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Feds Call Full-Tilt Poker a 'Global Ponzi Scheme'
blair1q writes "Popular (and heavily advertised) poker website Full-Tilt Poker was sued today by the U.S. government, following an investigation that revealed it to be a massive Ponzi Scheme. The principals in the company set up a complicated system to direct funds from subscribers' poker accounts into their own bank accounts. This was in contravention of their own claim that users' money was untouched. Players' accounts amounted to $390 million, but the company only has $60 million in the bank, having over time distributed $440 million to its own directors and executives."
Look up Ponzi Scheme. It requires fraud, misrepresentation. US Govt is not lying about where the money goes. The Poker company is.
Similarly, the US postal service wouldn't be having a problem if the Republicans hadn't raided the fuck out of them in the 1980s (when they were profitable) while holding up and blocking bills this year that would have required the US to pay back the $50 billion stolen from it.
But this is rather like other Republican attitudes - raid raid raid, golden parachute.
SS is a ponzi scheme
Of course this is not true. First, the way that Social Security works is clear, whereas an actual Ponzi scheme is always disguised as something else. Second, Congress can always modify Social Security so as to keep it funded, even if there are fewer people paying into the system later than at present, e.g. by raising taxes or lowering payouts. This is not really possible with a Ponzi scheme. Really, the only thing that makes it even appear to be like a Ponzi scheme is that the population of the country is variable; if it were constant, it would be clear that it is merely pay-as-you-go.
SS is absolutely clearly NOT SHOWN TO BE CONSTITUTIONAL in this judgment. At the very minimum it's a "maybe", but it's definitely not a "YES", which is what SCOTUS is SUPPOSED to show.
I'm not familiar with that case, but I do know that standard procedure for courts in the US is to decide questions of law rather narrowly. If it's possible to resolve the case without deciding on the constitutionality of a law, that's what will be done; anything further would be superfluous. Likewise, if one part of the case is contingent on another part, the court will only worry about it if it absolutely has to. E.g. if it is alleged that Alice killed Bob, and Alice claims that she did not, but that if she did, it was in self defense, and the court finds that she didn't kill Bob, the question of self defense will be ignored since it's not important anymore.
Whether or not everyone is on tenterhooks about a particular issue that the court manages to sidestep isn't really something they care about. If you really want to find out the answer, come up with a better test case that will compel them to give you an answer.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Almost every ordinary person buys all the stuff they need using income from work that has been taxed, and in most states pay a sales tax of some kind. The corporation they bought the item from was also taxed in various ways, and some of that cost (not all of it - read about Tax incidence) gets factored into the price, making the price higher than it would be without the taxes. And if whatever that person bought improves the value of their property, they'll get taxed again via their local property tax. And so on. The same dollars basically get taxed almost every time they change hands.
For some reason, though, the concept of "double taxation" only comes up when talking about taxing investments. Which suggests the objection is not really to taxing the same money twice (which would inevitably happen if there's more than 1 kind of tax in existence), but rather either (a) paying any kind of tax at all (a much more common position than you might think), or (b) really rich people paying taxes at all (which probably was why some think tank guy game up with "double taxation" in the first place). I simply see it as yet another expression of this gem by John Cleese in How to Irritate People:
The rich don't say "We want more money." They say "This increased taxation is reducing personal incentive."
I am officially gone from