Saturday 10 March 2018

Five Observations over Stormy Daniels

This Trump-Daniels thing has a twist or two....but I've down to five odd observations:

1.  This $140,000 that came as hush-money.....did Stormy actually report the money to the IRS and how exactly would you claim the money on the IRS form?  You'd assume that $40,000 of that (minimum) would end going to the IRS.  For some reason, I have my doubts that she reported the income.

2.  If the IRS gets hyped up and comes in....would they stop merely at the $140,000 in an audit?  Or would they go and look for all of the other potential hush-money pay-offs of the past decade?  Were there other hush-money pay-offs?  If you didn't report those....you'd have to pay taxes now, and a fine.  You could be talking about just one single hush-payoff, or two-dozen hush-money situations.  All of that would lead to terrible problems with tax lawyers, and tens of thousands just in lawyer fees to handle the cases.

3.  Did Donald and others just pay Storm for liaisons (unlike Bill Clinton's past)?  And if they did pay.....did Stormy report the income to the IRS? 

4.  With almost a twenty-year career in adult movies.....where does this lead onto now? 

5.  With all this public activity, the term 'discretion' is basically thrown out the door....so what happens to the contacts list of Stormy?  Did she lost a bunch of contacts now....since she can't maintain discretion?  Does anyone even care?

For some odd reason, I suspect that some network (cable related) will offer her a reality TV show series, and find out that six months into the deal that there's not that much interest in watching Stormy in reality. 

The Consequence of the Sugar Tax

Roughly two years ago....the city leaders of Philly stood up and passed a radical new tax.....a tax on sodas (with sugar).  If you were within the city limits of Philly...you paid 1.5 cents per ounce on a sugar soft drink.  A twenty ounce container?  That mean 30 cents going to the city.  Then they turned around and said that this newly found money would go to fund roughly 6,500 seats in a kindergarten situation for city residents (not to reach 100-percent until 2023).

Well...it's been two years almost....and what can be said is an odd thing.  Most grocery stores and drink shops have seen a continual drop.  People buy their sodas outside of the city limits now. 

No one says much over the consequence of this, but if you went an extra five miles to buy bulk in sodas.....wouldn't you go and buy OTHER things in bulk while at this non-city-tax establishment? 

I noticed this brought up this week and discussed to some degree. 

The city has a problem in that they chased people away from town and gave them a reason to shop in non-city-tax establishments.  To meet this goal of the 6,500 seats in the child-promise deal?  Well....yeah, there's a Philly discussion going on....of raising more taxes....in order to reach the goal of the first tax (the sugar tax). 

Why not admit failure and just dump the 6,500 seat idea?  The political folks just can't bring themselves to admit that they really screwed up. 

You can sit and do the math.  If you had a couple of members in the family, and regularly drunk 4,000 ounces of soda a year (a hefty amount, I admit) then your debt to the city would be around $60 a year.  You could drive one single time out beyond the city ($2 of extra gas) and pocket the $58 into your pocket by buying bulk.  In fact, you could find in the entire city.....ten thousand families doing this and pocketing $600,000 a year.