Hillary Clinton is Done: part 2

[Bob001]

Why is this a problem ? I understand that there could have been a problem if she was still Secretary of State but as an ex-SoS she was entitled to ply her trade as a corporate speaker.
.......

Is that really her trade? And if it is, she still decides who to do business with. She is a veteran lawyer, and if she maintained a law practice she could contend that she is entitled, actually obligated, to provide a vigorous defense to anyone who hires her. But she gets to choose her clients, and if they included arms dealers, foreign tyrants and drug kingpins, we would be entitled to question her integrity and her judgment. As a corporate speaker, she doesn't have to take big money to from entities that she might later be called on to regulate, even prosecute, or she could take the money and donate it to, say, non-profit legal clinics that help families fight bank foreclosures. But that's not what she's been doing. And it's a little misleading to call her a "private citizen" in the usual sense; she doesn't have a government job currently, but she's been running for President pretty much since the day Bill left the White House, and everybody knew that she'd run in 2016. She gets paid for future access.

Depending on the contract that she had with her clients, the intellectual property for that speech may be hers, theirs or a combination of the two. There may even be a confidentiality clause in her contract.

Do you think she couldn't insist on a contract that provides whatever she wants? If there is a confidentiality clause, she put it there.

 

[The Big Dog]

Do you think she couldn't insist on a contract that provides whatever she wants? If there is a confidentiality clause, she put it there.

she owns the rights to the speeches and can do anything she wants with them.

which means she will continue to bury them

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Unless you claim he's done something shady -- and there's no evidence of that -- Sanders and his wife have paid the legally required taxes on their joint income, which includes Social Security payments that are only partially taxable. The Clintons' declared income is more than 130 times the amount of Sanders; do you claim that one rate should be applied to all incomes, or do you think Sanders should be making voluntary contributions to the IRS, or the richest people in the country should only be paying 13%, or what?
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/15/politics/bernie-sanders-jane-sanders-taxes/index.html
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/hillary-clinton-releases-eight-years-of-tax-returns-120882

From Reuters:

had taxable income of $205,271 in 2014, putting him almost in the top 5 percent of American earners, according to the release of Friday of his federal tax return.

Not the point, though if you count his $9000 charitable contributions as a place to pay more, that brought the effective rate up to 18% and he could have donated more to move the effective rate.

The point is not that he's done something wrong, the point is he might have pointed to his own effective tax rate as part of the problem. I wonder if he was embarrassed about it and that's why he's been reluctant to release his taxes?

People who earn a little less average a higher effective rate:
The Buffet Rule

The so-called Buffett rule refers to billionaire investor Warren Buffett. In 2011, he famously pronounced that he paid only 17.4 percent of his taxable income in federal income taxes, a lower percentage than any of his 20 employees. He proposed that federal tax rates be raised for taxpayers making more than $1 million.

As for your complaints about the Clintons who paid the tax rate we'd like to see all rich people pay, you could say the same thing, "Unless you claim [they've] done something shady -- and there's no evidence of that -- [the Clintons] have paid the legally required taxes on their joint income".

Why the disdain over the Clinton's income? They didn't inherit it, they work for charity more than they work for the rich. Hillary is just portrayed as working for the rich when people like Sanders can't point to a single thing she's done as evidence of that.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Is that really her trade? And if it is, she still decides who to do business with. She is a veteran lawyer, and if she maintained a law practice she could contend that she is entitled, actually obligated, to provide a vigorous defense to anyone who hires her. But she gets to choose her clients, and if they included arms dealers, foreign tyrants and drug kingpins, we would be entitled to question her integrity and her judgment. As a corporate speaker, she doesn't have to take big money to from entities that she might later be called on to regulate, even prosecute, or she could take the money and donate it to, say, non-profit legal clinics that help families fight bank foreclosures. But that's not what she's been doing. And it's a little misleading to call her a "private citizen" in the usual sense; she doesn't have a government job currently, but she's been running for President pretty much since the day Bill left the White House, and everybody knew that she'd run in 2016. She gets paid for future access.



Do you think she couldn't insist on a contract that provides whatever she wants? If there is a confidentiality clause, she put it there.

Her trade is an incredibly experienced legislator and government administrator in addition to her law degree and running a billion dollar foundation.

Do you think someone of her stature shouldn't earn the going rate for speaker's fees?

As for paid for future access, that is drinking the koolaid. Sanders insists they only pay for influence but that's crap. Corporations pay for speakers like Clinton because it's a status symbol. All you need do is look at the high-paid speaker-fee industry to see political influence is not the usual reason.

Talk Isn’t Cheap as Paid Speakers Make Millions on Mouths

Carlton Sedgeley, who has represented paid public speakers for almost five decades at his New York-based Royce Carlton Inc., watched Tim Howard on TV that day and had one thought: The footballer could ride his 120 minutes of valor to lucrative speaking gigs for the next 12 months.
“It’s all about visibility,” Sedgeley says. “The higher the visibility, the higher the fees.” ...

“Everyone wants to say, ‘I had lunch with Michael Lewis yesterday,’” says Don Epstein, founder of Greater Talent Network Inc., who’s represented the best-selling author since ‘Liar’s Poker’ was published in 1989. “It might be you and 500 other people, but it still happened.”
Some 225 million people shook hands, swilled drinks and took notes at 1.8 million conventions, corporate meetings and trade shows in 2012, according to the Convention Industry Council. Those hordes translate into hefty appearance fees for high-profile public figures looking to cash in on their prestigious, if sometimes parsimonious, former professions.

It's pure innuendo, a fake accusation, they must only be paying for influence. That may be true for lobbyists and money buys access, but not necessarily results.


Not to mention: Why Attacking Hillary Clinton for her Goldman Sachs Speaking Fees Is Hypocritical

The law of supply and demand has a prominent place in a free-market society. The demand for goods and services—memoirs and keynote speeches, for example—determines their cost and availability. ...

Clinton was able to command $675,000 for three speeches at Goldman Sachs because the company wanted to hear what she had to say. A former elected official has “insight and perspective that others do not,” says Stacy Tetschner, CEO of the National Speakers Association. This knowledge, he adds, “is now that person’s intellectual property, and he or she has a right to share it.”

Besides, Clinton had already left office by that point, so she wasn’t in violation of ethics laws that prohibit government officials from being paid to speak. And then there’s the celebrity factor. Even the high rollers of lower Manhattan aren’t immune to the magnetic pull of one of the biggest boldface names in the country, if not the world.

What matters is Clinton's record, not her earnings and campaign donations. Yes money has too much influence in the government. But Sanders' movement is well shy of being big enough to be effective by electing a POTUS alone.


Of course her record is distorted too, but what else is new.

 

[sunmaster14]

Not really being fair to Bernie in the comparison of average rates. His payroll taxes (i.e. Social Security and Medicare) are not included in his federal tax, but the Clintons' social security and medicare taxes are (that's what the self-employment tax is). Bernie is paying 6.4% (SS payroll tax rate) x $117,000 (the SS payroll tax cap) + 1.45% (Medicare payroll tax rate) x $174,000 (his Senatorial wage) = $10,011 that is not included on his tax return. This adds almost 5% to his average federal tax rate (if you want to compare apples to apples with the Clintons). In fact, most economists would argue that the employee is implicitly playing the employer portion of the payroll tax, so Bernie is actually paying almost double my calculation above.

And I won't even go into an analysis of the perquisites and non-monetary benefits the Clintons have almost certainly reaped which don't show up on an income tax return. No doubt there's a lot of "complimentary" legal services, food, housing, travel, entertainment, "gifts" to Chelsea and her family, and other barter type stuff that they're "earning" on the lecture circuit but they're not reporting.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Clinton Is Winning The States That Look Like The Democratic Party

But the Deep South isn’t Sanders’s only issue. His problems in the rest of the South are what really dooms him. Clinton’s largest net delegate gains over Sanders came from Texas (+72) and Florida (+68), two states that are within the South as the Census Bureau (and most other people) define it. Clinton also cleaned Sanders’s clock in Virginia and North Carolina. Overall, Clinton gained a net of 155 delegates on Sanders in the five Deep South states, but she also added 211 delegates to her margin in the rest of the region....

In other words, Clinton has won or is favored to win almost every state where the turnout demographics strongly resemble those of Democrats as a whole. This shouldn’t be surprising — Clinton is winning nationally by about 14 percentage points in the popular vote. So if you’re in a state that’s well-representative of Democrats’ national demographics, you might expect her to win it by a solid margin too....

Furthermore, caucuses tend to disenfranchise voters by making it harder to vote. Our demographic modeling suggests that this has hurt Clinton and that Sanders wouldn’t have won by the same enormous margins if those caucus states had held primaries instead.

But overall, the math is pretty simple. Sanders is winning states that are much whiter than the Democratic electorate as a whole, Clinton is winning states that are much blacker than the Democratic electorate as a whole, and Clinton is winning most of those states that are somewhere in the middle, whether they’re in the South (like Virginia) or elsewhere (like Ohio or Nevada). That’s why she’ll probably be the Democratic nominee.

 

[Dr. Keith]

Not really being fair to Bernie in the comparison of average rates. His payroll taxes (i.e. Social Security and Medicare) are not included in his federal tax, but the Clintons' social security and medicare taxes are (that's what the self-employment tax is). Bernie is paying 6.4% (SS payroll tax rate) x $117,000 (the SS payroll tax cap) + 1.45% (Medicare payroll tax rate) x $174,000 (his Senatorial wage) = $10,011 that is not included on his tax return. This adds almost 5% to his average federal tax rate (if you want to compare apples to apples with the Clintons). In fact, most economists would argue that the employee is implicitly playing the employer portion of the payroll tax, so Bernie is actually paying almost double my calculation above.

And I won't even go into an analysis of the perquisites and non-monetary benefits the Clintons have almost certainly reaped which don't show up on an income tax return. No doubt there's a lot of "complimentary" legal services, food, housing, travel, entertainment, "gifts" to Chelsea and her family, and other barter type stuff that they're "earning" on the lecture circuit but they're not reporting.

Thank you for saving me the time of writing this.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Thank you for saving me the time of writing this.

If I did the math right:

The Clinton's Self-Employment tax on their 2014 return amounts to a tad less than 8% of their total federal income tax. And if that were earned wages they'd pay half. They still pay 31% before state taxes, well above Warren Buffet, as in they are not hypocritical millionaires.

Taking the max FICA withholding it brings Sanders' rate up to 17%, still less than many people making less than them pay.

I have to go back and look into why SE income doesn't have a FICA limit. That's confusing.


I'm doing something wrong here but the Clinton's have $780K showing on SE tax on their tax form.

One way or another though, because FICA is limited to the first $250K income on a joint return, the effect on the tax rates is not going to be very significant for the Clintons and if you use 7% for FICA for all of Sanders' earned income, it still doesn't get them past 19% effective tax including FICA.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Hillary Clinton's Confusing And Conflicted

Are you still trying to figure out where Hillary Clinton stands on a $15 minimum wage? Don’t feel bad. Apparently, her campaign is still trying to figure it out, too...

“I think setting the goal to get to $12 is the way to go, encouraging others [cities and states] to get to $15,” Clinton said. “But, of course, if we have a Democratic Congress, we will go to $15.” In other words, if she thought $15 was politically possible in Washington, she would get on board with it — never mind that she’s been trying to make a nuanced case against it for months.

...her statement Thursday that she would sign a theoretical $15 measure “epitomizes what Clinton opponents dislike about Clinton’s brand of politics.”

 

[sunmaster14]

If I did the math right:

The Clinton's Self-Employment tax on their 2014 return amounts to a tad less than 8% of their total federal income tax. And if that were earned wages they'd pay half. They still pay 31% before state taxes, well above Warren Buffet, as in they are not hypocritical millionaires.

Taking the max FICA withholding it brings Sanders' rate up to 17%, still less than many people making less than them pay.

I have to go back and look into why SE income doesn't have a FICA limit. That's confusing.


I'm doing something wrong here but the Clinton's have $780K showing on SE tax on their tax form.

One way or another though, because FICA is limited to the first $250K income on a joint return, the effect on the tax rates is not going to be very significant for the Clintons and if you use 7% for FICA for all of Sanders' earned income, it still doesn't get them past 19% effective tax including FICA.

The Social Security part of FICA is limited to the first $117K (in 2014) of wages. The Medicare part is unlimited. High earners pay far more in Medicare tax than Social Security tax, despite the fact that the Social Security tax rate is much higher. In addition, thanks to Obamacare, the Medicare rate on the employee portion goes up by 0.9% above the first $200K or $250K in wages (depending upon filing status).

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

The Social Security part of FICA is limited to the first $117K (in 2014) of wages. The Medicare part is unlimited. High earners pay far more in Medicare tax than Social Security tax, despite the fact that the Social Security tax rate is much higher. In addition, thanks to Obamacare, the Medicare rate on the employee portion goes up by 0.9% above the first $200K or $250K in wages (depending upon filing status).

So then subtracting the additional medicare tax still doesn't make the Clintons' taxes exceptionally low, nor does adding 1/2 the FICA tax back into Sanders' taxes make their effective rate all that much different either.

Bottom line, Sanders may be one of the rich not paying enough taxes that he's constantly complaining about.

I'm not trying to make Sanders out to be a serious hypocrite, just a teeny bit of one complaining constantly about the Clintons and lumping all rich people into one tax cheating basket.

 

[The Big Dog]

Anyone else think it is a bit ironic that fans of the Clintons are ragging on Bernie Sanders for tax reasons when Hillary Clinton made more by giving one half hour speech to Goldman Sachs than Bernie Sanders did all year?

Talk about mote/plank.

 

[bruto]

Anyone else think it is a bit ironic that fans of the Clintons are ragging on Bernie Sanders for tax reasons when Hillary Clinton made more by giving one half hour speech to Goldman Sachs than Bernie Sanders did all year?

Talk about mote/plank.

That is not actually relevant if the issue is fair tax payment. This is not to make any argument on that point, as I don't know what taxes everyone paid on what, but if Hillary paid a fair rate of tax on her considerable wealth while Bernie did not on his lessser wealth, then that is the issue, not the wealth itself.

 

[Slings and Arrows]

Sanders Supporters Shower Clinton Motorcade With $1 Bills

Supporters of Bernie Sanders "made it rain" on Hillary Clinton's motorcade Saturday as it passed en route to a high-dollar fundraiser at actor George Clooney's Los Angeles home, throwing dollar bills into the air.

The group of Sanders supporters were outside a counter-fundraiser being held at a home of one of Clooney's neighbors.

Demonstrators held signs as stereo speakers from that home blared the chorus, "We're in the money" and threw cash at the vehicles as they passed.

Attendees for the event with Clinton gave at least $33,400 per person. Co-hosts gave $100,000 dollars per couple.

Watch the 30 second video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfJerY-N7C8

 

[Maya22]

I apologize on behalf of my political brethren. The throwing of the dollar bills was ridiculous and sexist. No one deserves that sexist treatment, not even my arch enemies Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin.

 

[Foolmewunz]

I apologize on behalf of my political brethren. The throwing of the dollar bills was ridiculous and sexist. No one deserves that sexist treatment, not even my arch enemies Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin.

I didn't even register the "tossing dollars/strippers" thing until you mentioned it. I thought they were just idiots, who thought that by throwing money while attending a fundraiser at one Hollywood mansion they could make a point about Hillary taking money from donors at another Hollywood mansion.

 

[Maya22]

I think that the dollar bill stunt was inspired by this

Sanders Supporter Tells Crowd Not to Elect ‘Democratic Whores,’ Then Swiftly Apologizes
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/201...ct-democratic-whores-then-swiftly-apologizes/

After this comment, there were many apologies, including apologies by both Sanders spouses. (Could you imagine Trump apologizing for something like this? He and some of supporters have said worse things without apologizing.)

One of Clooney's neighbors hosted a competing $27.00 fundraising dinner for the Sanders campaign.
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaig...hbor-throwing-saturday-fundraiser-for-sanders

The day before the SoCal events, there was another high entry fee fundraising event accompanied by a protest in San Francisco.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/bernie-san...eorge-clooney-hosted-hillary/story?id=3844232

 

[Donal]

Anybody remember when Wall Street Hill waited until April 2008 to release her taxes? And she only did so after Obama already had released his?

 

[Slings and Arrows]

I apologize on behalf of my political brethren. The throwing of the dollar bills was ridiculous and sexist. No one deserves that sexist treatment, not even my arch enemies Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin.

Wasn’t the whole purpose of the Clooney fundraiser to get people to throw money Hillary’s way?

I’m a bit surprised that Hillary didn’t leap from her limousine, frantically scrambling to retrieve each and every dollar.

 

[Maya22]

Wasn’t the whole purpose of the Clooney fundraiser to get people to throw money Hillary’s way?

I’m a bit surprised that Hillary didn’t leap from her limousine, frantically scrambling to retrieve each and every dollar.

I was looking at the subtext of throwing dollar bills at women, as is frequently done in strip clubs. If the people throwing the dollar bills claim innocence about this, I will not believe them. I would be a traitor to my gender if I brushed this off so easily. Heck, even if this happened to Carly Fiorina, I would be outraged.