Loopholes Quotes
Gaming the system is the process of finding loopholes or arranging things so that you can get around the law and usually do just what is prohibited in a way that is not a criminal offense. It is done mostly by corporations trying to avoid laws and regulations, but government officials in the Executive Branch often do the same thing to get around the laws which have been passed but the current administration now finds inconvenient.
Two decades later, in 2011, the fact that the very wealthy often paid tax at a much lower rate than the middle class and even some working poor became a major political issue.
Regulators, like any other group of people, with the exception of an inventor or innovator and his/her team, are ALWAYS way behind the innovators. However, typically the regulators are not even up on innovations after their creation for several years. They generally are not appointed or hired for their technical skills, and Congress rarely provides enough of a budget to hire enough staff to give them the time to keep up with the field. For a professor in a University, this alone requires about half of his time. No agency can allocate that kind of time. Worse, is the ultimate regulators are the legislators—Congress at the Federal level. They often do not invest enough time to read the regulatory legislation upon which they vote, much less keep up with the fields they regulate.
He was the first medieval jurist to write opinions on cases, thus preserving a record for openness and an instrument to teach others and produce uniformity of decisions and judgments—the basis of most legal systems today. This quotation is a principle of most modern legal systems today.
Ford had asked Iacocca, then the President and the number 2 executive to Ford, if he paid any income tax. Iacocca paid about 50 percent of his income as the maximum bracket at the time was over 70 percent. Ford wanted to help him out. At the time Ford earned millions of dollars every month. One of the things that this quote illustrates is that it would not have mattered with Ford whether the maximum tax rate was 30%, 50% or 70%. He and the other super-rich people were not going to pay much anyway because of the loopholes, the deductions, and gaming the system.
Gaming the system is the process of finding loopholes or arranging things so that you can get around the law and usually do just what is prohibited in a way that is not a criminal offense. It is done mostly by corporations trying to avoid laws and regulations, but government officials in the Executive Branch often do the same thing to get around the laws which have been passed but the current administration now finds inconvenient.
What is interesting is at the time and today there are few politicians who would not agree completely, including all the members of Congress. Yet every word of the absurdly complex and unfair tax law was written and passed by some Congress and signed by some President. Congress could change it any time it wants to. The problem is that ut while all agree that the status quo is terrible, there is no agreement on what the correct solution would be, and any proposed change would be assaulted by the lobbyists of the special interests who benefit from the status quo. In that sense it is just like Health Care Reform. When a change is finally crafted and achieves a majority of Congress, each change has been trashed by so many vested interest that the public is not sure the reform will be better then the terrible system that existed before.
