Like , you run a restaurant / sell cars in the legal way. But local gangs backed by the current running political party comes to you to :
i) collect money for celebrating festivals
ii) security money
iii) social welfare
If you don’t want to donate money , you by chance find your loved ones in the other side or if lucky : hospital.
Aside from the main question in the post title , I would also like to know if there’s ways to lessen property tax in the usa . Like , you have 100 acres of land . But you hire a land-lawyer , show the tax office that you’ve only 10 acre. A little amount of hush money saves you a big sum of money which should’ve been the tax you give the government.
44 comments
No, that’s completely unheard of.
No, bribery is not nearly as common here (or Canada) as it is in other countries in the Americas.
There’s some corruption but not anywhere close to that degree.
No
Not in 2022 but political machines in big cities basically used to function this way.
You can definitely buy yourself some favors from politicians if you offer enough money or other benefits, but no, political parties aren’t sending goons out to make you pay them to stay in business or not end up in the hospital.
This might be the least American question I’ve ever seen on this sub
I think you’ve been watching Batman movies or something.
No way. To any of it.
I live in the most corrupt state. The worst thing they do is fuck people over with zoning ordinances and stuff like that.
The Mafia did that in specific places like New York City. But it wasn’t initiated by political parties. It was just criminal gangs. So there are and have been gangs that do that, but usually within their own ethnic communities. Russian gangsters prey on immigrant Russians, Italian gangsters on Italian-Americans, etc.
Whaaat? No.
nope, that’s not a thing
This kind of corruption almost doesn’t exist at all in the US.
Maybe 100 years ago. But nowadays you just go to prison for even being stupid enough to try it especially if it is a political party trying to do it.
No to all of that
Organized crime has greatly decreased in the last few decades, running from the Italian mafia to the larger gangs like the Bloods. A lot of the biggest players are in prison or have served time, and what is left of the organizations often operate under legit businesses or in a gray economy. Gangs still exist, but in most urban areas its hyper local. Like a gang might be a dozen teenagers, one 18-20 year old, and they control a few street corners in a specific neighborhood and that’s about it.
> I would also like to know if there’s ways to lessen property tax in the usa .
In general wherever your permanent home is you often will get a credit for being there. and that would be different versus your neighbor who only lives there 3 months of the year. In Indiana, that’s called a homestead exemption.
But it has to be your permanent address and you can generally only have one.
There’s nothing more entertaining than non-Americans asking a very naive question based on their local warped perceptions of something they think is perfectly normal and commonplace.
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Not saying that in a nasty way. It just is.
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As much as Americans ourselves love to rant about corruption in our country, it is NOT AT ALL to such a systemic and day-to-day mundane level as many other places in the world.
What the actual fuck lol.
This is not a thing that happens in first world countries in the 21st century.
there was a point where the mob did things like this. Its called a protection racket, but I think thats basically non-existent today. but political parties doing this is not something ive heard of.
Sound like some mafia shit
In the past(think timeframe between 1900-1950), this type of racketeering and corruption occurred in some places and was generally associated with organized crime. It declined pretty significantly in the latter half of the 20th century and nowadays it’s pretty much unheard of.
No.
You’ve described the classic Mafia protection racket. There’s a great scene in the Sopranos where the aging mobsters are finding their shakedowns don’t work in areas overtaken by corporate chains.
Like paying protection money to the mob?
I don’t know much about mafia history but I think neighborhood thugs working for the mafia used to require bribes to protect the business from the local street thugs. That was limited to local neighborhood level organized crime
Nah, but hackers kinda do the same thing by holding corporations hostage for bitcoin if they can crack their security. No political boss/local gang shakedowns though
We just plain don’t have people like that explicitly associated with political parties. Most Americans would have been exposed to this concept in history class learning about reading about pre-WWII Germany or Ancient Rome.
There are ways to reduce your tax bill, but it isn’t normal to find a guy to commit fraud for you. We don’t have that kind of corruption here.
Regarding the land question not quite. But you can easily reclassify land. You just have to prove you are doing what you claim to be doing on it. For example you can zone land as timber land for cheaper property taxes on that section. But of course you have to prove you do what you say to it
No.
Also land ownership is public record. I can look up a property and find it’s owner.
No. That doesn’t happen here. As for the property tax, hiring a lawyer to lie on your behalf wouldn’t fool the government, it would just get him or her disbarred. No one is willing to lose their livelihood to save you a few bucks. Besides, every square inch of this country is surveyed. The government knows exactly who owns what.
> If you don’t want to donate money , you by chance find your loved ones in the other side or if lucky : hospital.
This is sometimes called a “protection racket”, more formally known as “extortion” and in the US we primarily associate it with the Italian mafia, whose presence has been hugely curbed since the 1970s.
> A little amount of hush money
Regardless of the property tax context – this is called “bribery”, it is very illegal in the US and you *will* get thrown in prison if you try it. We often advise tourists from countries with more corrupt governments not to try bribing police officers while they’re here, because there’s literally no situation where that won’t *immediately* go south and get you in much, much more trouble than you were in before.
Happens all the in Nogales… Sonora, México. Haven’t heard much of it elsewhere. A few organized traffic light rings where the town tried to set some lights super short for money, maybe a few where getting a building permit requires a bit of grease, but nobody’s going door-to-door for protection money
No.
No, except for iii. Those goons are called the IRS.
I listen to 1940s-1950s old time radio detective shows.
This is a trope in those shows. 70-80 years ago. Even then, IDK how true it was. Now? No, utterly unheard of.
Well, I just upvoted about 99 percent of the posts on here and I feel great!
OP, I like your question, it’s very creative. That’s why you’re getting such a unanimous response.
Lol, it almost sounds like you’re farming for ideas for the book you’re working on, OP. You *know,* the book about an ordinary person who runs a restaurant and also sells cars. Who just wants to know if there might be a way, perchance, to spend a bit less scratch on some land.
Suddenly! They’re in too deep! Forced into an underworld of social welfare and festivals!
Working title: *The Other Side of Lucky*
I’m in a good mood today.
Bruh this isn’t the 1930’s. Organized crime isn’t as prevalent in the US as it was 50-60yrs ago.This stuff died out around the late 80’s and early 90’s. Been watching too mauve Scorsese
No. That is absurd.
Hooligans are such a foreign concept to me. Like, I’m sure there are pick pockets in every major city across the globe, but in my 30 years of life, I’ve never seen gangs of kids roaming around looking to cause trouble and extort people.
😂This sounds like Yakuza type stuff? Or something off a Japanese, Korean or Thai drama series?
No, not in the US. On a separate note, which idiot marked this as a “bullshit question”? What OP says is a part of life in many countries and I have seen it firsthand.
1) Criminal protection (extortion) rackets do exist in the U.S., but they are rare. When they do exist, they have no connection with political parties.
2) You cannot lower property taxes in the way you describe. All land ownership is recorded by the state you live in (generally at the county level). Presumably the 100 acres were legally transferred to you at some point. If you’re now saying you don’t own 90 of those acres, the assessor will wonder why no transfer of ownership was filed with their office. You can’t just say that you don’t own those 90 acres; you will have to actually transfer legal ownership of those 90 acres to some other entity.
In some very abstract sense the IRS is backed by politicians and they come to you to get money for all those things but I don’t think they’re going to break your grandmas leg if you don’t pay up. Society has generally decided that taxes for the social good are useful.
I’ve never heard from anyone I know that owns a business being threatened for protection money though.
So basically the story of the Italian mob. They were linked in with the Democratic Party machine in NYC & NJ, and the Teamsters union.
Thanks to the RICO act, FBI agents like Joseph ‘Donny Brasco’ Pistone, and believe or not Rudolph ‘Rudy’ Giuliani and his ilk, the mob was severely diminished in power and influence.
No longer today is this an issue.