could be powered by a battery in theory. Oh, fuck, my gun didn't charge last night, guys. Shit, my Tesla AK is not going to work

against the fucking Taliban. You know, about a year ago, SpaceX made a bid to the US military saying that they could provide faster intercontinental rockets without saying what those rockets would be for but they were like it can reach its destination in an hour um for fast delivery of goods wow yeah yeah it's frustrating because i think that after our uh um what was that michael moore green duck anyway after that fucking planet of the

humans yeah after that documentary it became very clear that like renewable is is more a concept than a practicable thing in uh society and uh you know it's like we we look at like oh don't use plastic water bottles get uh when they can refill it's like yeah that makes sense but they had to make the fucking refillable water bottle as well. And in terms of Musk, it's like, oh, you are just like your parents' parents, raping the earth for its minerals for your own gain. That'd be pretty tight to do like an all-electric intercontinental ballistic missile, though. The green new Nagasaki. I mean, it really is what Joe Kennedy Jr. was trying to do with Operation Aphrodite,

where it's just a drone-based fly the airplane into the target. I'm fucked up. All right, what else we got? How'd you do that? You'd have to have some kind of electric thing to get it. One interesting side effect of this is that you'll notice that many of the richest people in the world, the companies that they own, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Grubstakers LLC, they don't distribute dividends for their stocks.

Buffett argues that it is better to use profits to fund further investments in his company. But if Berkshire Hathaway did distribute dividends on par with the average dividend, Buffett would earn approximately 1 billion a year in dividend income and hundreds of millions of dollars on that income. But he claims that his no dividend approach is good. Yeah. It's supported by all the investors in Berkshire Hathaway.

And he says, I can't think of any large public company with shareholders so united in their reinvestment beliefs and he pointed out that berkshire hathaway does pay significant corporate taxes uh that accounts for 1.5 percent of the total u.s corporate taxes between uh 2019 and 2020 uh and this is presumably because you know the amazons and the Apples are all stashing their corporate profits in Ireland. Thanks, Sean. So, here's

how they get money for nothing. It checks for free. The way that billionaires are able to live as billionaires without cashing out their assets, as I alluded to earlier, is what they do is they just take loans that use their stocks as collateral. And those loans aren't taxed. Loans are not taxed because there's an

interest on them. And the arithmetic is very simple. If you have a regular income it's going to be taxed at their level like 37 percent if they if they cash out their stocks it's going to be taxed at 20 percent and if they take a loan from a bank it's going to have like a one to two percent interest rate right and so they're paying about as much in interest on their loans as they are taxes to the u.s well your tax rate ends up being whatever the apr is on your loan yeah right and like with you know all this uh fed uh free money for the wealthy and the banks and stuff that the savings are passed on to you the billionaires when you take out a loan from bank of america because they're getting their you know 0.25 interest uh money from the fed uh so yeah in an era of very low interest rates if you're just borrowing money against your assets like yeah you're just getting a massive liquid stream for

very little in terms of the actual interest rate you're paying because you're not paying any taxes on it. Yep. The vast majority of these loans don't appear in the tax records that ProPublica obtained, as they're generally not disclosed to the IRS. But occasionally the loans are disclosed in securities filings. For example, in 2014, Larry Ellison had a credit line secured by about $10 billion in shares. And in 2020, Elon Musk used 92 million shares as collateral,

which is worth about 57.7 billion as of May 2021. Do you know what Larry Ellison used that $10 billion credit line for? Giant slide. A week's worth of prostitutes. There's actually this famous quote from paul getty which is uh if you owe the bank a hundred dollars that's your problem if uh you owe the bank a hundred million that's the bank's problem you could extend that to if you owe the bank 50 billion that's the world's problem is this like looking at this number for el Musk, $57.7 billion.

That's how much he's borrowed against his stock. Yeah, or at least that's how much stock was used as collateral. I guess they couldn't get the actual number that he borrowed. You can use other things besides stock, but it often constitutes a large percentage of the collateral for these loans. Right. And what's so like concerning about this is everyone knows that there's a massive bubble in the stock market right now

right um no tesla's like appropriately valued that's worth more than every other car company in america combined yeah the company that's selling like eight cars a year uh half of which are involved in fatal collisions yeah and uh um what these loans are usually generally called they're called margin loans and if you look up like stats on them right now we hit like a new all-time high right for the the level of margin debt um on using stock as collateral and so you know as as soon as like the bottom falls out on the stock market which it has to eventually i mean maybe it won't maybe they'll i mean the maybe they'll prop it up because if the banks are so kind of uh nakedly exposed uh securing these massive 50 10 to 50 billion dollar loans on on overpriced stocks um

as soon as as soon as the the bottom falls out the the banks are going to be in deep shit and they're gonna they're gonna need another uh bailout and you know joe biden or whoever is gonna give that to them and it seems to be why the politicians were coached to respond the way they did, because this is a glaring, you know, the Titanic has hit the iceberg and the politicians are like, well, there's still free calamari. Like, it's like, and whoever did this, we're going to find who's responsible. You know, like it is clearly a massive fucking scandal that is, you know, ultimately, as it stands in this moment being ignored it's cool yeah it's like the titanic hits the iceberg and so they respond

by shooting the guy at the wheel right yeah well that's what you notice if you follow like msnbc cnn or just like the blue check media twitter discourse is like stories like this they appear but you're only allowed to talk about them as if you were a goldfish right like they happen and then well that that never happened right they are like yeah we can talk about this for two days and then you will never hear about it again and that's what's going to happen with this is you know maybe they'll if they find the whistleblower i'm sure they'll throw the book at him. Maybe they'll even come after the ProPublica reporters and try to get them to name their source. But it's like there's so clearly no energy or appetite to change this tax code in Washington.

So it's like, well, we have to just ignore this. We have to just put it on the back burner. It can't be talked about. There are no tax fraud in Ba Sing Se. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the day that this article came out, the New York Times had a little article covering it on the front of their website

and then that was it. They moved on to I don't know, Biden taking a shit in Belgium or something. Really? Yeah. Antipublica published this same article, but they were like outraged at how high Elon Musk is 3% real tax rate was. Yeah.

So some counter arguments to, um, the, basically the indictment of billionaires here are that, uh, these taxes are paid in other ways, such as corporate taxes, uh,

which are mostly shouldered by the owners. Um, of course, as we already mentioned, the owners of those companies are very good at good old-fashioned tax dodging. The companies that do pay significant corporate taxes are Berkshire Hathaway and Walmart. So they can't dodge as much because it's probably a little harder for them to offshore their taxes or their earnings.

There are also billionaires who do receive high incomes. In 2018, they note that nine of the 25 wealthiest Americans reported more than 500 million in income and three of the 25 reported more than 1 billion. In this case, the main strategy is just good old-fashioned tax avoidance you have deductions such as charitable donations or losses to lower or even zero out their tax bills so people who own sports teams um they're able to use that to kind of uh as a tax write-off and the result is that the owners are often paying lower tax rates than their millionaire players. Hmm.

Um, wow. That's fucking nuts. Yeah. And owning commercial buildings, um, even ones that steadily rise in value can be used to throw off paper losses that offsets income.

And so the primary example of this is Michael Bloomberg. Um, as I mentioned earlier, he receives high incomes as his company's profits, uh, go directly to him in. Yeah. But per foot foot of height he actually doesn't make that much money wouldn't he make way more no i mean it's less feet yeah i guess wow sean sean um we'd have put a foot in your fucking ass well for like a 510 guy he doesn't make that much money okay so in

other episodes we had to teach Sean about how the earth is round and seasons work now we're teaching him what a denominator is once you finish your fucking notes once you get through the the research that you have to contribute Sean you had a gay nerd riff that did last

40 minutes that has nothing to do with the situation we're in now Sean are you just looking around the room and saying this is gay nerd shit yogi these microphones are gay nerds the day the the the months they were doing fractions in elementary school sean was just in the back giant gay nerd shit can't wait till we're like back in person doing these episodes we're gonna bring such hot riffs uh so michael bloomberg as i said he in 2018 bloomberg recorded an income of 1.9 billion dollars uh he was able to write off much of this using deductions from the trump tax cuts wow and uh charitable donations of about 968.3 million uh which along with credits for having

paid foreign taxes uh he, I don't know, I guess he was paying them in Bermuda or wherever he spends half his time. It was China where he was pimping out his daughter. For horse lessons. He ended up paying... It's a real thing that happened. I didn't make that up. Yeah, no, it's in Wired.

Yeah, some interviewer is like, yeah, I hook her up with Chinese elites. Yeah, he told people, he was in this meeting and he said, yeah, she's real busty. And then he turned to the Wired reporter and said, that's off the record. And to the Wired reporter's credit, he still published it.

He is down dead. Yeah, he only ended up paying 70.7 million on that, which came out to a true tax rate of 3.7%. Between 2014 and 2018, Bloomberg paid a true tax rate of 1.3%, as I said earlier, probably twice. Aw, little guy, that's almost an adult's tax rate. Disgusting. A statement released by a spokesman for Bloomberg, he noted that as a candidate, Bloomberg advocated for a variety of tax hikes on the wealthy, presumably as a candidate

for president, because that's what you had to do in 2020. And Mike Bloomberg pays the, quote, Mike Bloomberg pays the maximum tax rate on all federal, state, and local and international income as prescribed by law.

And that last part. I was really confused by that because I'm like the maximum. So like the maximum is the minimum? I don't understand that. I think it means that after they finished all the loopholes and deductions and every other scheme that they could to get out of paying taxes, he paid the maximum amount that basically he paid the amount that was asked of him, which for his bracket is the maximum amount. Let's see.

Still weird. Yeah. They also, the statement also cited Bloomberg's philanthropic giving stating that taken together what mike gives to charity and pays in taxes amounts to approximately 75 percent of his annual income load of horseshit 75 cents yeah um and finally he said uh the spokesperson said the release of a private citizen's tax returns should raise real privacy concerns, regardless of political affiliation or views

on tax policy in the United States. No private citizens should fear the illegal release of their taxes. We intend to use all legal means at our disposal to determine which individual or government entity leaked these and ensure that they are held responsible. So basically in his like explanation of paying pretty much nothing in taxes, he's like, yeah, I mean, I

paid enough and I'm going to kill whoever snitched. So the last part was in all caps. Yeah. So now we get to death, the final equalizer. The final trick that people have to, that these billionaires have to pull off

is getting this money to their kids. Mm-hmm. And so Stephen actually knows quite a bit about this. He has to, yeah, he died and he came back so he studied this there's a strategy in estate planning called buy borrow die

and the dying part is obvious but buying the rest is you buy assets which appreciate and then you borrow against them and then but when you die though and your heirs receive your estate um they're they could get taxed through the estate tax which is like the government's last chance to claw back any um capital gains that might still

be there but what actually and the estate tax is 40 it's one of the highest in the tax code it's yeah it's up to 40 of for the for the top earners but actually a lot of that doesn't count because they have this rule where um the the cost like once if there was an unrealized gain on the cap on the capital from the person who who just died and gave it to their heirs um from the from the heirs perspective they didn't earn any of that gain so they made this really complicated legal argument in the 20s that says um they don't the gain goes away with the person who died so the error doesn't have any of the gain and thus has no capital gains tax

oh interesting so like they could just sell it right then and get the cash value of their marketable securities that they just sold and then use it to buy more and then they'll have a gain right right but actually they could just do what securities that they just sold and then use it to buy more and then then they'll have a gain right right but actually they could just do what their their mom or dad or whoever just did for them

and set up a uh charitable trust that that bequeaths all these assets to to whoever their kids are in the future yeah but remember they do charitable giving because they're giving back and they love the community and we owe them so much so like as an example um let's say that there's someone who's got uh let's go low 20 million dollars and in stocks this is just like to simplify it to sort of illustrate the scheme um they take out a loan with the stocks as collateral for 20 million dollars let's say right before they die they die the family gets the stocks the family then can sell those stocks and now they've got 40 million in asset or 40 million in the cash and the stocks the family then sells the stocks to pay off the loans they can write off paying off those loans to sidestep

the taxes and then they've still got the that 20 million and they can sell the assets that were bequeathed to them through the estate um without paying the capital gains tax to do that to sell off to to pay off the debt that they were essentially using as their income the principal balance it's so great when you go through the tax code and you're like, wow, this seems like it was written by rich people and lobbyists. I'm getting that distinct impression

right now. There's also, the article didn't go into detail because I don't think they could get details. I think the details are only known by the people who manage money for the ultra-wealthy, but there are also like kind of movie. They, they're, they're also kind of murky, um, money shufflings between philanthropic foundations, um, which provide large charitable tax deductions during the lifetimes.

And then by through that, they can bypass parts of the estate tax when they die um and uh out of the 25 richest people in america um a quarter of them are heirs uh three are waltons uh two are signs of the uh mars candy fortune and one is the son of Estee Lauder. Nailed it. Gracias. So one proposed way to address this during the Obama years, which maybe some of our listeners remember, was what Obama called the Buffett Rule.

And in 2011, Obama proposed this buffett rule to increase capital gains taxes as well as increased taxes for those uh making over a million per year and of course it didn't pass anyway uh but it wouldn't have addressed the problem in the first place and in his like uh when he was kind of deflecting to pro publica buffett cited this he was like you know i tried to push for raising these taxes, but he didn't acknowledge that the quote-unquote Buffett rule would have done nothing for his scheme to get around taxes. Still

doesn't affect him. Yeah. And the, Ron Wyden, to his credit, the senator from Oregon, has proposed taxing unrealized capital gains, which would serve as an actual wealth tax. Though, according to the article, wealth taxes aren't that widespread. There are some in Spain and I think Switzerland.

And apparently there used to be one in France, but it was recently abandoned as, quote, unworkable. Obviously, they're going to be more complicated than income tax. Yeah. Because there are so many different ways in which assets are hidden and can appreciate. And then other ones that are used as loss harvestings can be deducted against the gainers and stuff. So that's just inherently more complicated.

And the types of people, the wealth managers, who would be needed by the government to look after this, have clients who are trying to avoid it. Sure. It's also very funny how the article used the passive voice so they wouldn't have to say Macron did it. So the article says, this is where they get very lib, and they kind of hit a wall where they don't,

everything that they know about government, just the perspective that they're supposed to have as upstanding journalists who are not biased and who love the system runs up against the fact that if you, if the system works the way that it was designed to, you can't address this at all. Sure. And so they say, quote, what it would take for a fundamental overhaul of the U.S. tax system is not clear. Have you seen those scenes of revolutionary France? That might be a start. I think people have addressed this. There was this family in Russia. What was their name? The started with an R. The article ends on a Buffett quote where... Jimmy Buffett? Jimmy Buffett, where he likes showing his hand.

He says, you know, there is a class war in America. My class won. And now I'm just wasting away in Margaritaville. I'm just a regular guy. I go get burgers. The article ends on such like a downer, like we don't know how to fix this. Right. And it's true.

They don't know how to fix this. But you do, dear listener. Yeah. Let me tell you about the second amendment. And writing your congressman. Let me tell you about a fellow named Pol Pot. Let me tell you. He cut down the tall trees.

Let me tell you about setting up an llc which you say you are using for farming and then you order a large amount of fertilizer it's called the anders brevik strategy anders brevik here i think anders brevik here oh sean doesn't UF. I didn't get it when you said it first. Yeah, that's fair. No, I mean, I don't think it's an Anders Brevik strategy. I think it's a mixed strategy.

McVeigh, all the mix in the IRA, Sean, McCarthy. Brevik was just like, he set up, because he was a loner as far as we know, and he just set up like a farm somewhere out in Norway and just like tended to this farm, and then he used it to over time order a bunch of fertilizer to make a bomb. I didn't know he had a bomb. I thought he just shot people.

He had a bomb. It didn't kill many people, but he set off a bomb near the parliament, and then he drove out to the labor summer camp and murdered a bunch of children only only uh yeah he went to like the poor those like sock dim kids like summer retreat yeah yeah you get shot by andrewsivik and with your last breath you go, what are you, a gay nerd or something? And with that, this has been Grubstakers. Solutions

for this tax problem. Have you tried Violent Revolution? Yeah, I guess we have. I'm a little like the... Clippy. Okay, first thing, you're going to want to unplug your tax system And then plug it back in

I guess we have to say Like everything here is parody or else They'll cut off our Patreon or something For inciting violence Are we on Patreon right now? No but if you say it in one place It comes back to you Yeah

In Minecraft Unlike paying a 1% Effective tax rate It comes back to you. Yeah. In Minecraft. Right, right. Yeah. Unlike paying a 1% effective tax rate, death threats are not legal. You know, as much as probing violence is fun, it does seem to be pretty obvious that, so regardless of the actual evidence that ProPublica has put out now, we've all suspected there have been various loopholes including the taxes to the offshore accounts which also involve taxes but in terms of any actual justice in this particular

realm the leakers will get justice don't worry about that i I like that this episode is entirely onshore. This is onshore schemes. Right. Yeah, we did an offshore episode. This is our onshore taxes episode. Yeah. I mean, what they'll find is, you know, it'll be like Anthrax. They'll be like, oh, we found the leaker.

He tragically killed himself by shooting himself in the back of the head. It's that guy that had pornography at Bill Gates' home. He was the IRS leaker as well. Yeah, I don't think we talked about that on the air. We were saying before that one of Bill Gates' help got arrested for child pornography. And I just want to say, Fall Guy, that was not his. When you see Bill Gates and staff had child pornography, that means Bill Gates had child pornography. Yeah, ProPublica.

Parody. If you're still in contact with your fella, look into that guy's family's income. Yeah. The year before and the year after he was arrested. Yeah. Look at his commissary account, see if it's well-funded. A Seattle man employed as an engineer at bill and

melinda gates home is now accused of amassing a 6 000 image child pornography collection but what's weird is this is from 2014 but then it's coming back up now after the divorce which is like it was so weird they found it on this laptop that only bill gates could log into i mean i don't know how he put it there like you know you can talk about conspiracies all you want, but if someone that works for me in my home is doing something, I'm pretty sure I'm involved. Can you believe this sicko had child pornography on his computer with Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein high-fiving in the background?

Yeah, I mean, it's like, okay, so you're literally the second or third richest person on earth. Yeah, I'm sure you didn't vet your staff at all. Yeah, I'm sure if you were going to face a child pornography charge, you wouldn't have like somebody you could dump it on and be like, hey, will you do Fed time for me and I will give you $10 million or I'll kill you. The problem was that employee was using Linux. Yeah, that's true. That was the real here we had a problem with the drops because of linux and uh this guy got fucked up because of linux we had a problem with the drops because i uh brought a raspberry pi jerry rigged into the off-brand screen nobody asked you to do this no nobody did i didn't do it for the i did it because i'm trying to figure out how to make my own laptop.

Well, listen, I do this for you to entertain you people. You know, Andy, I could have rigged a fucking recording device. That was like three phones and some coconuts, but we use microphones and recorders that work for a reason at our job.

You said like, when we come back, we can do dual, we can do dueling drops. I'll bring my laptop. I'll put it in. Where's your laptop? My laptop's right here it would

have worked oh it's I don't have the cord I don't have one of the cords the true issue is I don't have the cord couldn't go in that's going into my bullshit laptop couldn't go into your laptop it could have gone into mine you're right Andy this is our promise to the listeners and now that we're back to in person episodes we will bring

four drop keyboards for an episode and make it totally unlistenable it's gonna be another like tax policy episode back to in-person episodes we will bring four drop keyboards for an episode chaos will rain totally unlistenable it's gonna be another like tax policy episode like this one where we go in thinking it's gonna be boring and then it's just the most homophobic we've ever dropped well it depends on the month yeah i gotta bring back the actual keyboard i love that thing i really do want you to bring that back it's a nice touch it's like they might be giants when they do like an old tape show we'll bring it back for the COVID survivors. All right.

I think that's all this fucking road. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. We're back in person. I really appreciate y'all being down here. Sean, you want to interrupt it? No, I was just going to say, like, in terms of how this all ends, I mean, we talked about Mitch McConnell at the top. I got an article from The Hill.

You know, Mitch McConnell at the top. I got an article from The Hill. Mitch is on the case. He gave a Senate speech demanding the Department of Justice and FBI investigate the disclosure of confidential McConnell said in a Senate floor speech, quote, the federal government owes taxpayers nothing less. And as a taxpayer, this is absolutely what I want them to do more than anything else. rate or something even close to reasonable it's to punish the person who informed me that elon musk pays three percent and uh you know and also the uh apparently the irs commissioner has said that an investigation is currently underway by the treasury inspector general for tax administration so the irs is currently searching for this leaker. And, you know, I would imagine the DOJ and FBI are as well. We will see if if anybody gets caught for this. But we did also mention, you know, not impossible. They try to squeeze the ProPublica journalists to get them to give up their source. You know, I got a theory is that if any of these billionaires are involved in uh the defense industry they're gonna try to pull like some kind of espionage act bullshit on them and like all of these all of these billionaires

are in are like they've got if they're if they don't directly deal with the defense department they own part of someone who does well that's something i mentioned before we recorded was that like it's interesting that they chose the top 25 billionaires because I obviously, you know, many other people on that thousand, fourth, hundred, whatever the list number is, are doing these things. And obviously they want to take out the head. But like you just mentioned, all of these people are directly linked with defense funding from Amazon and

Microsoft dueling with cloud uh to get the government contracts to musk's uh missile rockets to um you know walmart just selling guns in general i don't know how they're all connected but the point is is that all of them are subsidized by government and so this is a direct like hey government you know you're giving these fucks money well they're not giving you back that money they're giving you. Yeah, exactly. By the way, Maria Maria Cantwell, Senator from Washington State, proposed that Jeff Bezos get or that Blue Origin Jeff Bezos Rocket Company get a consolation second place contract for because he he did it because Elon Muskk got the um land on the moon

contract he got he got like the moon lander thing um and silver can't well said that well and it basically she said jeff worked really hard for this too and basically just wants to give him like a losers a reward yeah and billion fucking consolation yeah yeah participation trophy yeah possibly more than i haven't done the math but that could be more than he's ever paid in taxes in his life usually usually that you know there's there's usually something for like the runner-up right not not like this though so you think it's you would be something like what the 50 million

or 70 million he paid or whatever is that the number 10 billion is what he's he's getting it was it would not fucking I think you can probably guess who's paying for Maria Cantwell's real life that's not even a fifth of what he paid on the divorce Andy

I think the feds owe him something but no I mean like what I just wanted to say, like to kind of close out my particular thoughts on this. I saw Glenn Greenwald on Twitter. He made the point that ProPublica, as of right now, they have apparently 15 years worth of tax information. We don't know how many taxpayers, but at least on the top 25, they have about 15 years worth this this federal tax information uh which is like very heavily guarded by the law uh but as of right now they are not sharing it with other journalists so i don't know how this situation is going to develop but that might be something smart that they could do is you know bring in new york times the guardian to kind of pick over yeah bringing

grub stakers to kind of pick this thing over because like they said they made it into a workable database yeah it took them months because they just worked from raw data right but it is like the snowden leaks you know like snowden comes out and he reveals that it's like yeah he's gay then the federal government has been massively violating no he's just a nerd the federal government has massively violated the fourth amendment of the constitution with just warrantless wiretapping all over the place and that comes out and it's a bit of a scandal and then it just never stops like they're still massive warrantless wiretapping all over the united states it never stopped and the only thing that's changed is that they've spent the entire time since then trying to prosecute edward snowden yeah so it's like yeah

we're at the same situation where it comes out because you know it is illegal to leak this federal tax data but it comes out because of that i think the public has very much a right to know that the literal richest man on earth paid zero percent taxes in 2007 uh but that comes out and then nothing changes except they're going to try to throw the book the leaker so uh you know if you're out there uh we're wishing you the best and if you want to come on you know none of us will call you a gay nerd we think this is the i can't promise that we can't promise that and for those uh looking to do it again tails the operating system you put it on a usb you plug it into a computer no trace of you using it uh signal USB, you plug it into a computer, no trace of you using it. Signal. Make sure you always use open source security software

because that stuff's vetted. The private shit usually gets... Bro, are you the leak doc? That's how the FBI gets you. They're like, what is that? Some gay nerd shit? Tor? What kind of gay nerd uses Tor, man? You gotta use Tor.

Use Amazon Web Services, man. That's what the jocks are doing. And one thing that Snowden did that I thought was interesting is when he was sending stuff to journalists, he would make his computer into a Tor server because all the incoming and outgoing traffic completely obscured what he was actually doing on that server. You think when like the first time Carl Icahn's accountant explained like all this tax avoidance we just went over to you, do you think Carl Icahn was like, wow, you know, I thought that was going to be some gay nerd shit, but that was actually pretty cool. And with that, this has been Grubstakers, I think.

I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Yogi Poliwal. I'm Steve Jeffries. I'm Sean Palmer I'm Yogi Pollywool I'm Steve Jeffers I'm Sean P. McCarthy and you know as we mentioned these episodes back in person now

at least until the Delta variant takes over the United States but we did about a year and a half just under a year and a half of these remotes and honestly

much better to be back in person see my friends see you the listener and we're going to get a regular recording date again for the in-persons and uh well we're excited so thanks for listening and thanks for supporting us on patreon and we're excited to bring you some good episodes in the near future and uh you know and a lot of uh the other episodes but all in all we appreciate you sticking with us during

the pandemic it certainly was a tumultuous time for literally everyone and to be able to do the show I think maintained some of my sanity and for those that stayed we really appreciate it. I want to make a small footnote. I drove across the country for a month. That's why I was gone and I placed Grubstaker stickers all around the country and so far

I've decided that the first 20 people to find them will get a shirt because this will make it so that I fucking Figure out shirts for the show and one person did find it It was at a rest stop in Iowa and they tweeted at us and that person's getting a shirt. So Find the grub sticker stickers around the country It's a fun game that I created just right now. Yeah find them so that we can find someone who makes shirts That's right.

We can write off the shirts as a depreciation loss on our taxes, right? We're here to learn. I just want to say thank you to all the Patreons at the $5 and the $1 tier. Thanks for sending us

more money than Jeff Bezos paid in taxes. Thank you guys and girls and everybody. Bye. Yeah, so you can watch let's beat each other domestic altercations. Hey, cut that one.

Yeah. What? Chris, we know we crossed several lines, but that's the one we want to cut. Yeah. What? Chris, we know we crossed several lines, but that's the one we want to cut. Yeah.