the Supreme Court is making shit up again

because fuck you, that’s why

this fucking Supreme Court is making my head explode — again.

remember last July, when some piece of shit homophobe was so freaked out over the idea that someone might ask her to design a gay wedding web site, that she made up an entire bullshit story about how that had actually happened to her, and took it all the way to the Supreme Court?

it would have taken a legitimate Court all of ten minutes to discover that this woman’s story was a complete fiction, and then laugh her the fuck out of court.

which is in fact what all the lower courts had done previously with the case.

but no — this Supreme Court swallowed the story hook, line and sinker. because they wanted to believe her tale of oppression at the hands of the wicked gay agenda was true.

they ruled in her favor — because fuck you, gay people, that’s why.

well, they’re doing it again.

today, the Court is hearing oral arguments in the case of Moore v. United States.

basically a couple of rich fucks are trying weasel out of paying a wealth tax, and their argument is that taxes are bullshit and taxes on rich people are even bigger bullshit.

if the Court declares the wealth tax unconstitutional, our country stands to lose $340 billion in future tax revenue — and once again, the burden of paying for essential services will fall on you and me.

understanding tax law is well above my pay grade, but Lisa Needham at Public Notice has written a very good explainer:

The central question in Moore is whether a “mandatory repatriation tax” passed in the Trump-era 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is constitutional. The provision imposed taxes on certain earnings by corporations held abroad, where US shareholders with more than a 10 percent share in a foreign corporation would pay a one-time tax on the corporation’s earnings. The complication is that it taxed “unrealized earnings” — money the corporation earned that has not yet been distributed to the shareholders. 

You’re forgiven if all of this sounds like so much gobbledegook, because this is not a tax you’d ever run into unless you are rich. It’s what is known as a wealth tax, a tax based on someone’s net worth — all of their assets, like bank accounts, stocks, real estate, and money held in corporations overseas. Rich people are good at avoiding taxes via a wide variety of loopholes, and stashing money in foreign countries is one of them. The repatriation tax was a very modest way of trying to close a single loophole, but it would have raised $339 billion over the next 10 years. 

now here’s the part where the Supreme Court is up to their fuckery again.

as with the web-site-designing homophobe, the plaintiffs’ story in this case is a big pile of hooey.

Except their story is, to put it charitably, less than true. Last week, the Washington Post dropped a major story about how Charles Moore sat on the board of KisanKraft for five years, from 2012 to 2017, a fact the Moores neglected to mention. Moore gave the company a cash contribution of roughly $245,000 in 2014, and the company paid that back with 12 percent interest in 2015. WaPo also reported that after the Moores filed this lawsuit, Charles Moore sold around 20 percent of his holdings in KisanKraft and got nearly $300,000. 

So, the Moores aren’t really just those retired do-gooders who didn’t “realize” any gains from their investment. Instead, they’re savvy, wealthy investors who got a lot of money from KisanKraft. Additionally, their assertion they had no role in the company and therefore never had enough influence to have the company issue dividends, which would have resulted in direct income to shareholders, was a straight-up lie. 

wait, it gets worse. the plaintiffs’ lawyer is one David Rifkin.

Rifkin is the attorney who did a fawning “interview” of Justice Samuel Alito in the Wall Street Journal when Alito was trying to get ahead of the ProPublica story about how Paul Singer, a wealthy billionaire, took Alito on a luxury Alaskan fishing trip that would have cost over $100,000 for the cost of the private plane alone.

so, once again, the Supreme Court is hearing a case based on fiction, and they don’t give a shit. because fuck you, that’s why.

and, once again, we have a Supreme Court Justice with a huge conflict of interest who is refusing to recuse himself from this case, because double fuck you, that’s why.

boy that great new quote-unquote “ethics” code it really doing its job here, isn’t it?

it all stinks like a boxcar full of rotting skunks.

but hey, at least our nation’s oligarchs are getting a good return on their investments.

because what’s the point of taking Sam Alito on luxury fishing vacations, if he’s not going to rule in favor of the obscenely rich?

what’s the point of paying off Blackout Brett Kavanaugh’s credit card debt and country club fees and mortgage, if he’s not going to help you hoard wealth?

what’s the point of underwriting Clarence Thomas’s entire lavish lifestyle, if he’s not going to facilitate your tax avoidance?

hey, guess how much money is at stake here. you’re probably thinking that it must be millions, right, to fight this thing all the way to the Supreme Court?

nope. if they win their case, the Moores stand to receive a $14,729 tax refund.

that’s right. a measly fourteen thousand and change.

but that small sum isn’t the point. the point is to gut the tax code. the point is to have all wealth taxes declared unconstitutional — and then to keep chipping away, to bring more cases, to the point where no oligarch has to pay any taxes at all, ever.

we really do have the best Supreme Court money can buy.