Where George Santos is often, for some reason, spending $199.99 | Hacker News Reader

Where George Santos is often, for some reason, spending $199.99

slate.com

20 pointscwwc16 comments

Not too mysterious. FTA:

>on at least seven separate occasions he had meals that cost exactly $199.99—a sum that happens to be precisely one cent short of the threshold that requires documentation of campaign expenditures in the form of receipts

Here's a Dilbert comic from 26 years ago about this kind of thing https://dilbert.com/strip/1997-01-03

Is it not trivial to spend $100 or $120 or $140 and pay the rest as tip to reach exactly $199.99?

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Sure, I am mostly offering a trivial mechanism to reach exactly $199.99 without trying to guess at the menu items to reach it.

Being outside of US without political affiliation, this strikes me as a lot of work to embezzle relatively small amounts of money (that was $50k over 2 years): I would always envision politicians getting in on much larger payouts or more worthwhile free rides.

A surprising amount of political corruption is weirdly petty and unnecessary.

I am personally not worried about that: that is not what's causing $1B projects to turn into $20B projects with all the "friendly" (to politicians) companies getting in on the action.

… Oh, no, it totally is. How do you think those companies are getting in on the action? Sure, sometimes it’s suitcases full of cash, but often the bribes are, well, smaller than you’d think.

Oh sure, but my point is that even then, those $1B projects could go to those very same companies at a smaller markup (say $1.05B: $50M is still a lot of money).

If I had to guess, it's more likely they are expensing the maximum allowed and paying any overage out of pocket. Think of it as splitting the bill, only it's with yourself, and submitting the expense report for only one part of the split.

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Same difference; there's a limit they're trying not to exceed to take maximum advantage of an external source of funds.

Unimportant nitpick, "osso bucco" is actually "ossobuco" (one word and one c only), it is on en.wikipedia allright:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossobuco

It would be interesting to know if it is actually written like that on the menu or of it is the journalist mis-spelling it.

Would this be considered the crime of structuring or does that only apply to banking?

I don't know if it's structuring because it seems to actually be for separate meals. Certainly unethical though, trying to get the most money out of the campaign finances with a minimum of accountability.

Santos aside, I've eaten there a few times and it is pretty good.

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