Category: Trump and Trump-hatred

… because he would have paid all of his taxes via a land value tax.

My Facebook feed is alive with people complaining that Trump hasn’t paid sufficient taxes over the past decades for which the NYT has obtained his personal tax returns (see Holy Grail attained: NYT gets hold of Trump’s tax returns). Essentially they are complaining that the real estate industry is not taxed properly. For the first 39 years, for example, depreciation may cancel out much of the rental revenue (and this clock can be accelerated by the sophisticated, as I learned from a friend who owns a huge office building and will pay no taxes for the first 15 years). As with Warren Buffet’s fortune, as long as assets aren’t totally cashed out, any tax on capital gains can be deferred for decades or perhaps centuries.

Maybe this is the nudge that the U.S. needs to move to what might be a much better and fairer tax, i.e., one on the value of land. This won’t discourage investment in nice buildings because the value of the building isn’t taxed. As the U.S. gets bulked up via immigration to a Chinese level of population density, land per person should become more scarce and valuable. Already we’ve seen that much of the fruits of economic growth in the U.S. have ended up accruing primarily to property owners (i.e., as soon as wages rise in a city, rents rise so that landlords soak up most of the increase and leave the workers with little additional spending power).

An advantage of the land value tax is that the U.S. could shut down its income taxation scheme, thus encouraging people to work more. Note that everyone who isn’t homeless, unhoused, or living in a car would end up paying the land value tax directly (homeowner) or indirectly (renter). It is also easy for governments to collect property-based taxes. The government knows where all of the land is and who owns it. In the hysteria around Trump and his taxes, one thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is the extent to which the hated dictator has paid 50+ years of property tax on the various properties that he owns. According to the NYT, Trump is an arch criminal and a mastermind at tax evasion (so much so that the IRS hasn’t actually changed his tax liability, though supposedly such as finding by the IRS will come any day now). Yet there is no indication that Trump or his companies have managed to escape paying property tax every year.

What’s not to love about a tax that even Donald Trump is not smart enough to avoid?

(A federal land value tax might be awesome for redressing income inequality. Wealthy coastal elite states have a lot of valuable land so they would pay more than states where median incomes are low. Uber rich Californians who may be paying almost nothing in property due to Proposition 13 could finally be taxed on the rise in land value to which they contributed nothing.)

Related:

• Atlantic magazine article on the land value tax
• Wikipedia on the land value tax

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“LONG-CONCEALED RECORDS SHOW TRUMP’S CHRONIC LOSSES AND YEARS OF TAX AVOIDANCE” (NYT):

The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.

Finally all of the Trump-haters’ questions will be answered? Sadly, no. Much additional forensic accounting remains to be done.

By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

If the tax returns don’t reveal Trump’s true wealth “by their very nature,” why was it so important to obtain and review them?

I’ve read through this article once and can’t find anything interesting. Trump seems to have had some winners and losers among his properties and took all of the deductions that good tax lawyers (such as RBG’s husband, a specialist in limiting payments to the government that RBG sought to expand) could find.

Actually, a close reading of the article reveals that Trump should actually be rich, as you might expect with someone who uses a Boeing 757 as a personal/family aircraft:

The newer tax returns show that Mr. Trump burned through the last of the tax-reducing power of that $1 billion in 2005, just as a torrent of entertainment riches began coming his way following the debut of “The Apprentice” the year before.

For 2005 through 2007, cash from licensing deals and endorsements filled Mr. Trump’s bank accounts with $120 million in pure profit. With no prior-year losses left to reduce his taxable income, he paid substantial federal income taxes for the first time in his life: a total of $70.1 million.

According to some previous articles that I’ve read, due to some crazy favorable contract terms and tax laws it seems that Trump was able to deduct losses on real estate that were actually incurred by partners (i.e., the $1 billion in losses for him might have been taken after only a $50 million personal loss). So if he chewed through this $1 billion with profits, that likely means that he actually earned $1 billion in profit circa 1995-2005 and didn’t have to pay income tax on that profit (due to the losses carried forward from the previous ventures in which he had not actually lost $1 billion of his own money).

Is it fair to say that the NYT’s long hunt for Trump’s tax returns has merely revealed that Trump was making roughly $100 million per year in a volatile industry and that his tax lawyers have been aggressive with the deductions? Who was a primary enabler of Trump being able to keep most of this $100 million/year?

Business losses can work like a tax-avoidance coupon: A dollar lost on one business reduces a dollar of taxable income from elsewhere. The types and amounts of income that can be used in a given year vary, depending on an owner’s tax status. But some losses can be saved for later use, or even used to request a refund on taxes paid in a prior year.

Until 2009, those coupons could be used to wipe away taxes going back only two years. But that November, the window was more than doubled by a little-noticed provision in a bill Mr. Obama signed as part of the Great Recession recovery effort. Now business owners could request full refunds of taxes paid in the prior four years, and 50 percent of those from the year before that.

What about the New York Times’s passion for learning more about how American women make money with their, um, natural assets?

The data contains no new revelations about the $130,000 payment to Stephanie Clifford, the actress who performs as Stormy Daniels — a focus of the Manhattan district attorney’s subpoena for Mr. Trump’s tax returns and other financial information.

How about the proven (by the NYT) fact that everything Trump has done has been bankrolled by Russia?

No subject has provoked more intense speculation about Mr. Trump’s finances than his connection to Russia. While the tax records revealed no previously unknown financial connection — and, for the most part, lack the specificity required to do so — they did shed new light on the money behind the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, a subject of enduring intrigue because of subsequent investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

The records show that the pageant was the most profitable Miss Universe during Mr. Trump’s time as co-owner, and that it generated a personal payday of $2.3 million…

So the guy who was earning $100 million per year from 1995-2005 added $2.3 million to his fortune via an event that occurred in Moscow?

Here’s the most shocking section to me:

Likewise the cost of haircuts, including the more than $70,000 paid to style his hair during “The Apprentice.” Together, nine Trump entities have written off at least $95,464 paid to a favorite hair and makeup artist of Ivanka Trump.

That’s a lot of hair-related expense!

Readers: What new and important information did you take away from this article?

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From New Yorker:

THE PROSECUTION OF PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: How the House Democrats, in the face of certain defeat, presented the case for impeachment.

The magazine hasn’t been that interesting since 2016 when it switched to an all-Trump-hatred-all-the-time format, but this article is. Prosecutors who knew that they had no chance of convicting someone nonetheless pressed on!

This feeling of inevitability was shared among those who were most intimately involved with the House’s impeachment efforts. As recently as July … Adam Schiff, the ex-prosecutor who became the de-facto leader of the House’s impeachment inquiry last fall, said that he would “be delighted” if there was a real prospect of removing the President through impeachment. Unfortunately, he said at the time, “the only way he’s leaving office, at least at this point, is by being voted out⁠.”

Ordinarily, we don’t celebrate prosecutors who go after people whom they know they can’t convict, but when Trump is involved, apparently the standards are different!

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/12/13/white-men-correctly-perceive-american-jews-as-their-enemies/ (regarding Mr. Schiff)

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Donald Trump has demonstrated his criminal mastermind capabilities by beating the impeachment rap. In the entirely non-partisan process, out of 535 members of Congress there were 4 people whose vote could not have been predicted by party affiliation?

The failure to remove Trump has occasioned despair among my Facebook friends:

The Day Democracy Died

Tombstone: American Democracy 1776-2020, killed by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans who refused to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of a criminal president

An American flag morphing into a Nazi flag

Today the US Senate has validated the most dangerous precedent in its history. … This principle could be used to literally make a US president a dictator. Republicans will come to deeply regret this sad day. [more dangerous a precedent than court-approved Japanese-American internment?]

We now have a Russian-style government [if true, where is the U.S. metro system that runs a train on every line every 60 seconds?]

[From January 28] People who aren’t following the impeachment story are missing one as fascinating as any cliffhanger Game of Thrones story. It looks like the senators might not want to be caught letting Trump murder the Constitution. Surprise.

Today is going to be one of the darkest days in the history of the United States. Maybe, just maybe we did not deserve Democracy and all the efforts of the Framers who dedicate their energy, time and vision to set up the architecture of the Constitution… [In the good old days we had the Framers holding slaves, stealing land from the Native Americans, and speculating in real estate west of the Proclamation Line]

My fear grows that Donald Trump will win in 2020. … Badly constructed polls, and definitely national polls should be denounced. Anybody who cites a national poll should be criticized as distracting from the actual task at hand. Anybody who funds one should be questioned as being under the spell of Putin, because they can only mislead from the real answer. … Yes, under the spell of Putin. We are highly confident he is trying to manipulate the left in this election, to make them self-destruct. The question is not whether he is doing this, but to what extent he is succeeding. Any time you see the Democrats doing self-destructive things, you should be suspicious.

[me, responding to the rich Bay Area dweller above] How will you survive if the next five years are anything like the last three?

[him] it will be a challenge. More down the road, as Trump hastens the decline of not just the USA but the West, in the world.

For the above-quoted folks, impeachment of Trump is serious and/or entertaining. Why let it end with acquittal? Removing a Hitler-style dictator would be worth more than one try, right? Maybe in the second try more than one Republican will see that Trump actually is the new Hitler.

Most of us do stuff every day, right? From the point of view of politicians in the party to which he no longer belongs, isn’t almost anything that Donald Trump does conceivably impeachable? If so, why not start a new impeachment process next week? (or tomorrow!) Surely it can’t be too early to begin an investigation at least?

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