This could still have a beneficial effect of pushing political discussion towards issues instead of personalities.

Ideally we'd get rid of the presidency and vote for people at the cabinet level instead.

Ideally? Sounds like a clusterf- waiting to happen, far worse than anything we've got now.

The president's personality is by far more important than his/her political views given that their views do not matter when it comes to legislation if Congress is aligned.

> or whatever else was 1 inch inside the boundary and could fairly clearly be linked to the preferred candidate without "counting"

That is generally how laws work, yes. You explicitly define the exact boundaries within which people/organizations/smaller governments may operate. And they operate exactly within those boundaries.

This is why law is complicated and good lawyers make good money. Not because the system is corrupt (it might be) but because you need to draw these explicit boundaries, and then you will have people/organizations/smaller governments try to get around the spirit but follow the letter.

Boundary pushing is also risky business. There are two kinds of murky areas that exist - ones that are specifically carved out due to the letter of the law and ones that lie between the restricted and the allowed. The former case is where lawyers make really good money - the latter case is where judges reign and precedents are set... If there were a 1964 law that read something like "Sale of consulting services on the topic of banking via remote communication methods (radio, phone, television, or vision-phone) is prohibited when such communication would necessitate crossing a state boundary" then it's extremely likely that a judge would uphold the law as preventing such communication via VOIP if a tech company tried to offer such a service.

If the FEC had teeth they could come down on candidates skirting the law like this forcefully - being technically within the law but outside the spirit of it is something all branches of law currently deal with in a sane manner - there's always "clearly wrong" and "clearly okay" where they meet always has somewhat of a grey area (or areas) and that's where judges rule.

I don't think this is a legitimate concern, we've solved it elsewhere - even in extremely sensitive areas. And, at worst, it'll force Ads to be more indirect and, if that proliferates, we can expand the powers of the law as needed.

If someone has broken the law, he's broken the law. If he hasn't broken the law but you wish there were laws against his actions, that person still hasn't broken the law. Convicting people for random things you feel should be illegal but aren't is tyranny. Punishing people for violating the

The law is not a strict list of all possible actions, activist judges are certainly an issue but they are uncommon and extremely rare at higher courts. Laws always contain grey areas and usually when a case actually gets before a circuit or higher court it's because a dispute has fallen into a grey area (or someone made an error and those are usually quick judgements). It's that grey area I'm talking about where decisions need to be made in accordance with legal intent.

Uneven application of the law is certainly an issue, and an overly wide application of the law usually falls under ex post facto laws which are seen as illegal by pretty much everyone. There are very sane people who can judge challenges to the law - we can lean on these people heavily.

Isn't the entire controversy over global corporate activity structuring that has the effect of optimizing taxes within the letter of the law evidence against this as a "solved problem"?

Once a law is clarified and precedence is set it's capricious and arbitrary to change it - tax laws don't have "loopholes" for corporations in the classical sense - they have been crafted (and reaffirmed) in a manner that benefits corporations.

A real loophole is something that gets closed once noticed, and there are accountants that thread the needle on these - a good, and rather widespread, example might be SUVs qualifying as farm equipment. This combined with loose agricultural qualifications in some states (like florida) led to widespread claims against luxury auto taxes for some pretty bizarre cases - then that loophole was closed.

The US has the absolute authority to solve the loophole, other countries can't do much about it but since the US is the ultimate destination for these goods the government can demand that manufacturing steps have paid proper minimums on VAT taxes and force tariffs on goods equivalent to the lost tax potential when goods enter the US - since the US is a huge consumer market that'll cover a whole lot of items... Additionally, as soon as the US starts collecting the taxes that the Bahamas voluntarily let go unpaid people won't ship goods there to dodge the VAT - then the Bahamas will have no continued reason to decline to charge VAT and likely institute a sane VAT just to acquire what income they can (since not doing so is essentially leaving money on the table).

Honestly, corporate tax laws are how they are because corporations hold a lot of political power - not because nobody notices what's going on or because no one can actually address the situation.

Who could trust the FEC to fairly adjudicate? Whoever is in power, or whoever placed the officials, the other side will happily claim foul play.

This is the role of the government, there are occasional scandals, and occasional attempts to make scandals out of nothing - but all government departments have this power. And they would be held to account very quickly for uneven application of the law - whenever one company's competitor is getting a sweet deal they'll pursue that all the way to the courts - and the courts should (ideally) be neutral.

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