Letter to the Editor - Los Angeles Times

The following was a letter to the editor of the LA Times. I must say he is a little ticked off, as if you can't tell. Letters to the Editor are great,.there is always going to be some butt head who exposes himself or herself as an idiot, giving us a target. That's if the paper publishes your rebuttal,....

Hector,

I can't believe that a major metropolitan paper like the LA Times would publish drivel like your distortion-laden column I had the misfortune to read today. The citizens of Arizona passed a law that makes it necessary to prove you are in their state LEGALLY. They are tired of paying TWO BILLION taxpayer dollars a year in medical and educational benefits to people in their state ILLEGALLY. They are tired of the Mexican drug traffickers, kidnappings (389 last year), traffic accidents, and crime caused by ILLEGAL immigrants in their state. They are tired of citizens of a foreign country overcrowding and bankrupting their emergency rooms and schools. They have the ABSOLUTE RIGHT to defend their state when the federal government fails to do so just like I have the right to put three hollow-points in the chest of the guy who's trying to kick in my front door when the cops don't show up.

It has been THE LAW in this country since 1940 that foreign nationals be able to produce proof that they are here LEGALLY by way of visa, green card, etc. This "Produce your papers" and the allusions to Nazi Germany is a bunch of dishonest claptrap. If you took time to read the Arizona law (assuming you can read English) you would see that police officers may only inquire as to an individual’s immigration status in the course of a "legal contact". The problem with you and Mexicans like you is the fact that you have this sense of entitlement that you can enter OUR COUNTRY as you please. You come from a culture and a country with NO RESPECT for the law or the RULE OF LAW. The United States is a sovereign nation with the ABSOLUTE RIGHT to decide who does and does not enter our country.

What amuses me the most is the fact that if our illegal immigration problem was due to the influx of SWEDES, you wouldn't have written ONE WORD in the defense of their rights. It is only because they are Hispanics like you that you leap to their defense. I find it ironic that you are truer to your Hispanic roots than you are to your American citizenship, especially since the Hispanic culture is a broken, busted-ass, ignorant-ass, uneducated, going-nowhere culture and has been for the last 500 years, and in all likelihood, will be for the NEXT 500 years.

When I moved to California in 1969, Los Angeles was a CLEAN prosperous city. Now it's BROKE under the weight of massive entitlements. Now we need concertina wire to protect our freeway signs from Hispano-moron graffiti "artists'. What an enlightened culture you come from that believes that vandalizing another’s property is an art form. Over 400 California families have lost loved ones to ILLEGAL immigrant murderers. 40% of the criminals incarcerated in our prisons at CALIFORNIA TAXPAYER EXPENSE, are ILLEGAL immigrants. Thank you so much for our overcrowded ERs, schools and freeways. Thanks also for the gangs and the drive-by shootings. In all fairness though, I like the tacos.

If I want to enter Mexico , France , England , Germany or ANY country on this earth, I need to PRODUCE A PASSPORT to do so. It's THEIR COUNTRY and I need to ask permission to do so. HOW DARE you and your brethren think that they have some God-given right to flout our laws and come into our country of their own accord. You and people like you are the textbook example of why the fewer Mexicans we have in our country, the better our country will be. We manage to produce a steady supply of home-grown idiots on our own, thank very much (Exhibit A - Obama)

Good luck with your boycotts and your protests. Just remember; amigo, 70% of the people in Arizona and 65% of Americans LOVE this law. Every time you put together thousands of protesters, you piss off MILLIONS of people like me.

Hasta la vista, baby.

Tom Edwards

The Dallas Solution - Homeowners Unite to Fight Excessive Garbage AND Illegal Immigration

Sent to Cowboys and Tea Parties by a Reader,.....

I have a friend who is President of his homeowners association in the Dallas, Texas, suburbs. They were having a terrible problem with litter near some of his association's homes. The reason, according to my friend, is that six very large, luxurious new houses are being built right next to their community.

The trash was coming from the Mexican laborers working at the construction sites and included bags from McDonald's, Burger King, and 7-11, plus beer cans and bottles, coffee cups, napkins, cigarette butts, coke cans, empty bottles, etc…..did I say beer cans and bottles?

He went to see the site supervisor and even the general contractor, politely urging them to get their workers not to litter the neighborhood, to no avail. He called the city, county, and police and got no help there either.

So here's what his community did. They organized about twenty folks, named themselves The "Inner Neighborhood Services" group, and arranged to go out at lunch time and "police" the trash themselves. It is what they did while picking up the trash that is so hilarious.

They bought navy blue baseball caps and had the initials "INS" embroidered in gold on the caps.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand what they hoped people might mistakenly think the letters really stood for..

After the Inner Neighborhood Services group's first lunch-time pickup detail, with all of them wearing their caps and some carrying cameras, 46 out of the total of 68 construction workers did not show up for work the next morning -- and haven't come back yet.

It has been ten days now.

The General Contractor, I'm told, is madder than hell, but can't say anything publicly because he could be busted for hiring illegal aliens. My friend and his bunch can't be accused of impersonating federal officers, because they have the official name of the group recorded in their homeowner association minutes along with a notation about the vote to approve formation of the new subcommittee -- and besides, the old INS – Immigration and Naturalization Service was disbanded years ago with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

SO, FOLKS, I THINK YOU COULD SAY THAT TEXAS INGENUITY TRIUMPHS AGAIN!

Reminder: Don't forget to pay your taxes....... Tens of millions of illegal aliens are depending on you.

Greed - Adds to the Velocity of this Country's Downfall

Greed, along with Corruption are destroying this Country. An unbelievable complex and unfair tax code aids in the destruction.

From the Los Angeles TimesMcCourts pitch a shutout on taxes
February 24, 2010|MICHAEL HILTZIK

The McCourts (Frank and Jamie), who own the Los Angeles Dodgers (so she says; he says he's the owner and she's not), jointly pocketed income totaling $108 million from 2004 through 2009, according to documents Jamie McCourt recently filed in the couple's divorce case in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

On that sum, they paid zero federal and state income tax. Jamie suggests that some tax breaks will apply this year too.

This reminds me of the old line about how true scandal lies not in what's illegal, but what's legal. It's certainly an edifying window into the lengths some people will go to avoid paying taxes.

The court papers indicate that the McCourts deliberately structured their business at least partially to allow them to live tax-free.

Frank McCourt's lawyer, Marc Seltzer, didn't directly dispute Jamie's characterizations of the couple's tax planning or the details of their finances. He did, however, call her document filings "selective" and complained by e-mail that she made public "information which most people would respect as private."

According to Jamie, the McCourts employed two mechanisms to live tax-free. One was to claim enormous tax losses from their business, which was mostly commercial real estate before they bought the Dodgers. These could be carried forward, offsetting income year after year until they were finally netted out. Jamie's documents say that in 2008 the net loss carry-forward from previous years was $109 million -- in other words, the McCourts could have earned that much without paying a penny of income tax.

A year later, the loss carry-forward had increased to $135 million, which makes it sound as if 2008 was one horrible year. Yet according to another document Jamie filed in court, one of Frank's partnerships paid him $23 million that year.

Did the McCourts really lose $135 million in the years before 2009? Probably not in the sense that you or I suffer a loss when a dollar bill slips through a hole in our jeans, or even when we sell that stock our brother-in-law described as "a slam dunk" for less than we paid for it.

"They're tax losses. I don't mean real losses," Jamie's lawyer, Bert Fields, told me.

Fields, who assured me that everything the McCourts have done is legitimate, tax-wise, wasn't entirely clear on how the losses were generated. But Jamie's accountant states in a court document that some is due to depreciation, which is a way of accounting for wear and tear on a property.

Depreciation is a non-cash expense that can be applied against cash income, reducing your income taxes or creating a loss to show the tax man, even though you're making money. It's common in real estate, though it can also be applied to things like a sports team's player contracts. Depreciation is technically a tax deferral, not an exemption, but the reckoning can be years off.

In any case, one would also think that if the McCourts' business were truly suffering operating losses of such magnitude, eventually it would no longer have the proverbial urn to fill. It's unclear whether this is so -- the document dump includes a 2007 e-mail from an officer of the McCourt Group, one of the family's major holding companies, observing that the group "has squat for assets" and needs "start up capital and cash flow" -- but that's just one subsidiary.

Another McCourt maneuver involves financing and refinancing their assets. The tax rules allow real estate owners to refinance properties with rising values and take out cash tax-free. (Many homeowners engaged in similar "cash out" refis during the housing boom). Land developers can transfer tax credits from property to property, like an NFL team booting a fumbled ball toward the goal line, until time runs out or the market crashes.

The McCourts have also borrowed against future business income -- in 2007 they took out a $140-million loan against future Dodger ticket sales, of which $20 million went to fund their lifestyles, tax-free. Of course, when the loan comes due, the piper will have to be paid, but interest on the loan will be tax-deductible for the Dodgers, Jamie's lawyers say.

It's proper to acknowledge that tax breaks like these can have a legitimate purpose. The idea is that they encourage certain investments, such as real estate development, that may energize the economy and create jobs.

Is that what's happening here? The tax benefits reaped by the McCourts helped turbocharge their lifestyle. There are eight houses, including four in Holmby Hills and Malibu . The McCourts treated their family and business checkbooks as "largely one and the same," according to an e-mail from a McCourt executive Jamie filed in court. (Oddly, the e-mail ascribes to her the philosophy of "why have a family business but to support the family lifestyle.") This paid for meals in the best restaurants, floral arrangements for home and office from the finest florists, country club dues, personal travel on the Dodgers plane, Jamie's makeup "for Dodger events" ($386 a month).

The point is not to begrudge the McCourts these luxuries. The point is to question why we as taxpayers should subsidize them. Jamie asserts that, although the state of Massachusetts is auditing the couple's personal returns for 2006 (they used to be based in the Bay State ), neither California nor the Internal Revenue Service is doing so. This raises another question: Why not?

Can we as taxpayers be confident we aren't paying more than our fair share? Jamie alleges that for the purposes of the divorce, Frank has manipulated the business accounts to make himself look $670 million poorer than he is. Delivering fake numbers to the IRS is a rather different matter from delivering them to your spouse in a divorce action, but the McCourts structured their business as a stew with a lot of complicated ingredients, which makes it hard to verify that all the tax breaks are fully warranted.

People who practice tax avoidance on this scale don't often emerge with their images unsullied. When a Senate committee revealed in 1933 that J.P. Morgan Jr. and his partners had paid no income taxes for 1930, 1931 and 1932, their reputation for probity was shattered; the uproar helped the New Deal bring Wall Street under regulation. Leona Helmsley's 1989 conviction for tax evasion wrecked her elegant image forever (I am not suggesting the McCourts broke the law, as she did). But she did bequeath us the credo of the wealthy non-taxpayer.

"Only the little people pay taxes," she reportedly told a maid. The lesson of the McCourts is slightly different: The little people pay taxes for the big people.