For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

Re:For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest American... by ComputerGuru on Monday October 07, 2019 @12:25PM (#21182728)

It’s a lot easier on your sanity to just accept that (insanely) crazy coincidences happen. If it helps, that number jumped to 6.5T a few years later and now stands at 21T and the military and Pentagon have simply stalled all attempts at enforcing audits. They have the gall to simply refuse to account for the discrepancies and believe they cannot be taken to task for misappropriated funds; they don’t need to blow up records when no one does anything if they simply refuse to make them available.

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Re:For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest American... by ptero on Monday October 07, 2019 @01:13PM (#21183324)

I do not doubt that the waste and accountability are a huge problem in the DoD, but $21T sounds extreme. The FY19 total military budget, according to Wikipedia, is a bit under $700B and you need to misappropriate 30 years of that to embezzle $21T. And that assumes everything is misappropriated (no salaries, no fuel to fly planes, etc.) and does not account for growth (30 years ago the budget was a lot smaller than it is today). My 2c.

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Re:For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest American... by ComputerGuru on Monday October 07, 2019 @01:18PM (#21183395)

It’s not really $21T in cash but rather $21T worth of book-cooking “adjustments” to make the numbers align. This article gives a good overview: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/us/politics/fact-check-pe...

The NYT article claims that’s the absolute value of cooked assets and liabilities rather than the net amount but in truth it’s misappropriation so many levels deep (and recursive in parts) that you can’t even tell whether dollars are being made or lost. Purposely, I can only presume.

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Re:For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest American... by mistermann on Monday October 07, 2019 @01:33PM (#21183588)

> It’s a lot easier on your sanity to just accept that (insanely) crazy coincidences happen.

Perhaps if your goal is peace of mind rather than correctness. All crazy things are not necessarily coincidences.

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Re:For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest American... by ComputerGuru on Monday October 07, 2019 @02:35PM (#21184380)

What would you think about the whole thing if the missing money announcement came on the 9th of September ("can you believe it came less than 48 hours after Rumsfeld came public with this info!?)? The 8th? The 4th? The 1st?

The 10th of September, 2001 was a Monday. What percentage of announcements are delayed until the start of the business week? How close did this particular announcement come to being delayed to Tuesday (in which case it wouldn't have even happened)? There are so many factors that pivot on the most tenuous or whimsical of things that it actually is borderline ridiculous to read too much into any one single aspect of it.

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Re:For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest American... by mistermann on Monday October 07, 2019 @02:41PM (#21184458)

Perhaps you didn't notice the word necessarily in my sentence.

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