Elizabeth Warren says she will make the U.S. an affordable place to live despite (1) our incompetence at building physical infrastructure, such as housing, and (2) population growth of about 2 million people per year through immigration and the children of immigrants (Pew). Her plan is to grab hold of family via an increased estate tax and use it to build 3 million housing units over a 10-year-period (i.e., one for each of the 3 million refugees who’ve been granted U.S. residency/citizenship since 1980; compare also to the 7.2 million units of affordable housing of which the U.S. is currently short).
Today, however, the NYT has a big article on the conventional estate-tax avoidance strategies used by the Trump family to prevent more than half of their wealth from being taxed away. The effective estate tax was 5 percent rather than the headline 55 percent sought by the government. This was all illegal/immoral according to the Times, though the IRS and the various tax professionals involved at the time (nearly 20 years ago) thought that it was legal and proper.
[One thing that the article shows is that Trump’s sister has to be pretty darn rich and yet she has gone to work every day as a Federal appeals court judge (same job that folks think a proven rapist such as Brett Kavanaugh should keep!).]
Readers: Could Elizabeth Warren’s plan for 3 million housing units over 10 years make any difference? If the estate tax is cranked up, will wealthy families pay it or go back to their time-honored avoidance strategies?
[Also, doesn’t this article mostly falsify the Times‘s own reporting over the last few years? We were told by the Times that Trump was poor. He was heavily in debt to rich Russians and therefore they controlled him. Now this new article says he inherited at least $1.96 billion, adjusted for inflation and S&P 500 returns.
Which is it? Is he a rich guy with a personal Boeing 757 and another $2+ billion to keep it fueled and renew the gold-plating on the seatbelt hardware? Or is he broke and beholden to some rich person in Moscow?]
Related:
- “Is the new Zuckerberg fake charity an estate tax avoidance scheme?“
- “I Can Afford Higher Taxes. But They’ll Make Me Work Less.” (NYT 2010), by Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist whose marginal tax rate, including the Elizabeth Warren-proposed estate tax, turned out to be 90 percent
> Elizabeth Warren says she will make the U.S. an affordable place to live…
Of course, she will… and for her children and grandchildren too.
Judge Barry is currently inactive on the Third Circuit, presumably because of her brother’s position.
She might be the highest judge who is an alumna of Hofstra Law School. Other famous alumni of Hofstra Law are Charles Kushner, the father-in-law of Ivanka Trump, and David Paterson, the blind former Governor of New York.
As an aside, when she was appointed 1999 she took the seat of H Lee Sarokin. If this name sounds familiar to you, he was the one who freed Hurricane Carter in 1985.
Obama says if you like your inheritance tax you can keep your inheritance tax. But if you don’t like it feel free to hire fancy lawyers 😉
Could there be a third option? He inherited a lot of money, squandered it on bad deals, declared bankruptcy six times, then had to borrow from Russian mobsters as US bankers wouldn’t loan him any more money. All of these statements have been corroborated by Donald Trump, either Sr or Jr. How does the Times latest article indicate that any of these statements are false?
Bruce: It would be a great story if Donald Trump had filed for personal bankruptcy six times (don’t forget the required intervals between filings; see https://www.thebalance.com/if-i-filed-bankruptcy-before-how-soon-can-i-file-again-316173 )!
Given that he had a role in hundreds of real estate development projects, why would a handful them going through a corporate bankruptcy reorganization impair Trump’s ability to fly around in his B757 without Russian assistance? How would that keep him from spending the profits from the hundreds of projects that were successful?
The corporate bankruptcies were, I’m sure, unfortunate events for some creditors. But why would they impair Donald Trump’s personal spending power?
Phil:
According to a well-known anecdote, one day when he was $1 billion in debt, Trump pointed out a homeless man to his daughter and said, “See that bum? He has a billion dollars more than me.” The Guinness Book of Records lists him as having the biggest financial turnaround in history. “In the early 1990s, I owed billions of dollars and many people thought I was finished,” says Trump. “
Bruce and Phil:
And now this naughty Trump guy is going to be our president for 6 more years. Are you excited yet?
The more liberals bash Trump the more I think: so what? he is the president and you are not. (As an Arab proverb has it, a dog barks as the caravan goes by.) The conclusion is, winning the elections is all that matters: just ask Hillary.