The Clinton Chronicles

Hillary is a triple threat: dishonest, bad judgement & economically illiterate.

Hillary Clinton's Terrible Tax Plan
Clinton's refusal to reform the corporate income tax is stunning.

Hillary Clinton recently laid out her plan for the economy, which boils down to more government, more spending, more taxes, more regulations, and more red tape. It translates into more debt and less growth. Some of the most outrageous provisions of her plan are those that target U.S. corporations abroad.

To be fair, Clinton's policies are very similar to those of President Barack Obama. They both want to prevent U.S. companies from leaving the country through a process called inversion. They both also fundamentally misunderstand the reasons behind inversions and try to fix the perceived problem by treating the symptoms rather than the causes.

The reason companies engage in inversions (usually by merging with a foreign firm to pay taxes abroad instead of at home) is obvious to most economists: U.S. companies doing business overseas are put at a terrible disadvantage because of our punishing corporate income tax system. The United States has the highest rate of all the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries (35 percent at the top federal level and close to 40 percent when you add state taxes), including all the big welfare states in Europe.

The United States also taxes income on a worldwide basis. This means that a U.S. company operating in Ireland pays the Irish rate first on its Irish income and then will pay the U.S. rate minus the tax paid in Ireland when it brings the income back to the United States. Contrast that with a French competitor doing business in Ireland. The French company pays the low Irish rate of 12.5 percent, period. To cope with the penalty or to try to remain competitive, U.S. companies are either not bringing their income back to the United States (there's supposedly $2 trillion of earned U.S. income abroad) or performing inversions.

As it happens, there is wide bipartisan support to reform the corporate income tax. But it wouldn't happen under a President Clinton. Her plan would change a key rule to make it more difficult to invert. Another portion of her plan would limit the deductibility of interest when it is supposedly used as a tool to avoid American taxes. Never mind that it would be up to the government to decide when the use of such a deduction would be appropriate or not.

Another provision is an "exit tax" on companies that relocate outside the United States without first repatriating earnings kept abroad. This one is particularly awful because it amounts to demanding a ransom from companies when they decide that enough is enough and that the survival of their business requires them to effectively change their citizenship.

Interestingly, Clinton may have gotten this authoritarian idea from her husband, who enacted a law in 1996 that imposes an exit tax on people who decide to move abroad and change their citizenship to avoid the same punishing tax system. It's worth noting that the United States is one of the very few countries taxing individuals on worldwide income.

What's stunning is that Clinton's refusal to reform the corporate income tax doesn't fit well with her claim that she wants to help American workers and that she cares about rejuvenating left-behind communities, such as Detroit. The economic literature shows that workers are shouldering the burden of the corporate income tax.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, the American Enterprise Institute's Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur note, "Our empirical analysis, which used data we gathered on international tax rates and manufacturing wages in 72 countries over 22 years, confirmed that the corporate tax is for the most part paid by workers." In a piece appropriately called "The Cure for Wage Stagnation," they also cite works by the University of Michigan and Harvard University, among others. For instance, they write, "In (a) 2009 paper, (Kansas City Fed economist Alison) Felix and co-author James R. Hines of the University of Michigan discovered that the effects of lower tax rates are especially strong for union workers."

You would think that Clinton would be more favorable to helping low-income Americans and union workers in particular. If she were, the way to go would be to reform the corporate income tax, not to arbitrarily prohibit companies from moving to where tax laws are less punitive.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

https://reason.com/archives/2016/08/18/hillary-clintons-terrible-tax-plan/print
 
Spike Trader said:
The escapades of Bill Clinton was between consenting adults , whereas Roger Ailes is a predator who used his position to grope and blackmail employees for sex.
More...

Allegations of an unwanted sexual encounter
Paula Jones — A former Arkansas state employee who alleged that in 1991 Clinton, while governor, propositioned her and exposed himself. She later filed a sexual harassment suit, and it was during a deposition in that suit that Clinton initially denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky. Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives over the matter, but acquitted in the Senate. Clinton in 1998 settled the suit for $850,000, with no apology or admission of guilt. All but $200,000 was directed to pay legal fees.

Juanita Broaddrick — The nursing home administrator emerged after the impeachment trial to allege that 21 years earlier Clinton had raped her. Through an attorney, Clinton denied the claim, and there were inconsistencies in her story. However, several of her friends backed her claim. No charges were ever brought. (Here’s a link to the Dateline NBC interview with her in 1999.)

Kathleen Willey — The former White House aide said Clinton groped her in his office in 1993, on the same day when her husband, facing embezzlement charges, died in an apparent suicide. (During a deposition in the Paula Jones matter, Willey initially said she had no recollection about whether Clinton kissed her and insisted he did not fondle her.) Clinton denied he assaulted her; an independent prosecutor concluded “there is insufficient evidence to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that President Clinton’s testimony regarding Kathleen Willey was false.”

Note that no court of law ever found Clinton guilty of the accusations.

Peter Baker, in “The Breach,” the definitive account of the impeachment saga, reported that House investigators later found in the files of the independent prosecutor that Jones’s lawyers had collected the names of 21 different women they suspected had had a sexual relationship with Clinton. Baker described the files as “wild allegations, sometimes based on nothing more than hearsay claims of third-party witnesses.” But there were some allegations (page 138) that suggested unwelcome advances:

“One woman was alleged to have been asked by Clinton to give him oral sex in a car while he was the state attorney general (a claim she denied). A former Arkansas state employee said that during a presentation, then-Governor Clinton walked behind her and rubbed his pelvis up against her repeatedly. A woman identified as a third cousin of Clinton’s supposedly told her drug counselor during treatment in Arkansas that she was abused by Clinton when she was baby-sitting at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock.”

Update: We were focused on stories that emerged during Clinton’s presidency. But many readers have also urged us to include a reference to Clinton’s post-presidential travels on aircraft owned by convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein. Gawker reported that flight logs show that Clinton, among others, traveled through Africa in 2002 on a jet with “an actress in softcore porn movies whose name appears in Epstein’s address book under an entry for ‘massages.’” Chauntae Davies, the actress, declined to discuss why she was on the flight. Clinton has not commented.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-the-allegations-of-bill-clintons-womanizing/
 
Foundation Ties Bedevil Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign


By AMY CHOZICK and STEVE EDERAUG. 20, 2016
  • The kingdom of Saudi Arabia donated more than $10 million. Through a foundation, so did the son-in-law of a former Ukrainian president whose government was widely criticized for corruption and the murder of journalists. A Lebanese-Nigerian developer with vast business interests contributed as much as $5 million.

    For years the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation thrived largely on the generosity of foreign donors and individuals who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the global charity. But now, as Mrs. Clinton seeks the White House, the funding of the sprawling philanthropy has become an Achilles’ heel for her campaign and, if she is victorious, potentially her administration as well.

    With Mrs. Clinton facing accusations of favoritism toward Clinton Foundation donors during her time as secretary of state, formerPresident Bill Clinton told foundation employees on Thursday that the organization would no longer accept foreign or corporate donations should Mrs. Clinton win in November.

    But while the move could avoid the awkwardness of Mr. Clinton jetting around the world asking for money while his wife is president, it did not resolve a more pressing question: how her administration would handle longtime donors seeking help from the United States, or whose interests might conflict with the country’s own.

    The Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars from countries that the State Department — before, during and after Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary — criticized for their records on sex discrimination and other human-rights issues. The countries include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Brunei and Algeria.

    Saudi Arabia has been a particularly generous benefactor. The kingdom gave between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation. (Donations are typically reported in broad ranges, not specific amounts.) At least $1 million more was donated by Friends of Saudi Arabia, which was co-founded by a Saudi prince.

    Saudi Arabia also presents Washington with a complex diplomatic relationship full of strain. The kingdom is viewed as a bulwark to deter Iranian adventurism across the region and has been a partner in the fight against terrorism across the Persian Gulf and wider Middle East.

    At the same time, though, American officials have long worried about Saudi Arabia’s suspected role in promoting a hard-line strain of Islam, which has some adherents who have been linked to violence. Saudi officials deny any links to terrorism groups, but critics point to Saudi charities that fund organizations suspected of ties to militant cells.

    Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said the Clintons and the foundation had always been careful about donors. “The policies that governed the foundation’s activities during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state already went far beyond legal requirements,” he said in a statement, “and yet the foundation submitted to even more rigorous standards when Clinton declared her candidacy for president, and is pledging to go even further if she wins.”

    Mrs. Clinton’s opponent, Donald J. Trump, could face his own complications if he becomes president, with investments abroad and hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate debt — financial positions that could be affected by moves he makes in the White House. And on Friday, Paul Manafort resigned as chairman of the Trump campaign, in part because of reports about his lucrative consulting work on behalf of pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians.

    Still, Mr. Trump has seized on emails released over the past several weeks from Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, in which a handful of donors are mentioned. He has attacked her over an email chain that showed Douglas J. Band, an adviser to Mr. Clinton, seeking to arrange a meeting between a senior American government official and Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-Nigerian real estate developer who donated between $1 million and $5 million. Mr. Chagoury explainedthrough a spokesman that he had simply wanted to provide insights on elections in Lebanon.

    Some emails and other records described donors seeking and in some cases obtaining meetings with State Department officials. None showed Mrs. Clinton making decisions in favor of any contributors, but her allies fear that additional emails might come out and provide more fodder for Mr. Trump.

    Craig Minassian, a spokesman for the foundation, said the decision to forgo corporate and foreign money had nothing to do with the emails. The foundation will continue to raise money from American individuals and charities.

    “The only factor is that we remove the perception problems, if she wins the presidency,” he said, “and make sure that programs can continue in some form for people who are being helped.”

    But Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that has sued to obtain records from Mrs. Clinton’s time at the State Department, said that “the damage is done.”

    “The conflicts of interest are cast in stone, and it is something that the Clinton administration is going to have to grapple with,” Mr. Fitton said. “It will cast a shadow over their policies.”

    And in an election year in which a majority of Americans say they do not trust Mrs. Clinton, even some allies questioned why the foundation had not reined in foreign donations sooner, or ended them immediately.

    A Bloomberg poll in June showed that 72 percent of voters said it bothered them either a lot or a little that the Clinton Foundation took money from foreign countries while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state. In a CNN/ORC International Poll the same month, 38 percent of voters said Mr. Clinton should completely step down from the foundation, while 60 percent said he should be able to continue working with the foundation if his wife became president. Mr. Clinton said Thursday he would leave the foundation’s board if Mrs. Clinton won.

Soon after, Mrs. Clinton agreed to keep foundation matters separate from official business, including a pledge to “not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter that has a direct and predictable effect upon” the foundation without a waiver. The Obama White House had particularly disliked the gatherings of world leaders, academics and business people, called the Clinton Global Initiative, that the foundation was holding overseas. The foundation limited the conferences to domestic locations while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state. On Thursday, Mr. Clinton said the gathering in September in New York would be the foundation’s last.

One of the attendees at these conferences speaks to the stickiness of some donor relationships.

Victor Pinchuk, a steel magnate whose father-in-law, Leonid Kuchma, was president of Ukraine from 1994 to 2005, has directed between $10 million and $25 million to the foundation. He has lent his private plane to the Clintons and traveled to Los Angeles in 2011 to attend Mr. Clinton’s star-studded 65th birthday celebration.

Between September 2011 and November 2012, Douglas E. Schoen, a former political consultant for Mr. Clinton, arranged about a dozen meetings with State Department officials on behalf of or with Mr. Pinchuk to discuss the continuing political crisis in Ukraine, according to reports Mr. Schoen filed as a registered lobbyist.

“I had breakfast with Pinchuk. He will see you at the Brookings lunch,” Melanne Verveer, a Ukrainian-American then working for the State Department, wrote in a June 2012 email to Mrs. Clinton.

A previously undisclosed email obtained by Citizens United, the conservative advocacy group, through public records lawsuits shows the name of Mr. Pinchuk, described as one of Ukraine’s “most successful businessmen,” among those on an eight-page list of influential people invited to a dinner party at the Clintons’ home.

Earlier in 2012, Ambassador John F. Tefft wrote to Mrs. Clinton about a visit to Ukraine by Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, “at the invitation of oligarch, Victor Pinchuk.” Mrs. Clinton replied, “As you know, hearing nice things about your children is as good as it gets.”

In July 2013, the Commerce Department began investigating complaints that Ukraine — and by extension Mr. Pinchuk’s company, Interpipe — and eight other countries had illegally dumped a type of steel tube on the American market at artificially low prices.

A representative for Mr. Pinchuk said the investigation had nothing to do with the State Department, had started after Mrs. Clinton’s tenure and been suspended in July 2014. He added that at least 100 other people had attended the dinner party at Mrs. Clinton’s house and that she and Mr. Pinchuk had spoken briefly about democracy in Ukraine.

A deal involving the sale of American uranium holdings to a Russian state-owned enterprise was another example of the foundation intersecting with Mrs. Clinton’s official role in the Obama administration. Her State Department was among the agencies that signed off on the deal, which involved major Clinton charitable backers from Canada.

There was no evidence that Mrs. Clinton had exerted influence over the deal, but the timing of the transaction and the donations raised questions about whether the donors had received favorable handling.

Even if Mr. Clinton steps down, there could be remaining complications about a potential president’s name being affixed to an international foundation. And Chelsea Clinton, who is its vice chairwoman, would continue her leadership role.

“It is very difficult to see how the organization called the Clinton Foundation can continue to exist during a Clinton presidency without that posing all sorts of consequences,” said John Wonderlich, the interim executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group in Washington. “What they announced only addresses the most egregious potential conflicts.”

Considering the scale and scope of the foundation, Mr. Wonderlich said it was easy to “name a hundred different types of conflicts.”

The reality is, he added, “there are no recusals when you are president.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/u...inton-presidential-campaign-charity.html?_r=0
 
Spike Trader said:
The escapades of Bill Clinton was between consenting adults , whereas Roger Ailes is a predator who used his position to grope and blackmail employees for sex.
More...

Seriously? Clinton abused government employees, typically low level women who needed the paycheck, when he was governor. He used state troopers to approach women on his behalf. No abuse of power there, right? Then he and Hillary used their thugs like Carville to intimidate them into silence or, in the rare cases where they could not be silenced, to slime them in the press.

The allegations against Ailes are all unproven and many are either anonymous or date back to the Mad Men era, when cultural norms were far different . There is no record of women being retaliated against. His two highest profile accusers, Carlson and Kelly, got their own shows on Fox. Carlson failed and then suddenly tried to play the victim. Kelly saw a chance to backstab a guy the mainstream media hated and raise her own profile. There was a long line of women at Fox who stood by Ailes and said he never behaved inapproriately.
 
Comey’s FBI Double Standard
To view Hillary’s FBI file, lawmakers must go to a secure room under lock and guard.

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

As for the suspicion that there is one standard for the Clintons and one for everyone else, witness the FBI’s interaction this week with Congress over Hillary Clinton’s agency file. The G-men are back to being G-men—at least now that the Democratic nominee is off their hook.

FBI Director James Comey gets credit for agreeing to Congress’s demand for documents related to the bureau’s investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email server. The FBI shares such files only on the rarest of occasions. Yet given the cloud surrounding this affair, not to mention Mr. Comey’s stated interest in “transparency,” he would have been hard-pressed to deny Congress’s request.

It’s the manner in which lawmakers are getting access to the documents that is more interesting.

Bear in mind what the FBI investigation revealed: We know that Mrs. Clinton for years emailed top secret information willy-nilly over a home-brew server that lacked security. We know that this classified information leached into the private email accounts of those with whom she communicated. We know that she cavalierly used her private email while in hostile countries, making it possible that those countries gained access. We know that Mr. Comey nonetheless chose not to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for her “extremely careless” behavior.

Compare that standard with the one the FBI is now imposing on Congress, where the Clinton files are being guarded at a level that brings to mind the Vatican Secret Archives. Aides from an array of House committees described to me the extraordinary limits that have been placed on who can see the files and under what circumstances.

The FBI has provided just one set of Hillary files to be accessed by both the majority and minority members (and their staffs) of the House Oversight, Appropriations and Judiciary committees. That’s a single set of documents for hundreds upon hundreds of people. The files are being held in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) underneath the Capitol, a secure room reserved for viewing the highest-level secrets. That room is under lock, key and guard, and viewing is by appointment only.

Many of these lawmakers and aides hold some of the highest clearances available to Congress, yet they are nonetheless barred from examining vast portions of the record. The FBI in some cases redacted entire documents, presumably at the request of various intelligence agencies, and to protect national security. Initially, visiting congressmen and staffers were not allowed to take any notes. After intense negotiations, the FBI on Thursday relented, but only on the condition that all notes remain behind in the SCIF.

Some of this is as it should be. These are, after all, national secrets. Yet the process highlights not only the absurdity of Mrs. Clinton’s claim that her server was no big deal, but also the irresponsibility of the FBI’s decision not to prosecute. Duly elected members of Congress are traversing layers of security and guards, clearances in hand, to view a few top-secret documents. Ask Mr. Comey why what is demanded of them was not demanded of Hillary.

But the contradiction gets even more extreme. The FBI has placed additional, and unnecessary, strictures on the Hillary file. It warned lawmakers against publicly sharing any information from the documents—even unclassified information. So the FBI chief won’t prosecute Mrs. Clinton for spreading secrets across the globe, but he bars Congress from talking about unclassified issues that potentially get to the heart of today’s presidential race. One might wonder why.

Nor does the double standard end with Mrs. Clinton. Oversight Committee aides who have seen the documents note that some of the redactions look to have come at the demand of the State Department (rather than the intelligence community). Indeed, the FBI allowed the State Department to review portions of the file before handing it to Congress. This is the same department that essentially served as a co-conspirator in the operation of Mrs. Clinton’s secret server and which has spent more than a year stonewalling investigations and making excuses for its former boss.

One doubts that Mr. Comey has ever previously allowed an accomplice in bad behavior to tidy up evidence. Then again, Mr. Comey was not until recently in the habit of waiting until the last days of an investigation to interview the target. Mr. Comey’s past procedure has been to interrogate immediately, the better to catch perjury later on. Mrs. Clinton got special treatment.

The entire spectacle—from the investigation to this week’s handover of files—demonstrates how much damage Mr. Comey has done to the FBI’s credibility. It’s good to see the bureau now taking national security seriously. Yet the director’s willingness to ignore those standards for Mrs. Clinton has sent the message that Americans can’t expect equal treatment under the law.

That’s why Republicans shouldn’t hold out hope that the FBI will go after Mrs. Clinton for lying under oath. Politics trumps. If your name is Clinton, it outranks justice, Congress, everything.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Com...&ie=UTF-8#q=Comey+FBI+Double+Standard&tbm=nws
 
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