• aged care
• school canteens
• prisons
• hospitals

That is a lot of food, and it often won’t be quality, nutritious, appealing, satisfying food. We know this for sure in aged care and hospitals. Schools will vary a lot, but in my experience they are still predominantly fast food but with some healthy options.

Most of this “government” food is provided by for-profit businesses (where to provide better food means lower profits) and/or outsourced to catering companies who will also put profits first.

Seeing as we are paying for this food already, and everyone deserves quality, nutritious, appealing, satisfying food, then I propose a government department or agency that looks after the food for these people, nationwide, directly. Their mandate is to prioritise quality, nutritious, appealing, satisfying food (and variety), and then provide it as efficiently as possible. Quite likely economies of scale would come into play. Quite possibly food could be purchased direct from the growers, with contracts.

There is another category of government food where the new department can take their clues from, or hire experts from – the armed forces.  That is where keeping the workers satisfied and healthy is a priority.

Some prisons (in Australia) seem to also feed their inmates well – with food that non-prisoners in aged care and hospital would love to have:

Cajun chicken on couscous, coconut beef, lamb kofta and Thai beef noodle salad are among some of the dinner menu items on offer at Canberra’s jail.

…While some days feature more boring staples like mac and cheese or corned silverside, other days offer somewhat more exotic dishes like “jerked chicken”, zucchini fritters or ratatouille and grilled haloumi.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-20/what-canberra-prisoners-are-eating-in-jail/9677592

In the USA, based on this official menu, the food is as bad as movies/tv tell us it is. Very cheap, and primarily carbs and sugar, with some token veggies and the cheapest, formed meat. Presumably the caterers profit well.

We can learn from Australia’s prison menus and apply it globally. Also, I recognise that in some prisons the inmates are involved in the food service, and that should remain.

In Australia we also have the CSIRO who do great work – rope them in as well. 

While we are at it, the same agency can provide absolute basic staples (rice, flour, sugar, tinned tomatoes etc) to anyone at cost or below cost price, along with free nutrition and cooking classes.

The post Ministry of Nutrition appeared first on The Rich Cheat.

The headline says:

People Working A Minimum Wage Job Can’t Afford Rent Anywhere In The U.S.

At local minimum wage rates, a worker would have to put in 79 hours a week, nearly two full-time jobs, to afford a modest one-bedroom rental, a report finds.

First off, the “can’t afford” is based on the concept that accommodation should never cost more than 30% of your income. As inequality shifts, this is no longer a reality – the 30% rule dates back 50 years.

Secondly, they only take into account the low income of minimum wage earners. In reality, the US is actually a quite socialist country, and the state contributes to low wage earners in numerous ways, from food stamps, to school meals, to tax credits to subsidised housing.

The study is based on minimum wage, not actual income. Many people on minimum wage receive tips, for example.

Thirdly, the study refers to “modest housing”.

The Housing Wage is based on HUD Fair Market Rents (FMR), which are estimates of what a family moving today can expect to pay for a modest rental home, not what all renters are currently paying… The FMR is usually set at the 40th percentile of rents for typical homes
occupied by recent movers in an area.

40th percentile is high, and far from the cheapest available rental properties. Clearly 40% of people are paying less, however the standards might not qualify as “modest”.

And finally, it is based on people living alone. The reality is that a lot of Americans don’t leave home until their late-20s. Those that do tend to be in a relationship (shared rent costs), in college dorms, or sharing a house.

Inequality is terrible. The lowest paid are vastly underpaid. Housing is too expensive relative to income. These are inarguable.

But make sure you get the full facts when discussing this.

The post Be Wary of Bias appeared first on The Rich Cheat.

Often the general narrative is that a rich person made a mistake and will learn their lesson, whereas a poor person has started down an unstoppable path of crime. Also, of course, the rich can afford better lawyers (as opposed to many poor folk not even having a lawyer), and awesome character references.

But it is rare to see these contrasts so blatantly extreme as this:

An American hedge-fund billionaire has surrendered 180 looted and illegally smuggled antiquities valued at $70m… The DA’s office said its inquiry found “compelling evidence” that the antiquities were stolen from 11 countries, and that at least 171 passed through traffickers before being bought by Steinhardt.

…“His pursuit of ‘new’ additions to showcase and sell knew no geographic or moral boundaries, as reflected in the sprawling underworld of antiquities traffickers, crime bosses, money launderers and tomb raiders he relied upon to expand his collection.”

…treasures include the Ercolano Fresco, which depicts an infant Hercules strangling a snake sent by Hera to slay him, which had been purchased from convicted antiquities traffickers for $650,000 in 1995, the year it had been looted from a Roman villa in the ruins of Herculaneum, near modern Naples. Today, it has been valued at $1m.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/07/us-billionaire-michael-steinhardt-surrenders-70m-dollars-stolen-art

Keep in mind that hedge fund billionaires don’t really work for their money, and are the biggest tax-dodgers around.

And the result? No charges, no conviction.

Whereas a poor person who received a stolen toaster would be convicted, and even jailed if they had priors.

The post Different Punishments for the Rich appeared first on The Rich Cheat.

We know that the majority of the very wealthy are very keen to keep that wealth going, for themselves and their descendants, even if they don’t actually need to be so wealthy.

A key form of storing that wealth (and removing it from the cyclical economy) is property. Often the family home is a key asset, because typically it won’t attract capital gains tax – it my home, not an investment!

So in many districts of the US, zoning laws are in place to make sure that only expensive, single family buildings can exist, even when multi-family buildings – apartment buildings of any size – would be economically viable. This is against the nature of free capitalism, and more akin to authoritarianism.

The American Prospect reports:

Exhibit A is exclusionary zoning, which outlaws the construction of duplexes, triplexes, and apartment buildings—housing that is more affordable for working-class families, many of them families of color—in affluent areas.

…In the 1970s, residents of Boston made national headlines for violently resisting school desegregation.

…Almost 50 years later, exclusion remains pervasive in the Boston area. In Wellesley, for example, which was home to the federal judge who ordered school desegregation, and where three-quarters of voters supported Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020, the population remains just 2.9 percent Black and 5.1 percent Hispanic. The median household income is $197,132.

…In the relatively diverse city of Cambridge (median household income of $103,154), for example, the zoning code states that the minimum lot size for multifamily housing is 900 square feet, while 15 miles away, in Weston (median household income of $207,702), the multifamily minimum lot size has been set at 240,000 square feet, some 267 times higher than Cambridge’s.

That’s 5.5 acres. There’s no logic behind such a rule.

The article cites other examples. Thankfully there is a chance that Biden can improve things, as the US slowly removes barriers to equality:

The House-passed version of the Build Back Better Act provides $1.75 billion for Unlocking Possibilities, a first-ever federal race-to-the-top program to provide incentives for states and localities to remove the exclusionary zoning policies that segregate Americans by race and class and make housing less affordable for everyone.

The post Zoning Laws appeared first on The Rich Cheat.

a) have reason to suspect that taxpayer is lying
b) do their own valuations, which might include gaining access to paperwork and the property
c) argue in court that the IRS has the more correct valuation

Valuations can have a subjective aspect, especially for the more unique properties, rather than an apartment with clear recent records of selling prices in similar apartments.

Recent reporting has debunked the idea (that nobody believed) that Donald Trump was self-made and merely got a $1 million loan from his father. It also discovered a massive tax fraud relating to underpaid gift taxes regarding property gifted by Fred Trump to his children. Massive in the audacity and the under-reporting of the true value of the gifts.

The NY Times says:

The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.

The post Trump and Blatant Cheating of the Rich appeared first on The Rich Cheat.

This website has kept track of them all:
https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/

All of the tax benefits and subsidies are from counties, eager to get the benefit of providing terrible jobs for their citizens.

And therein lies the problem. America is unlike most countries in that states can do things different to the federal government, and counties can do things differently to the states they are in. That means that businesses that already dominate can go shopping around for whichever location will give them the best deal. With so many counties out there, they will find one that gives them more than what they will gain. Because jobs is the perennial strong message in elections.

It is a problem that is hard to fix legally. I suggest a coalition of counties that refuse to give tax benefits to any business at all. Because collectively, otherwise, they lose and big business wins

The post Amazon is subsidized by US taxpayers appeared first on The Rich Cheat.