Who is a more tyrannical president with the usage of executive orders: Obama or Bush?
A couple interesting articles about executive orders:How Obama has used executive powers compared to his predecessors Is President Obama abusing his executive powers? His opponents are having fun by constantly reinforcing the notion that he’s out of control – and obviously, needs to be sued/impeached. But as we’ve explained on The Fix before, the number of executive orders signed by Obama isn't huge. In fact out of the last 10 presidents, he’s signed the least amount of executive orders on average per year.When It Comes To Abuse Of Presidential Power, Obama Is A Mere Piker That Mr. Obama has issued fewer edicts (so far) than his predecessors does not thereby justify his decrees, but it does allow us to question the unrestrained hyperbole we’ve been hearing from the right-hand side of the American political spectrum. In the 1970s the Democrats may have been more justified to complain of Richard Nixon and his “imperial presidency” (indeed, that was the title of a 1973 book by Harvard history professor and JFK acolyte Arthur Schlesinger), because Mr. Nixon issued an average of 58 orders p.a. Yet those same Democrats failed to note that JFK, in his short tenure at the White House, issued 22% more orders (71 p.a.) than did Nixon. If Nixon was dangerously imperial, was JFK positively monarchical?Among the more famous (or infamous) executive orders in U.S. history, FDR issued one that forcibly transferred Japanese-Americans and German-Americans to internment camps during World War II. Harry Truman issued an order to seize and nationalize all steel mills in America, during a labor strike in 1952. These were clearly rights-violating orders. On the positive side, in a famous 1957 order that was respectful of rights, Dwight Eisenhower decreed an end to racial segregation in America’s public schools. The U.S. courts have overturned only two orders: Truman’s order on steel mills, and President Clinton’s 1995 order to preclude the federal government from contracting with firms that had strike-breakers on their payroll.5 Myths About the Obama Executive Orders Those are just hightlights. Read the whole articles.
Does the bank flag my checking account for the IRS if I receive a large check (around $10,000)? Does the bank flag large deposits between individuals? Would receiving 2 checks of $5,000 mitigate this problem?
DO NOT break up the payment into multiple deposits. This is called “structuring”, and it is illegal even if you are not doing anything else illegal. Seriously. A former speaker of the house of Representatives went to federal prison for this, even though he was not convicted of any other crime.A single deposit of $10,000 is not suspicious. Deposits of that size happen all the time for all kinds of innocent reasons.And even if it were, it would not be reported by the bank. The bank only must report cash transactions or suspicious patterns. When considering whether transactions are suspicious, they tend to err on the side of staying out of their customers’ business. They will say: “Are we required to report this? No? Okay then.”So lets say they did report it to FinCen. The authorities would put it in the archive and forget about it. They have better things to investigate than kids getting checks from their parents.But let’s suppose that it was “red flagged”. FinCen would request information from all your bank accounts, and discover that you are probably not an international criminal money-laundering operation. The IRS would see that the deposit came from a family member, who paid taxes on it.But lets say you were audited. Contrary to myth, an audit is often not a big deal. You send the IRS copies of everything, and give them an explanation for why your $10k deposit was not reportable. That’s the end of it. A small hassle, but you don’t avoid it by illegal structuring.