I met John in an Atlanta airport lounge years ago[1]. I recognized him immediately as I've always admired him, and I decided to go up to him and tell him as much. He invited me to sit down, and told him about when I was a teenager in the 90s learning about tech entrepreneurs at the time, I always thought he was pretty cool and had good ideas. I told him I respected him, and that I was sure he'd lived an incredible life and thanked him for his contributions. He was clearly totally sloshed(inebriated) and insisted he called his wife so I could recount the story to her. I did. An hr later I had to leave to catch my flight, and i asked him where he was going - he said I'd find out some "pretty crazy shit" about him next week, and that "the doc was a bunch of BS". Two days later, I read Show Time had announced "Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee". In the brief time I spent with him, I have to say he had pretty positive energy for someone who was portrayed the way he was.
I think people like that always have positive energy whether feigned or real. It's what attracts people (and money) to them. Famous celebrities, high level execs, politicians that I've met all had similar outward charm.
That, and he was already wealthy by the point the OP ran into him. I’m still poor and every additional dollar I receive increases my happiness immensely. Dollars buy dignity and he had no restraints in life at all financially.
Yes I've met a number of personable people who I completely disagreed with on politics and their actions, as long as you don't challenge their ideological stances. It's kind of like dealing with an alcoholic as long as you don't challenge their addiction everything tends to go well. It happened to me just last night on the phone. The human mind is a complex thing.
Realise that people can be super nice to you and cruel/evil to somebody else. The serial killer living next door might be a great neighbour. That doesn’t change the facts of what he/she is.
This kind of subjectivism is so lacking in nuance, though, that the good parts that one is seeing (and, in many ways, choosing to see) are a mere reduction of the whole truth, and isn’t the whole truth of a person
So a serial killer is a good person just because he’s a nice neighbor to you? If you’re hanging out with a friend in your inner circle of elites and that friend is nice to you but is very rude to waiters and other blue-collar workers, is that friend a good person?
I’m not making a judgment of McAfee’s character here, just pointing out the myopic sense of morality. It’s so popular, too popular if I must say, among people these days.
My interaction with McAfee was in the pre-internet '80s. I was called when a nearby international school got hit by a computer virus spread on floppy disks. Looking for sources of info, found the "Computer Virus Industry Association". Called, got a little bit of generic advice, and he mostly asked me to send sample disks. Turned out that the "CVIA" was basically a pretext of McAfee trolling for people like me to send samples for the anti-virus software he was writing.
Sure, mildly clever ruse, but I always felt that the way it was done was a bit off - could have been more straightforward. I guess he thought people would not help him if he didn't use the pretext.
Somehow the rest of the story does not surprise me. Making his millions seems to have given him no peace either.
I'd argue that making those millions turned his life upside down, made his life drown in hedonism, eventually taking his mind and any shred of dignity. Still, RIP John
Was just reading about McAfee freebasing bath salts from old posts on an old Joe Rogan forum and not paying taxes seems like the absolute least he was up to:
>I've processed 23 kilos of this stuff in the past year or so, and bump it myself every day - in fair quantities the hypersexuality... is beyond belief. I have had a number of acquaintances (both male and female) who have rubbed their genitals way past the point of bleeding and still couldn't stop.
>In all honesty, a first time user, or a user on a large dose, when presented with food, will simply figure out a way to include it in the ongoing sex play with their partner. If alone, they will figure out a way to fuck it, or shove it up their rectum. This is not a joke. Everything on the Tan becomes a sex partner or a sex aid. If only visually. I will not, anymore, let anyone on Tan be alone with my dogs for example.
>A local brothel owner (prostitution is legal in my country) talked me out of a large amount of Tan and provides it to his working girls and their customers. The idea was to simply increase business by having hornier customers and more authentic product. It worked for a while, and then girls started taking larger doses and giving customers larger doses. They began leaving and running off with customers - some after a single contact with the customer.
>If a person takes a large dose of the Tan and has the misfortune to have no partner at the time, then truly terrible things happen. A number of men, and women, have molested strangers after massive doses of the pure product (which is why I no longer provide it to anyone other than trusted friends - everything else is cut 50 to one). Twice, users on large doses have tried to molest my dogs.
>I have distributed over 3,000 doses exclusively in this country. They call it SPT (I named it) and it is a seriously hot underground topic here. I know of at least a dozen people who spend virtually full time playing with this, and hundreds trying to get samples, which I dole out with meticulous care. Anyone caught sharing this with another without my consent doesn't get any more.
Doesn't that quote seem odd to anyone else? I wouldn't think he had a "boss" any more being a multi-millionaire. He was certainly an odd fellow, but I wonder how much we know about the provenance of these random forum threads.
So he discovered super viagra? Maybe it was some phizer executive who got him done in.
All jokes aside though rip, McAfee was a really colorful character and strangely inspiring in some ways, it's unfortunate he got himself stuck in a dark place
In more recent articles about it it seems to be a variation of alpha-PVP (flakka), something called alpha-PHP that is outside of any schedule for drugs. Basically a designer cathinone that is (or was) still legal.
He wasn't totally certain exactly what he'd made, afaik; his neighbor troubles coincided with efforts to get a real chemist to assist him in identifying what he was producing and stabilizing his method.
I smoked alpha pvp in a transit home in Saint Petersburg with some Georgian immigrants thinking it was meth, It made me really really high, and I spent the whole next day crying. I suspect this is a pretty popular drug in Russia.
Good or bad, what a sad ending to a colorful life.
The guy was troubled and had many shortcomings, but he was colorful and also achieved success and arguably was one of the seminal figures in the nascent AV industry.
Sad to see his fall from grace and into a world of extravagance, deceit and cheating (taxes) and, if allegations true, even worse; then to end it on the floor of a jail -all by his own hands.
There were some very disturbing allegations against him --which is why I included his fall from grace and the good or bad.
I would just add some skepticism to the charges only because the police down there can be corrupt and or inept and subject to bribery and so on. I don't know if there has been an independent international inquiry into the matter.
Anyway, I think it's sad to see people when they throw away all the earned achievements in such a debauched way.
> I would just add some skepticism to the charges only because the police down there can be corrupt and or inept and subject to bribery and so on. I don't know if there has been an independent international inquiry into the matter.
A US federal judge found him culpable for a murder civilly.
> A US federal judge found him culpable for a murder civilly
False. A US federal judge entered a default judgement against him in a wrongful death suit. Murder is not a civil offense, the standards for civil wrongful death are not remotely the same as murder, and wrongful death liability (even based on a trial and evidence) doesn't indicate that one has even approximately committed murder. And, in any case the judgement was a default judgement because McAfee didn't answer the lawsuit, not a judgement based on evidence.
It establishes civil liability, but does not indicate anything (or even that anyone has reached any judgement) about the relevant facts.
That he was found culpable is irrelevant. That it was “of murder” is false. The grandparent was focussed on the discussion of culpability in the context of the segment that was quoted in the comment it responded to.
The obvious point you're making is about a double standard -- rich people are unfairly given more slack than others. But an alternative framing amounts to evaluating a method by its results -- basically saying "I don't know why you're behaving that way, but for reasons I don't understand it seems to work for you." That obviously falls apart if you can cleanly separate their wealth/financial success from their behavior e.g. because they inherited the money.
I almost had to. A neighbor didn't think leashes or fences applied to his dogs and they cornered neighborhood children on more than one occasion and attacked one of them. The dogs went into another neighbors garage and attempted to attack him. He happened to have a rifle with him and gave them a warning shot. I'm not sure I would have, and I love dogs.
That was definitely a teachable moment for the owner had the dog been shot. It’s always the owners fault of course and not the animal’s but it’s pretty weird how some dogs are that aggressive and terrorize while others are no problem.
Arbitrary (and inconsistent) moral standards. I can’t wrap my head around how the same people who think killing dogs is bad are fine with eating meat from pigs and cows. How do you draw a line? Dogs are more intelligent? Dogs are better pets? Dogs are more fun and loyal?
Objectively, none of this is probably true (except the last).
I would agree that someone who intentionally killed a dog and doesn't regret it is a terrible person, but I still think you'd be a terrible person if you subject them to death.
It is interesting to watch dogs being treated like humans, almost like children and that sense of care does not extend to very human neighbours.
I don't get it. Probably because its a cultural thing. Anecdotally, where I am from a dog is a dog and will never get more attention than a person. It's not allowed in the house because that's where people live and if you feel lonely you call up a friend or sibling - not cuddle a dog.
One might get the impression that some cultures place more value in a dog than a person, which is bizzare since it is just an animal.
It's not necessarily cultural, for some people dogs/pets are a substitute for human company and are held in higher esteem, since they don't have some of the negative behaviors humans do (such as dishonesty, etc)
Western European culture has long placed a lot of value on dogs. The over embrace of dogs over humans recently though as you’re describing, is a sign of our societal collapse. People have gone absolutely bananas over animals and pets in general over the past 20 years. It’s the social upheaval and economic squeezing of the lemons. People are tense and always in fear and panic. So if you’re not very religious, you may find your non-human comforts in your pets. Especially because everyone else around you is also in constant fear and panic. It really started around here on 9/11. And it’s just a constant ramping up ever since.
I don't think it has as much to do with wealth as it has to do with how interesting/accomplished the person is, the more slack we give them culturally. The more boring/ordinary a person is, the less slack we give them in western culture. A poor person whose life has interesting or compelling elements to it also seem to get a ton of slack culturally for crimes.
It's a logical standard. You can't prove a negative (ie that you didn't do something and thus are innocent), so the burden of proof must always be on those making a claim to show that it is true. While it might not be as dangerous for the gossip column to employ fallacious reasoning as it would be for a court of law, that doesn't stop it from being wrong.
Outside the courtroom everybody makes judgements based on the balance of evidence, because we can’t possibly know enough facts to pass the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.
You mean like people judging others on Twitter based on gossip and quotes out of context? Society could do a lot better by imitating the justice system standards a bit more. The system was created that way for important ethical reasons.
It was created that way because of the extreme consequences of criminal conviction. Civil suits, which deal in money or injunctive relief, have a much lower standard of proof. Social opprobrium rightly has a standard lower than that.
I'd say the standard in civil suits is the lowest ethically possible in judging people. It merely requires the claim to be more likely to be true that not. Below that, you're saying the claim is most likely false based on the evidence, but for reasons of extreme caution you will presume it is true. I certainly agree that happens in social media where the outcome of letting a "guilty" person get away with something is judged to be more unacceptable than the outcome of destroying an innocent person.
It's no longer mere "opprobrium". These days it's losing your career (or at least your current job) and getting incessantly harassed. The calculus has very much changed.
(I'm not claiming that I have a solution for the problem, besides people individually waking up and realizing that it's a bad idea to rush to judgement. No amount of censorship or similar tactics could possibly solve this problem even if our benevolent tech overlords wanted to)
It's not a logical standard, and you can prove a negative. For example, I can prove that I'm not dead, that there's no elephant in the room with me as I type this, and that my wife is not having sex with someone else right now because I can see her on the couch.
I wish people would stop saying you can't prove a negative. You can prove that you didn't do something by proving something else that logically excludes you doing it--such as being somewhere else at the time.
In Aristotelian Logic, is said that you can't prove an Universal Negative statement. I guess at some point someone forgot the Universal part and ran with it, creating that misconception.
What about people who can’t prove a negative but truly are innocent? If you can’t guarantee that 100% can prove a negative, then innocent people would be convicted.
Had a net worth of several hundred million in a country where the cost of living was 23% of the US might not be a "megayacht and private 787" lifestyle, but it would do pretty well.
He owed a lot of money in back taxes because he made a point of specifically refusing to pay them, not inability to do so.
His net worth peaked at $100M right before the 2008 financial crisis, which apparently decimated his investments.
If you spend a lot of money without paying your taxes, you still owe those taxes, which means you have significantly less money than you think you do. So when his aforementioned wealth peaked at $100M, the real value (i.e. minus taxes) was probably much lower.
Not withstanding the amount, I'm willing to be corrected there, but the latter part makes little sense:
Say I have $1M in the bank (or in Bitcoin), but I owe the IRS say $300K.
I leave the country, and take my money out of the reach of the IRS.
My "net worth" on an accounting statement might be $700K, but if I'm making a point of avoiding and biting my thumb at the IRS, I still absolute have access to $1M, regardless of moneys owed or claimed. And if I have no intention of paying those taxes, I'm certainly going to use that money. And McAfee was very actively saying "I'm keeping that owed tax and doing whatever the hell I like with it".
The IRS can seize assets. McAfee wasn't sitting on $100M in hard cash, most was in property and investments.
According to [0] he was down to about $4M in net worth after 2008, which isn't nothing, especially in a LCOL country, but for context, if he made 200k per year and put 10% away for retirement from when he was 25, he would have had the same amount.
Given that McAfee himself claimed he had assets seized by the feds and had nothing at the end, I don't think even McAfee was ever as far out of reach as you think he was.
He seemed to like his dogs (which I get!), and was out for the little guys of the world. He didn't like authorities whom abused their power.
I found him refreshing compared to most wealthy guys.
I am sad he's gone. I wish it wasen't fear over the IRS though.
(I don't think anyone should do jail time over taxes. You can take their money, but no jail time. Oh yea, I don't care if he was doing drugs (prescribed, or illegial). I don't think anyone should have to go through withdrawls in a cell. That last sentence was not aimed at John. It never felt right hearing that people are expected to withdrawal from any substance while in jail. I see a constant help wanted in my local paper for a Psychiatry position at San Quentin. If I was in charge, every suspect would have a Psychiatrist they can talk to, and medicated if needed, with in a hour of being locked up for any offense. It's got to be one of the most stressful event in a person's life.)
We offered the McAffees a puppy shortly after they moved to TN; they came out and played with the litter for a couple hours in our front yard, and they were both very much "dog people".
Our pack wasn't aggressive, as such, but everyone found them intimidating. John was quite happy being chewed by multiple small hounds, and the rest of the pack was OK with the idea of him having a pup.
Alas, they weren't stable enough to give a good home to a dog at that time (and told us so before the pup was ready), so that puppy went elsewhere; but I was delighted to meet them both and found them decent people to spend a bit with.
Actually, John killed his own dogs after he believed they were poisoned by his neighbor. Were they really poisoned, or was that just one of his psychotic delusions(like his claim that Belizean officials were out to kill him but killed Faull by mistake)?
We'll never know. But we do know that his dogs were allowed to run free in a giant pack and attacked at least 6 people (probably more, but they may be locals and not ex-pats/tourists whose claims are more likely to be reported on)
He claimed that he gifted laptops to the Belizean government pre-loaded with spyware and alleged to have found evidence that multiple top officials were engaged in drug and human trafficking.
If true, would certainly be a motive for those officials.
> He claimed that he gifted laptops to the Belizean government pre-loaded with spyware and alleged to have found evidence that multiple top officials were engaged in drug and human trafficking.
So he was looking to take out his competitors? Because he boasted of having sold 25KG of psychotropics in the previous year, so let's not mistake him for some vigilante.
This is how conspiracies are created. There's no evidence and strong motive for him to create this conspiracy.
I'm a big fan of Occam's razor and in this case the simplest explanation, in light of _evidence_ of which there was plenty in the documentary, is that he was not truthful.
Weird he never provided any proof of his claims about that. You would think that if he was invested enough to put his own life in risk(according to him) to find out the extent of corruption among officials in Belize, that he would, perhaps, release the information in some manner instead of just pretending like it never existed.
And what was the thinking of the officials who allegedly received the laptops? "Oh no, the man who gave us free laptops has been reading everything we've done on these laptops. Let's plan his murder on these laptops now. Don't worry about finding his address, it's just some home north of San Pedro right? Just go kill a guy and it must be John"
What is the value of the poster's feelings about this, when we can rely on actual information instead? Appending "likely" to the statement is just a way to dress up a baseless opinion in the garb of objectivity.
What subjective probability is at play? None of us were there, or even in court. Maybe something very traumatic to Mr. McAfee happened that day. Would that inform some of his later recklessness?
I believe that’s how most people in society invoke a numerically void word like the word “likely”.
Call my cynical, but time and experience has taught me that people do not back up qualifying words with the appropriate level of mathematical rigor.
It’s as if they want to express an opinion without doing the leg work or providing any citations.
Had he invested the time to calculate an estimate of likelihood, I’m willing to bet an estimate or confidence interval would have been parenthetically inserted into his remarks.
"people do not back up qualifying words with the appropriate level of mathematical rigor."
To be fair, how in the world am I supposed to calculate such things and provide a satisfactory number?
The vast majority of my conversations and discourse don't require or benefit from giving a range or specific value to such words. Would the preceding sentence be better if I said 90%, 95%, 99.5% instead of 'vast majority'? And to be honest, most people - especially myself - aren't at all accurate with probability estimates, let alone calculations.
According to news story: McAffee's dogs kept terrorizing people on the beach, neighbor poisoned dogs, McAffee hired hitman to torture and kill neighbor.
He died in a Catalan prison, not in US. Even if the US government had really any reason to kill him, sending an agent to prison in a foreign country to fake a suicide, when he was going to get extradited anyway, seems a bit hard to believe.
The other explanation -that the policemen in the Catalan prison were useless enough to let him hang himself without them realizing- seems more plausible.
He tweeted in preceding months and years that if found dead it wouldn't be suicide. He got "whacked" tattooed on his arm to prepare for this situation.
I don't think we can just uncritically accept that it's 100% a suicide
The guys been in prison before and seemed to enjoy it, posted pictures from prison in the dominican republic which is way worse than spanish prison. The guy talked about being content a week ago, "I'm old and content with food and a bed", he felt bad for the young people who were afraid of prison. He was still able to tweet and enjoyed interacting with people.
If you think he killed himself, you don't understand how humans work, plain and simple.
If there's anything I've learned in my life, it's that I don't understand how humans work. Which is why I'm pretty skeptical of your implicit claim that you do know how humans work.
> If you think he killed himself, you don't understand how humans work, plain and simple.
Suicide doesn't involve humans working as they should, and anyone who pretends to understand suicide, or understand what motivates people to kill themselves, or believes anyone to be incapable of killing themself, is mistaken. I hope you never find out how mistaken you are.
Unless they’ve attempted it, which many people alive today have. I suspect even more have seriously considered it. But I agree that it is an acutely foreign place relative to the average human experience.
Relevant Eric Weinstein tweeted this few minutes ago:
> I have two bits of information about JE that are not public.
> 1) An interchange from McAfee on Epstein.
> 2) Knowledge that Epstein was asking after me in a late email just before he died. I have no idea why. There is no more contact about Epstein than one meeting about 20yrs ago.
> With that said, there now is nothing I know of again on Epstein that is private. There is no benefit to harassing me further. All Epstein information is now public. He crossed my path once. Seemed to know who I was. Interested in GU. That’s it. John and I have no recent contact.
> GU is now public. I have no more information as to its connection to Epstein other than he wanted it taken to Villard house. I’d like to talk to relevant physicists quickly given its role in the story. I give my permission to release any Epstein security video of me. Thanks.
Geometric Unity, Eric Weinstein's supposed Theory of Everything. It's likely a bunch of nonsense, but the man won't release a paper, so we can't know for sure.
Two mathematical physicists took the time to go through his talk on it and pointed out serious flaws with it, which the author didn't address in his paper and has gone on to ignore.
"*The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an Entertainer and host of The Portal podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from without express permission of the author."
30 years for tax evasion? No wonder he preferred to die.
I mean, you’ll get jail time for severe cases of tax evasion in Germany, too, but it’s a couple of years at max and most of the time it’s on probation.
How do you justify your draconic punishments in the US which is supposed to be a free country?
Prison time for tax evasion is extremely rare in the US. Almost always the IRS just collects the penalty and moves on. The only real exceptions are either for criminals with a lot of other charges stacked up (eg mob bosses). Or a public figure making a political statement like Wesley Snipes.
Not saying this is good or bad. Just saying it’s how it is. Joe Sixpack who fails to report some cash income will almost certainly never see a jail cell.
Selective enforcement is bad. The fact that the law says that you could go to prison for one year for not filing taxes on time, but that it's rarely enforced means that they should fix the law.
Using it only on "bad guys" is a recipe for the government punishing people that disagrees with them.
I believe selective enforcement is a core part of policing in the US. No police agency has enough resources to go after everybody who breaks the law, so they make examples of high profile defendants to deter others.
One of two things is true. Either they believe everyone should be doing 30 years (preposterous) or they know they are committing a grave injustice against someone.
There is no reasonable interpretation of selective enforcement.
Maybe possible? But generally in that case when there was no fraud, you just get a bankruptcy-resistant lien that follows you to your grave, and whatever enforcement actions accompany liens. Generally again, absent fraud, they'll work out a high-interest installment plan.
To be fair, the dude doesn't live in the US. There are only two countries in the world that tax citizens overseas, and the US is one of them.
I'm certainly not excusing his actions (and I'm sure he dodged taxes in many ways), but I have to say that as a Spanish citizen having lived in the US, Ireland, and now Japan, the US tax code is batshit insane.
Sure, but he also refused to pay his taxes while being a US citizen and on money he earned in the US. And did so not from a place of disputing the validity of the tax bill, but simply refusing to pay the legally issued tax bill because he didn't want to.
If US citizenship has a whole lot of advantages that mean you want to keep it, then the price is perfectly clear up front: you are bound to the US tax code.
I never gave consent. Just because I was born here I have to give my earnings to a system governed by representatives chosen through a binary (red or blue) funnel?
How can topics as complex as transgender rights, or abortion be all boiled into a single digit of information.
And then I'm stealing if I don't consent to a system I by all statistical means have no control over!?
If you don't want to pay taxes, you can live off the grid. It's really rather simple if you think about it- if you're off the grid you're using none (or very very few) government resources like roads, utilities, banking networks, etc. With that, you're also not making any money meaning there's nothing to tax.
No, you can't just move - the US collects taxes from citizens even if they live and work outside of its borders. You could renounce your citizenship, perhaps, I don't really know if/how that works.
Germany has more draconic laws than the US in this situation, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
"Under German law, the maximum term for one count of aggravated tax evasion is 10 years. If an accused is convicted of more than one count, the court can increase the maximum to 15 years."
The US is 5 years for each count, half of Germany's.
Macafee was under accused of multiple crimes, which added up to the headline figure of 30 years.
If he had been German it would have 60 years for those same multiple crimes.
Nope, we don’t add up prison time in Germany for repeating the same or related crimes over and over. On top, the 10/15 years are the maximum and barely reached. E.g. Uli Hoeneß, ex-manager of the soccer club Bayern Munich, got 3.5 years for evasion of ~30m dollar in a total of 7 counts, but could actually leave prison after sth like two years, 1.5 of which where „open jail time“, so he could go to work and only had to sleep in jail.
> Nope, we don’t add up prison time in Germany for repeating the same or related crimes over and over. On top, the 10/15 years are the maximum and barely reached.
The USA is similar, sentences are often served concurrently meaning the headline numbers don’t get added up. Headlines reflect the absolute maximum penalties but there’s something called the Sentencing Guidelines that is used to set the actual length of the sentences and whether they are concurrent. https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/introducing-guidelines-app
Prison time here in Germany is limited to 15 years at max — independent on the number of crimes. People imprisoned for violent crimes may stay there for their whole life if they pose an ongoing threat to public safety.
Not sure about Germany, but here in Norway we have prison sentence with a max of 21 years which is a punishment.
However we also have "forvaring", or detention, which is locking someone up to protect the public.
If you're sentenced to "forvaring", you're not let go at the end. Instead a commission will review your case and behavior, and determine if the "forvaring" needs to be extended or not. So while you can't get more than 11 years (IIRC) at a time, the sentence can be extended indefinitely.
The important point is that "forvaring" isn't mean to be a punishment, although I assume it might certainly feel like it. It's meant to protect the public from a dangerous individual.
It’s not misleading. The prison term is 15 yrs max. In case of extraordinary violent crimes, the prisoner will be continuously evaluated and - if deemed to be a threat to public safety - hold on custody. Not because of the crime itself, but as a preventive measure. Once the evaluation no longer suggests a threat to public safety, they can leave.
What? It says right there "more than one count, the court can increase the maximum to 15 years." It doesn't say per count. If you're convicted of more than one (up to infinity) the maximum is 15 years.
> If he had been German it would have 60 years for those same multiple crimes.
Nope. That's nonsense. Contrary to other countries, prison time isn't added on a per-conviction basis in Germany. There's maximum prison time per crime (in this case: 15 years) and that's that.
Also jail times do not add up in Germany like in the US it seems. If you are guilty of violating several laws you still receive only a single punishment („Tateinheit“). If McAfee has not declared his income tax correctly in three consecutive years this would count as a single violation of the law.
I completely agree, but plea bargains are also the basic mechanism by which the justice system functioned. They represent something like 95% of convictions. If everybody who currently took a plea switched to demanding a trial, we'd need at least twenty times as many judges and juries.
I'm not against that, mind you, I'm just saying that you are proposing a massive sea change in the legal system. Everything about the recommended sentencing to basic questions like "what incentives can we offer to flip on someone" would need to be completely rethought.
Given the US imprisons its citizens at nearly ten times the rate that Germany does, has hugely unpredictable outcomes to civil suits, and clearly has serious problems with reliability of convictions in criminal cases, the question shouldn't be whether the US should have radical changes to its legal system, but how to achieve it.
Not just that but as a US citizen even if you aren't living in the US anymore you still have to pay US taxes. The 2014-2018 income taxes he owed were while staying abroad. The US forces you to renounce your citizenship to get out of paying taxes to a country you don't live in. IANAL but that's my understanding.
My understanding was the IRS will give you a chance to pay back your taxes with penalties, and they only criminally charge people as a last resort. Is that not the case? Or perhaps only for people who aren't being egregious with their evasion.
Livestreaming your cryptocurrency-fueled presidential bid while living on a houseboat in international waters to evade arrest may qualify as "being egregious".
Right, I don't think they tend to imprison people who accidentally mess up their taxes or fail to report some income to save some money. I think it's typically the very egregious offenders who get jail time.
As a counterpoint, Germany uses fines much, much more as a punishment than the US, which can easily be seen as a regressive punishment – it is a punishment which is much worse for the poor than it is for the rich. Meanwhile prison is something both the poor and the rich want to avoid equally.
Fines in Germany usually follow the "Tagessatz", which is the income of a day, as calculated based on your tax records (and other information). So you might be sentenced to pay 90 'daily incomes', which hits a poor person as badly as it does hit a rich person.
Also note that there is a minimum amount of income that you always will be granted access to ('Pfändungsfreigrenze'), so a fine will not make you die from hunger nor make you homeless.
If haven't noticed by the number of responses your comment has engendered, speaking in absolutes can come across as trolling. "You" don't justify anything; you live and affect the system you are born into. The united states are not united in what is desired from the "justice" system.
A common misconception. The United States takes the constitution seriously, but doesn’t even rank in the top 15 countries according to most freedom indexes.
The US loves it jails and they love making examples out of people unless of course you're a corporation or a politician. Then you're allowed to evade taxes, insider trading, and anything else that is considered a death sentence for everyone else.
Many countries largely limit things to taking your assets rather than locking you up, especially in cases like McAffees where I don't think he committed fraud, just refused to do his tax returns.
There's an underlying element of basic cooperation there -- you will actually surrender the assets, eg, instead of putting it all into cryptocurrency then sailing into international waters.
It’s 5 years. The 10 years are an amendment in cases of organized crime or public servants misusing their power. This exception exists to lock up criminals if no other charges can be proven. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ao_1977/__370.html
the U.S. legal system is designed to ensure even innocent people plead guilty, it does this by coercing its victims with cruel punishments but then say "but if you just sign here and admit you did it we will agree to these much much lesser punishment"
>> makes you pay tax even if you are tax resident of different country
It's not that someone is tax resident of different country.
The disgusting part of this IRS racket is that US forces people to pay taxes to US even if they no longer live there. Eritrea is the only another one like US in this aspect.
I knew this was a thing, but I had always assumed a US citizen living abroad only ended up paying tax to the IRS if the tax they paid to the foreign government was less than what they would have paid to the US, and only the difference is paid.
But it seems that’s not the case, and you get an exemption for “only” the first $108,700 of your earnings.
As with everything the IRS does, it seems complex and full of exemptions, but I have read that (badically) correctly? You could end you being double taxed if you earn more than that?
A friend of mine that is a Canada & US dual citizen got royally screwed by the IRS. Canada has tax free savings accounts (TFSA) that are essentially retirement accounts that are similar to Roth IRA in the US, except with a lot less restrictions. He had opened his TFSA account in Canada when he was 18 and was investing since then. Eventually he got a green card and became a US citizen. It was at that point he realized that the US doesn't consider the TFSA to be a retirement account and that it's fully taxable. This is an account he had prior to moving to the US / having anything to do with the US, and he had to pay taxes on it.
I can't remember if the amount was exempted under $108,700 but I don't think it was given how mad he was that he closed the account because the paper work wasn't work dealing with.
My dad's friend told me a horror story about his friend's mom who was born in the US while he parents were on vacation but she never lived there. The mother is currently retired and is collecting a pension, then she got a letter from the IRS saying that she owed back taxes because she's a US citizen and never filed.
>I can't remember if the amount was exempted under $108,700
Most unlikely, that's an earned income exemption. So basically salary or say invoices paid for consulting that year when the work was performed while physically on foreign soil (US taxes you 100% for any work done on the seas or in international air space)
With the major caveat below, on the face of it, it doesn't seem much less arbitrary to tax by citizenship than by residence in certain cases. For instance, as someone that grew up in the US and went to public schools, I certainly used far more public resources there than in my current country of residence, and would also (as a citizen) have access to an indefinite further amount of resources such as consular representation, retirement benefits if retiring there, etc. It seems about as arbitrary to me to pay taxes in a country that I cannot unilaterally choose to continue living in, due to immigration obstacles.
However, given that the global consensus is to tax by residence, the US should absolutely change its policy to avoid the hassles due to this inconsistency.
It's possible to be a citizen of a country without having ever used any resources from it (it's also possible to have dual citizenship, which complicates things). Taxation isn't about retroactively collecting money for the resources you used during your childhood, it's about collecting money for the resources you're using today. Children, the unemployed, etc. are sponsored by the rest, they aren't taking a loan on their taxes.
The idea is that you receive the services and benefits of your US passport even when residing overseas.
Also keep in mind that you can write off any taxes paid to a foreign government so it's really just a tax on those who make lots of money in low-tax jurisdictions.
It seems quite unusual to be double taxed according to what I could understand from the relevant laws. The first X amount of earned income is exempt as you noted. The amount above that, if a tax treaty is in place with the other country of taxation (i.e. your country of residence), is generally subject to the rule of paying the difference, although the details on this may vary by individual country and tax treaty.
Having a US passport entitles citizens to a lot of benefits globally, those benefits have to be paid for. It would seem odd that you can benefit from the US growing up, and once you make it, you can move to the Cayman Islands and not pay for the benefits you have received
Having a European passport entitles citizens to a lot of benefits globally too, but oddly enough I haven't paid taxes to any EU country since the day I moved out and nobody expects me to.
I'm not sure why the US thinks it is so special that it is entitled to tax people who happen to be born there even if they have nothing to do with the country any more. You aren't taking a loan on taxes during your childhood; that period is sponsored by everyone else. It goes both ways.
It seems like the US were (compared to the rest of the world) at their best from 1860ish to 1970ish. When they had great education for he masses, public health, technological and economic progress, a certain naive idealism, and the most comfortable middle class in the world. Things were, if not already good, pointing in the right direction. After that, selfish and cynical elites took over and society stagnated and fragmented.
I mean 1860 is when the civil war happened, possibly the worst time in American history. And the 70s were the end of Vietnam, another terrible time. Cynical elites have been apart of American history at every point between those two dates. I don’t think you can pick a time where America was really great or perfect. The only real example I can think of is the end of WW2 where American industry accounted for a staggering 50% of the world’s industrial output.
I'm not an expert on US history, yes. I was aiming for "well before 1900, about the time of the first industrial boom" and "slightly before the mergers and acquisitions craze of the 80s".
The US had the or one of the best fed, healthiest, best educated populations in the world around 1900. That was a clear success and it didn't start then.
It was good around 1880-1900 while Reconstruction was going but got bad again for anyone non-white a bit after when eg they elected Woodrow Wilson who was absolutely insanely racist.
Top end, which kicks in at a bit shy of $520k is 37%. Top end Long-term Capital Gains max rate is 20% at about $440k. These are numbers for individuals, they differ for married couples and households filing collectively.
The very wealthy can usually avoid paying anywhere near these amounts, though. Corporate owners can pay themselves a nominal salary and let the corporation grow. Capital gains are only due when stock is sold. So they avoid selling and borrow using their stock as collateral.
In NYC, earning about $100k a year, the effective rate is ~28% tax (ie, you pay $28k tax a year), including federal (~15%) and state (~5%), social security etc.
At the time of this writing (mid 2021), US tax breakdown for the highest income bracket in California is as follows.
# Federal
* Long Term Capital Gains Tax = 20%
* Short Term Capital Gains Tax = 37%
* Earned Income / Ordinary Income Tax = 37%
* Net Investment Income Tax = 3.8%
* Medicare Payroll Tax (W-2 Wages) = 1.45%
* Additional Medicare Tax (W-2 Wages) = 0.9%
# State (California has the highest rate)
* CA State Income Tax = 12.3%
* CA Mental Health Tax = 1%
In summary, if you make "a lot" of money in California, you'd be paying combined Federal/State taxes of at least 37.1% and as much as ~55%, depending on the type of income. Deductions and credits mostly phase out at said income levels. In particular, Trump's doing away with the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction meant that now you also pay both Federal and State taxes on the same income as if the other tax (Federal or State) did not exist.
You left out FICA, but it's also worth noting that the W-2 taxes have a maximum for the year, so the income bracket of 37% does not overlap with W-2 taxes.
Sure, but that's why you'll see that my summary totals aren't just a summation of all the enumerated percentages. The point is to illustrate what the total tax range is at the highest income levels.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/qThvR2S.jpg
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