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[MetalSlimeHunt]

A 10% Value-Added Tax, with other funding being reached by increased worker productivity and reduced healthcare costs. Which you can totally do by taxing the working class and then giving them back the money piecemeal, surely.

[JoshuaFH]

What will they do if Trump doesn't give up his tax returns? Place another deadline?

[Frumple]

Next step should be the mace, I guess. Law enforcement gets involved and Congress stops asking nicely. The house actually can force compliance, at the end of the day, you just have to piss them off enough, first.

[Folly]

What will they do if Trump doesn't give up his tax returns? Place another deadline?

Well, they are actually making the request to the IRS. The IRS are balking because Trump is telling them not to comply, even though he doesn't really have that authority.
So it's not like the House need to take action against the President; their beef is with the IRS. Though I'm not certain precisely what punitive measures they are capable of deploying when they don't get their way.

[SalmonGod]

He wants to eliminate all other forms of welfare and get that basic income from regressive taxation. Yang is no friend of the workers, and UBI will serve as a prelude to the managed destruction of those it is given to.

Yeah, I used to be excited by the prospect of UBI... but these days, I'm pretty sure it's going to be used to save capitalism from the people, not the people from capitalism.  It'll be a pressure valve to delay widespread anger for a little bit longer, while the upper class continues tightening its death grip on everything.

[Trekkin]

Though I'm not certain precisely what punitive measures they are capable of deploying when they don't get their way.

That would be contempt of Congress. It's normally used to force compliance with subpoenas, but it applies here too.

If the US attorney for DC approved the contempt citation, the Capitol Police could presumably jail Mnuchin and/or Rettig in one of their holding cells until they complied. That is not likely (for reasons our resident revolutionaries are doubtless eager to enumerate), but it is how things are intended to work.

[Magistrum]

Uh, sorry, someone was talking about revolutionaries, so...

Anyways, I'm here if you need me.

[SalmonGod]

That is not likely (for reasons our resident revolutionaries are doubtless eager to enumerate), but it is how things are intended to work.

I'm guessing I'm one of them.  But I'm no Trump fan, and all about transparency in public interest.  The tax-return stuff is sooooort of a grey area... just a little bit..... but I have zero sympathy regardless.  One of the ways I look at it is whatever info they're allowed to have on us, we should be allowed to have on them.  I will not raise a finger in defense of the privacy of an authoritarian figure while we have none.  So I'll offer no explanation as to why they shouldn't squeeze it out of him however they like.

[Gentlefish]

He's the president. If anyone shouldn't have privacy, it's that guy. We should be able to trust our head of state with actually doing his job.

On a similar note, Barr, speaking for the DoJ because of course he fucking is, now says that the emoluments clause doesn't apply to Trump's private businesses because fucking reasons.

Even though Carter had to give up a hobby peanut farm. What the hell.

[McTraveller]

This tax return thing is so petty I don't even

"If anyone shouldn't have privacy..."
    Is this what the world has become?  Rationalizing privacy violations?  As much as I want our leaders to have high moral character, it's a terrible terrible argument to say "the guy is the president so of course the entire mob-rule population should be entitled to pick apart his tax returns."

If there was anything illegal in the tax returns, the IRS would have found it long before he was president.  I'm sure his returns fall into the "automatic audit" category.  So maybe complain about why the stuff in his returns is legal in the first place, but not that they are "illegal".

Or is the public saying there is some conspiracy theory that for decades the IRS was ignoring the abuse in the tax returns of this one individual because "they" knew that someday he'd president?

[Gentlefish]

The tax returns aren't petty. If someone else is holding his purse strings, then he's compromised and/or in violation of the emoluments clause. How is that petty? It's the highest (electable) position in the land. We want to make sure they're clean, whoever is in office.

[McTraveller]

How would a tax return show there are foreign holders of purse strings?

I mean, if he owns stock in Monsanto, would that constitute foreign influence, since Monsanto is now foreign-owned? What if it's only one share?  What if it's 10000?  I do also think it's petty that previous presidents had to "give up" various investments - because nobody truly divests themselves of stuff that large even if the give it up on paper.  Put another way: just because a person doesn't have an investment somewhere today, doesn't mean they won't get one in the future at a really good price because of policies they put in place while in office.

This is why it's petty - because there is no objective measure of what this means, it's just a witch hunt.

I mean, you can't even really use an argument like "the president personally benefits from his policies", because of course if the president is "average", and a policy benefits the "average" person, the president would benefit from the policy.  On the flip side - you don't want something like "the president can only pass policies that don't result in personal gain, or that only result in personal loss."

For the record, I'm actually more personally worried about the internal influences on politics than I am the foreign ones.  That doesn't mean I'm not worried about foreign influence - but it's probably like 5 units of concern for domestic influence for one unit of concern for foreign influence.

Essentially:  this is worrying about Possibly Bad thing, when there are other things are Manifestly Bad.    We should probably use 20% of the public energy worrying about the Possibly Bad, and the other 80% fixing the Manifestly Bad.  80-20 rule and all that.  But what the media does is get us 80% (or more!) worked up about the "oh but maybe this .... or maybe that...." so we forget about the real, everyday problems that face our citizens and all those (citizen or non) with whom we interact on a daily basis.

[nenjin]

This is how we normalize the Presidency as a for-profit enterprise, by downplaying what's going on right now. "Oh there's bigger problems....."

And three elections from now the president elect gets to point back to the Trump administration as an example of why what they're doing now is A-OK. If previous presidents had to divest themselves of even the smallest ventures to stay above board, why are we giving arguably the biggest and most ruthless business tycoon a pass?

[Baffler]

This is how we normalize the Presidency as a for-profit enterprise, by downplaying what's going on right now. "Oh there's bigger problems....."

And three elections from now the president elect gets to point back to the Trump administration as an example of why what they're doing now is A-OK. If previous presidents had to divest themselves of even the smallest ventures to stay above board, why are we giving arguably the biggest and most ruthless business tycoon a pass?

The only thing being normalized here is playing the yellow press and showboating instead of actually doing anything. Attempts at soft coups by means of piling on (fruitless) fishing expeditions and literal lies until you have enough """""smoke""""" to say that there's a """""fire""""" and impeach Orange Man or whoever else, or at the very least prevent them from ever actually doing anything, are far more damaging to the institution of the presidency and the Federal government in general than the president giving his business holdings to his dumbass son upon taking office. If there was anything illegal in there the IRS would certainly have noticed it. Demanding it become public knowledge is simply another attempt at concocting a scandal, and a pretty transparent one at that. I really don't see any reason the administration should do anything but tell them to fuck off.

[nenjin]

So every other president being willing to release their tax returns means fuck all then? We're happy to let him blackbox it all, the guy who says he should run the US government like a business where he's the CEO?

It's both ignorant and irresponsible.

instead of actually doing anything.

Such as? Doing years worth of research to prove it, rather than using the standard accepted practice of releasing his tax returns? (Which was done prior to his election and guess what? His family has been cooking the books for decades before he ever became president. Scamming vendors, tenants, deflating or inflating their wealth to absurd proportions when it stood to benefit the family?)

If you ain't got nothing to hide, why hide it? If he wasn't comfortable having his business become public, maybe he shouldn't have run for office and have his life put under a microscope as every other president has.

Oh right though, he's Trump. He's special. And everyone is just out to get him.

or at the very least prevent them from ever actually doing anything

Oh please. Like someone telling him no has stopped him from acting unilaterally so far. Like the multi-billion dollar boondoggle that's going to be dragging us down for the forseeable future.

If there was anything illegal in there the IRS would certainly have noticed it.

It's amazing how people say the government is shit until they're suddenly ready to trust it without question when it suits their interest. As though he hasn't hired the best tax lawyers and leveraged every possible means to disguise his wealth before he ever became president.

People just want actual facts. All you're doing is making excuses and rationalizations for obscuring what's actually going on. Release them. If he's got nothing to hide then all his detractors can eat shit, which is the way it should work. Which he would have already done if that would actually be the case. Mr. "I don't give a shit what people think" is hung up on the optics? Mmmmmmmm no.