I’ll summarize two big articles (one in NYT, one in WaPo):
(1) Trump ran his casinos into the ground in the early ’90s, even while other casinos were doing well.
(2) Trump borrowed $20 million from his siblings to stay afloat.
(3) When that wasn’t enough, Trump started a publicly traded company, DJT, to fleece investors into taking on debt in his casinos. He also looted the company by giving himself a lot of money.
(4) DJT has filed for bankruptcy three times.
Item (3) sounds a lot like what Conrad Black went to the clink for. Black came out of jail believing a lot of unserious left-wing things about the American criminal justice system (though even now he’s a Trump-loving wingnut). I wonder if Trump would do the same or if he’d still be such a “law and order” guy.
RaflW
Well hello new thread 21 minutes later. How we needed you so!
Though I will say, the news for DJT looks grim. His case for the Presidency* is based on his business acumen. Which is shit.
*I think his case for the presidency is really about celebrity worship in our country, but his official case, the one the press plays along with, is business. Which, as I said, he’s shitty at.
RaflW
Well, balls. I tried to edit my comment and it set off the spam filter.
dmsilev
You forgot to mention the few million dollars worth of chips that his daddy bought from him and never redeemed, i.e. a bailout from Dad to save I Is Serious Biznessman from his failure.
MattF
It’s a good question, why Trump has never been charged with a crime. Hard to believe he’s never committed any.
Botsplainer
If he loses (for which I’m cautiously optimistic, and sell gloom as a motivator), I think his “brand” evaporates in a cloud of smoke. I can’t imagine that his partners (and I suspect all of them have a substantial majority stake) will want the anchor of his name attached to their properties, and will jettison his sorry assed family name and legacy before the new year.
Spouse was at a trade show a couple of months ago where reps from some of those properties appeared. They’re pro resort GMs and concierges and very pleasant, nice people, but were feeling zero love and endured open criticism from the very industry people they need to survive and thrive. There is, as we speak, a very overt yet unofficial blacklist on Trump resort properties, and after the election is done, something’s going to give.
Camo clad gun collectors and WalMart hoverround users don’t spend $800 a night for the bottom tier of rooms for resort stays. They don’t buy $600 in spa services in a day, nor will they pay $300 for a round of golf.
RaflW
@MattF: Yeah, it’s almost as if the system preferences white guys who throw money around (even if it’s other people’s money).
NorthLeft12
Glad that this crook and fool de-Canadianized himself. Just goes to show that no matter what they say they believe, they always go back to their core beliefs.
hovercraft
@dmsilev:
Joy Reid and you are having a mind meld this morning.
patrick II
An additional thing about DJT going public and ripping off investors — Trump owed big money to banks and negotiated his debt downward before starting the public company DJT. My thought is that the banks had to know the debt Trump was switching from himself to the public company since they were the creditor, but stood by because it was their best chance of getting repaid anything at all. Large institutions did not invest in DJT because they knew what was going on. DJT stock was mostly bought by small investors, and small investors and businessmen once again got fleeced by Trump.
I look at the banks that Trump owed money to as accomplices, and while there is little chance any there will be legal reprecussions for Trump over this fraud, there is virtually no chance anything will happen to the banks that were his enabling accomplices.
RaflW
@Botsplainer: I notice there aren’t any Helmsley hotels any more. That crooked tax cheat destroyed her brand, too.
Matt McIrvin
@Botsplainer: He’s going to have to transform himself into a pure wingnut-lecture-circuit figure. It’s a much more modest gravy train than he’s accustomed to, though.
Amir Khalid
I still haven’t figured out how Donald Fucking Trump managed to run into the ground a casino — a business where people give you their money by the fistful, and all you really give them back is free refreshments. Did he finance it on ridiculously unfavourable terms?
Botsplainer
OT – the big Wikileaks reveal…
Its a crummy commercial…
Wapiti
@Amir Khalid: I think part of his troubles came from building three Trump casinos in one city, so they competed with each other. Savvy businessman.
Botsplainer
@Matt McIrvin:
The first thing to go will be the plane.
Can’t wait to see him juggle the miles for business class upgrades and listening to him argue at the gate like the rest of us schlubs.
MattF
@Botsplainer: Alex Jones was upset… Roger Stone will, presumably, just move on to the next lie.
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: These days, I think it’s actually pretty easy to lose money on a casino. It used to be that there were relatively few places you could go for legal gambling in the United States, but the market’s saturated, between state lotteries, off-track betting places, casinos on tribal lands all over and (especially) online gambling of various sorts.
But Trump lost all this money back in the mid-1990s, when the situation wasn’t that bad. It does seem that casino spending is fairly cyclic and the early-1990s recession may have hit them hard. I know Las Vegas was suffering during the worst bit of the most recent recession; people actually do cut back on gambling tourism when times are tough.
Felonius Monk
@Botsplainer:
Hey Trump, the line forms way back there.
OzarkHillbilly
@MattF:
The answer is quite simple: $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Amir Khalid
@Botsplainer:
Assange promised us the movie, damn it, and all he released today was a trailer.
The Ancient Randonneur
David Cay Johnston: writes about those tax return pages:
One of many damning points made by Johnston.
Matt McIrvin
@Botsplainer: At the very least he might have to downgrade to a Gulfstream or something instead of a 757. Like a prole.
Botsplainer
@Matt McIrvin:
And maybe Kushner will buy him a condo somewhere outside Ocala, so he can live among his voters. Preferably next door to some lady with 15 cats, and sandwiched on the other side by some old deaf couple with 3 mixed race grandchildren (all under 8 years old) they’re raising while their daughters finish court mandated rehab; the fathers coming by to visit frequently.
Percysowner
@Botsplainer: So basically Assange took a book from Trump’s playbook. Just like Trump said he was going to have a big press conference on Obama’s birth certificate and then turned it into an ad for his new hotel, Assange says he’s going to give a big announcement and then turns it into an ad for his books. Birds of a feather and all that.
WereBear
Trump and his ilk make sure of that!
Felonius Monk
@Amir Khalid:
I don’t think he even did that. It was more like: “We’re making a movie, maybe.”
Botsplainer
@Felonius Monk:
Orange shitgobbon: “Do you know WHO I AM???”
Gate agent: “Sir, we are very busy today, and we have other passengers. Step over there and we will get to you when we get to you….”
Frankensteinbeck
@Percysowner:
Conservatives have been doing this for ages. Seems like every month at least FOX says the information is about to be released that will put Hillary in jail.
Brachiator
@Amir Khalid:
I don’t know that [email protected] have down well in Atlantic City. They certainly haven’t done much for New Jersey.
Matt McIrvin
@Botsplainer: “Step forward and raise your arms, sir.”
Another Scott
@Amir Khalid: I think Atlantic City overbuilt casinos back then. Playboy had similar issues trying to run one there (but they had trouble even getting a license).
Maryland is going nuts building casinos, too. There’s a $.41B one under the MGM name going in just south of DC, and it will be the third one within a 50 mile radius and 6th overall in the state. Someone’s going to be hurting in the not too distant future…
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Amir Khalid: Got moderated. Let’s try again.
I don’t know that [email protected] have down well in Atlantic City. They certainly haven’t done much for New Jersey.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
as I read that NYT article, there was a $10m loan from the family trust before that twenty, so the besides the “small loan” that got him started, and Daddy Trump’s political connections, and the AC chips and and loans from the estate… there were well over thirty million in family bail outs and boosts for the great self-made man
Another Scott
@Another Scott: Er, $1.4B, not $.41B.
(I’d post links, but they usually have casino in the URL.)
Cheers,
Scott.
MattF
@Another Scott: Not to mention the MGM project cost $1.5 B and was 30% over budget. And now, you expect it to be well-managed? Dream on. It’s easy to go broke when you let the $$$$s fly freely.
geg6
@Amir Khalid:
Three. That was three cas!nos he ran into the ground.
GregB
Remember the good old days when the conservative Republican’s argued that situational ethics were the cause of moral bankruptcy?
Conservative dogma four years ago: People who don’t pay taxes are moochers bleeding the system dry for their own financial benefit.
Conservative dogma today: People who don’t pay taxes are geniuses who know how to game the system for their own financial benefit.
eclare
@Amir Khalid: From my understanding they were heavily leveraged.
Barbara
On the one hand, I keep hearing that Trump passed through most of his debt to the newly created public company, thereby allowing him to survive the disaster of his own mismanagement and ill-conceived business decisions (buying an airline). On the other hand, he seems to have passed through nearly $1 billion in losses to his personal returns. Are these two separate losses or did Trump fail to let the IRS know that he had been relieved of his nearly billion dollar loss by offloading it onto a bunch of suckers? Or maybe that happened in subsequent returns, but since he won’t let us know, I am going with the tax and securities fraud version of the story.
amk
@Amir Khalid:
More like slides of yore.
schrodinger's cat
@Amir Khalid: His [email protected] were money laundering operations not legitimate businesses. He wants to run the United States like a mob boss too. He is scary on many levels.
JMG
If Trump loses, he will still have possession of his small donor list, a built-in perpetual market for future grifts. He’ll make more money that way than ever before.
Brachiator
@GregB:
I’ve heard Trump surrogates try to hammer home the idea that having huge losses and not paying taxes is OK if you create thousands of jobs along the way.
I’m wondering how many people lost jobs or got stiffed as Trump racked up his losses. And how many who invested in him lost their shirts?
Amir Khalid
@Brachiator:
All I really know about casinos in Atlantic City is from the movie starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, and the song by Bruce.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
Unfortunately, no proof of that.
Matt McIrvin
@GregB:
Manly white Christian types always had an infinite deck of get-out-of-hell-free cards; Jesus could wash their souls clean an unlimited number of times.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: This is my working theory anyway, I never claimed proof.
Tokyokie
@Brachiator: Trump created a lot of work in Atlantic City, but not a lot of jobs. That’s the difference between being paid and being stiffed.
MattF
@GregB: Also, the argument that government should be run ‘like a business’. Um, maybe not.
hovercraft
@Amir Khalid:
From the NY Times
Jack the Second
@Another Scott: The state-by-state de-outlawing of gambling is like a slow motion prisoners dilemma train wreck.
When gambling was only legal in one or two places, it was a big tourist draw — New Yorkers would head down to Atlantic City for the weekend, everyone else would go to Vegas, they’d have a good time and the two states would prosper.
But ain’t nobody travelling to fucking Maryland or to Indiana for one of their riverboat casinos. It only fleeces locals, which is to the detriment of the state.
The Ancient Randonneur
@schrodinger’s cat: Read the article I linked to in #19 and you’ll see that your theory has some evidence to back it up. At the linked article the author explain how Trump was able to game the tax system to drain the profits and leave banks, investors and workers holding the shit end of the stick.
Iowa Old Lady
Balzac once wrote something like behind all great wealth is a great crime. I hesitate to be so sweeping, but it’s hard to amass billions for yourself without cheating others in some way, maybe by underpaying your bottom level workers at least.
mr_gravity
@MattF: The laws that govern the very wealthy seem to have an unusually large amount of “wiggle room”.
See: Bankers, 2008.
Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck
@GregB:
The contradictions in conservative thought become consistent if you know where to substitute the words ‘black people’ and ‘white people.’
hovercraft
@Amir Khalid:
From the NY Times
Anoniminous
@Botsplainer:
OCTOBER! SURPRISE! has become the RWNJ’s HORSE! RACE!
Iowa Old Lady
@Iowa Old Lady: I think Balzac is probably using “crime” in the moral sense rather than the legal one, since rich people’s action often are defined by the legal code as “not criminal.”
schrodinger's cat
@The Ancient Randonneur: Thanks, I will take a look. Calling DT a racist and fascist is not going to sway his diehard voters but calling him a tax cheat and a business failure might.
Interrobang
Conrad Black has always been a wingnut, and a deeply misogynist one at that, which is why he wouldn’t support Clinton even though he’d probably do very well under a Clinton government (probably better than under Trump). He once wrote publicly (in the National Post, I believe) that kinda-lefty writer Linda McQuaig should be horsewhipped. Me, personally, I’d like to horsewhip him, and I’m glad Harper didn’t let him re-Canadianise himself. Good riddance.
That having been said, I rather suspect that if you put Black, Trump, and Clinton in a room, eventually Black would figure out that the person he could actually talk to is Clinton. Unlike Trump, who is a couple sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade shy of a picnic in the intelligence department, and has all the way with words that a brick has aerodynamics, Black is very smart, and has written several books, including one biography of FDR that is apparently excellent. Trump would probably bore and annoy both of their asses off in about five and a half minutes, if not fewer.
Frank Wilhoit
@Iowa Old Lady: Proudhon was even more succinct.
bluehill
I think one of these articles also raises the question of whether Trump negotiated down the debt he owed. I think this is a big issue with potential legal consequences. If he did, the reduction in debt should have been treated as income and would likely have offset a large amount of his losses. Trump may have “parked” those loans, which means that he had another entity buy the discounted loans and never collect on them. This would have allowed him to avoid recording the income from debt relief and retain his loss carryforwards.
Tripod
@Amir Khalid:
Check out the movie Casino.
The most likely answer is an organized crime bust out. If there is raking straight out of the cash tills occuring, the casino is going broke.
schrodinger's cat
I only do my own taxes and am no expert but whatever we have seen of Trump’s taxes screams tax fraud to me.
gene108
@Amir Khalid:
At least with the Trump Taj Mahal, he overleveraged to make it huge and super awesome, so when the 1991-1992 recession hit, the dip in revenue was enough to kill his ability to make debt payments.
Probably the same for his other establishments.
What will be interesting is how many of his properties does he actually own. Could he liquidate enough assets, to actually have the billions in worth he claims to have tied up in real estate.
SFAW
@Amir Khalid:
This one?
“Well, they blew up the shitgibbon in Noo Yawk last night,
Now they blew up his Tower, too. “
Captain C
@geg6: Plus an entire football league.
mr_gravity
@JMG: And he will no longer be constrained by his brutal honesty.
OK. Sorry. That seemed pretty funny as I was typing.
schrodinger's cat
Has anyone looked at the SEC filings of Trump’s publicly traded company? Statement of cash flows should be interesting.
The Ancient Randonneur
@schrodinger’s cat: It appears Johnston has put together many of the missing pieces and he claims that if he had the complete return it might be worse than what he can derive from the available three pages. It really does appear Trump is hiding something.
cmorenc
Some tax expert wias on CNN last night explaining the truly extraordinary provision in the federal real-estate income tax code that generated Trump’s $916 million claimed loss:
1) Assume, as is likely, that the financing for the project generating the loss was highly leveraged – e.g. Trump personally put in $1 million, and various banks contributed the other $999 million for a $1 billion dollar project.
2) The project goes under into insolvency.
3) Trump loses his $1 million, the banks lose their $999 million.
4) The banks write off the $999 million as a loss, but don’t get to take any deduction (it’s pure loss of capital from a tax code standpoint) – but Trump DOES get take the entire loss as a deduction to his individual tax liability, and carry it forward 15 years or backward 3 years (where the assertion that the loss could have allowed Trump to pay no federal income taxes for up to 18 years comes from).
I am absolutely dumbfounded how, even as corruptly influenced as Congress is, anyone managed to insert a provision into the tax code allowing an individual to take a loss against ordinary income that is hundreds of times greater than the amount that individual actually invested in a real estate project.
Anoniminous
Real Estate is the original over-hyped, illiquid asset, fueling a speculative frenzy and financial bubble.
(And Henry George, too. But that is a different story in a different direction.)
SFAW
@hovercraft:
So, basically Atlantic City was (for Trump) just one long con, with different sub-implementations.
Cacti
@Amir Khalid:
I know, right?
Owning a casino is like having your own license to print money. How the hell could you not turn a profit from one?
Cacti
Stuck in moderation, release me dammit!
scav
Svattered about — and I’m noway evonomically savvy enough to thoroughly judge — there seem similar and dodgy whiffs about The Old Post Office hotel.
easy enough to be “On Time and Under Budget” if you juggle the budget and timeline. (WaPo minor sin) There’s also seems to be a repeat of weird patterns of promises, assumptions and hyper-hype. (Mother Jones). The funding is beyond my depth, but things seem to lurking with lots more at stake, making them perhaps edgier, unless they are just setting up the next tax-magicking loss) (Wa Biz Journal) [cont]
Tripod
@Amir Khalid:
First response in moderation –
See the movie Cas1no. If someone (cough -organized crime- cough) gets to the cash tills before anyone else, the operation will be a money loser. They provide the financing, or concrete, or whatever, and the front man skims what he can then they bust it out.
Note the big money lands elsewhere – he’s always been a trimmer, never a mover and shaker.
SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch
Just as “socialism” was finally released from the FYWP list of banned words, it does seem that — at least for the duration of this campaign — someone could allow “casino” into the approved dictionary. I can’t believe this is the last thread on which Trump’s history will be discussed, and it’s a pain to keep having to insert tags or exclamation points into “casino” as a workaround (or type/copy/link it as is and languish in moderation for however long).
Botsplainer
@Matt McIrvin:
“Ah done sinned a’fore Gawd – and ah done asked mah personal Lord and Savior Jesus Chrahst ta fergive me and he done it. And if yer a Christian, you’d fergive me too…”
different-church-lady
@Brachiator: We know. We just want to make him deny it.
MCA1
@GregB: That’s less “situational” than you think, because the actual formulation makes a distinction based on the wealth of the individual not paying taxes, so it’s constant over time. It’s: rich people who don’t pay taxes are geniuses, everyone else who doesn’t pay taxes are moochers.
different-church-lady
@MattF: We tried running the economy like a kasino for a while there. Didn’t work so well, did it?
different-church-lady
@srv: Ivana is a mobster.
Wow, that was easy.
scav
@scav: [cont] And two amuse-bouche links, they’re playing the usual complain about taxes / assessments game (I know, Standard Business, but it speaks to the already-blessed whining loudest etc theme) (WaPo) And then sort of general color as I’ve got the link NYT to compare tone. Just seems more of the same, which as he’s trying to convince everyone he works for us now, I mean come on. Detect obvious, and he’s using it as an infomercial on stump.
ETA, I’m so scattered that svattered might be the better term. But that seems one dodgy woodshed.
different-church-lady
@MCA1: To put a finer point on it: if you don’t make enough money to have taxes to dodge, you’re a moocher. If you make enough and pay them, you’re a dope. If you make enough and dodge them, you’re a genius.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Botsplainer: I want to hear the next traffic cop who pulls him over.
“Hey! I pay your salary!”
“Well, actually,….”
different-church-lady
@Captain C: Right, it’s like a body count: three kasios, one airline, and one football league.
I wonder if Hill has this little laundry list in her back pocket, waiting for tango 2 or 3.
khead
Trump’s [email protected] followed the business model of the restaurant in Goodfellas after taking on Paulie as your partner.
Except in Trump’s case he didn’t even have to burn the restaurant – just declare bankruptcy – and then find another sucker who thinks “How can you lose money with a [email protected]?” Rinse. Repeat.
Shell
You get an economic downturn…people have less money to play with…they stop coming…the area becomes more and more rundown.
Course that doesn’t explain losing money when the economys booming.
bartkid
> Black came out of jail believing a lot of unserious left-wing things about the American criminal justice system
Black came out of jail and wrote some unserious left-wing things about the American criminal justice system. I’m not sold that he still believes what he wrote.
Shell
Sigh, I really wish there was a n easy way to find out why a seemingly innocent comment gets thrown into moderation.
Botsplainer
Huh – so with all the reporting power out there at the NYT and CNN and NBC, it took Real Clear Politics to learn that Trump curried favor with social conservatives for three years prior to the election through donating foundation charity dollars, sometimes to overtly political groups.
Where were the networks, the NYT, the LAT while these guys, Farenthold and Newsweek were working these stories?
rikyrah
THIS is most despicable.
Mai.naem.mobile
Josh Barro had a tweet that Trumps $915M loss was 2 percent of ALL corporate losses reported to the IRS that year. Thats crazy.
ruckus
@dmsilev:
Imagine that, Donnie has soilled a shitty family name. I find it so hard to believe.
hovercraft
@Mai.naem.mobile:
Well he is the king of debt, so also being the king of failed businesses is not a surprise.
Roger Moore
@GregB:
Come on! You know the real difference: poor people who don’t pay taxes are moochers and looters with no skin in the game; rich people who don’t pay taxes are financial geniuses who know perfectly well their tax money would have been squandered anyway. That’s why we need to lower taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor.
burnspbesq
@Barbara:
The public company’s SEC filings likely make for interesting reading.
workworkwork
@Botsplainer:
“You now own 60% of ‘Prisoners of Love’. Congratulations!”.
In honor of the great Gene Wilder.
bluehill
@Roger Moore: At some point all of people trying to rationalize all of these contradictions are going to insane. Unfortunately, it also means that they are primed to do anything Trump wants since they already shown a willingness to discard previously held beliefs.
Roger Moore
@Jack the Second:
IIRC, the Navajo Nation based their decision not to build a tribal casino on more-or-less the same logic: nobody was going to go that far into the middle of nowhere to play, so they were just going to be creating problems for themselves.
burnspbesq
@bartkid:
A lot of Canadian lawyers thought that the trial was fundamentally unfair. There are a lot of differences between the two systems.
liberal
@Anoniminous: Yeah…I tried to explain the basic theory of land rent to juicers here. They don’t understand much economics.
hovercraft
@Roger Moore:
It’s the same as the principle that says you can’t take away bonuses and other incentives for rich people, or they will become less productive, but the rest of us just need to suck it up and accept that Social Security and Medicare need to be cut, and wages are too high.
Kay Eye
@Botsplainer: oh, the horror. “Mixed race” grandchildren! Their fathers coming to visit!
You might want to re-think that. As a deaf old lady with mixed race grandchildren, a successful daughter, and a son-in-law I’m happy to see coming, if I saw the Donald next door I’d think, well, there goes the neighborhood.
You might want to back off what you clearly see as an insult.
Oh, and last time I checked our president was mixed…..race…..whatever that means.
liberal
@cmorenc: There’s all sorts of shit re taxes and real estate that is just outrageous. Like one guy depreciating his assets, then selling it, then the next guy doing the same thing.
LurkerExtraordinaire
@Botsplainer:
This.
My husband is an aircraft mechanic here in Ohio, who actually worked on Trump’s plane here about a month ago. The current project he is currently helping with is a Delta aircraft (not sure if a 757, 767, or 777- will ask), but they are practically rebuilding that plane. The estimated cost? Into the millions. And it will take at least 6 months.
People usually only focus on the fuel costs of plane ownership. Truth is, the maintenance costs are high as well, and maintenance schedules are usually federally mandated.
Bye, bye, Trump plane.
Roger Moore
@bluehill:
The followers who are actually trying to believe that crap might. The leaders who are spewing it are just bullshitting. They’re throwing out rationalizations based on what they think sounds good in the moment. They never bother to think about what they’re saying deeply enough to worry about whether it’s true or even consistent; it’s just a verbal smokescreen they can generate as needed.
burnspbesq
@cmorenc:
Basic stuff. If you are a partner in a partnership, you get to treat your pro rata share of the partnership’s nonrecourse debt as part of your basis. Every tax advantage that real estate developers get flows from that. And partnerships are passthrough entities; an individual partner’s share of partnership income or loss goes on his/her 1040.
It’s a double-edged sword; in some situations, partners can get stuck with huge amounts of “phantom income” (i.e., taxable income that doesn’t have any cash associated with it). But if a project craters and you structure things in certain ways, you can get taken out for almost nothing and still have all that basis to offset the small amount you receive.
My guess is that Trump doesn’t have much in the way of audit risk, but there is plenty that can be said about the policies that make this stuff possible. And obviously the optics are plusungood.
catclub
@bluehill:
Yep, this. The guy who wrote about this said that whoever finds the entity that owns those loans gets the Pulitzer.
The question will be: “Trump has owed you this money but you have never collected it for twenty years. Why not?”
Mnemosyne
@Kay Eye:
Although Botsplainer is quite frequently an asshole, I think he means that The Donald would be upset by those circumstances, not that he would be.
Also, as he is a family law lawyer, I think he may also be expressing frustration with the bigoted grandparents who come into his office and complain about their grandchildren’s father showing up wanting to see his kids while their mother is in jail.
catclub
@liberal:
But there still has to be lying going on. If you depreciate the asset, then sell it, any price you get above the depreciated price is income that you should be reporting.
Botsplainer
@Kay Eye:
Oh no – I’m not saying it as an objective negative. I’m saying he’d be horrified.
catclub
I hope Hillary has a line about Trump’s genius. “He was too shy to show how smart he is by releasing his tax forms.”
cokane
One of the things that the tax leaks seem to indicate is that Trump is still in debt, and I think this is getting short shrift in the reporting. It’s frankly more important than the fact that he hasn’t paid taxes for two decades.
Gelfling 545
@Botsplainer: They should be used to that now. Trump did it with his big “birther” announcement a few weeks back. Not to mention his steaks, golf courses etc. being promoted under the guise of politically relevant announcements. Look for more of this to come. No more subtlety like Gingrich & Carson. Yes, everything Trump has touched he has made worse.
Roger Moore
@hovercraft:
Pretty much. The way I see it, the basic principle is that poor people respond only to punishment while rich people respond only to rewards. So the basic plan for dealing with poverty is to punish the poor so they’ll want to be rich; any kind of safety net program makes poverty too comfortable, so poor people will never try hard enough to lift themselves by their bootstraps. Meanwhile, it’s pointless to punish rich people for their lawlessness; instead, we have to bribe them to behave.
catclub
@hovercraft: Trump’s finances: Human pyramid scheme or human centipede scheme?
catclub
@cokane: Especially when he is in debt to foreign actors, whose identities we do not even know.
cokane
@catclub: That seems likely, but it wouldn’t matter. People deserve to know if the president was in debt to anyone (above a trivial threshold obv). Holt had it right when he pressed this precise logic at the debate.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
I object to your insinuation that the orange shitgibbon is human!
bluehill
Stuff like this becomes increasingly acceptable with the true believers.
liberal
@catclub:
I’m not an accountant. Here’s a reference for a lot of thoughts on this stuff:
Wealth and Want—Michael Hudson
I think the point is that it’s all converted into capital gains. And (don’t know for sure or whether it’s at the link) but there are ways to put off realizing the gains, too.
Turgidson
@schrodinger’s cat:
That won’t sway his diehards either. Nothing will. For them, bad news or dirt about Trump is just the latest edition of the media being very unfair, very very unfair, believe me.
But it might peel off some of the softer Trump supporters who are with him out of tribal loyalty or “just can’t vote for Hillary” stubbornness.
Gelfling 545
@Kay Eye: I suspect that the commenter was intending to indicate Trump’s viewpoint, not his/her own.
MattF
@bluehill: But… but… it was a light-hearted execution.
SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch
@catclub:
That’s been nagging at me, too. If the information proves that he’s not just “smart” but an actual “financial genius,” why in the world would he not want to release his returns for all to see?
Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck
@MattF:
I said this was coming. I don’t know whether racism or misogyny are ‘worse’, but they’re different in tone. Black men are scary to racists, so Obama got more united, fanatical obstruction. Misogynists think women are weak and vulnerable, so Hillary will get more direct attacks and insults.
SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch
@Gelfling 545:
It’s the reverse Midas touch.
“Midas” spelled backwards is “Sadim.”
“Sadim” is an anagram of “I’m sad.”
You sure are, Donald. You sure are.
Villago Delenda Est
@SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch: King Midas in Reverse
Mnemosyne
@SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch:
Honestly, the reason the original story of Midas is a cautionary tale is that he turns everything around him into gold, including the food he needs to survive and his beloved daughter.
Like all good fairy tales, there’s the version they tell to kids where the person who put the curse on him reverses the spell and fixes everything, and then there’s the real story, where he accidentally kills his daughter by turning her to gold and then starves to death for his greed.
Miss Bianca
@Villago Delenda Est: great song. breat band. Fangs for the memories.
@Mnemosyne: Point taken.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Let’s see. There are rich people and there are poor people. So, who are “we?”
SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch
@Mnemosyne:
I grew up on the real story, TYVM. Always loved the Greek and Roman myths, and while I expect the early versions I heard and read were somewhat sanitized for young sensibilities, I don’t think they ever actually reversed the entire meaning of the story. What’s the point of that, O Mother of Muses?
DougJ
@Amir Khalid:
Great movie
Mnemosyne
@SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch:
I’m not sure, but somehow “having the Midas touch” has come to be seen as a good thing, even though the entire point of the story (including the sanitized one) is that turning everything you touch into gold is a curse that destroys everything around you.
I guess it’s that American simplemindedness that can’t picture any downside to having a lot of money, so of course a “Midas touch” must be good by definition. Sure, you starve to death after accidentally killing your daughter, but you die rich, amirite?
JR in WV
@liberal:
Link to your explanation, or it didn’t happen. Lawyers, architects, bankers, math geeks, we don’t understand econ, right!
I have a BS CS degree that required some Econ, and I was interested as at the time prime interest was 17%, so I took more than required, along with the required statistics, calc, discrete structures, etc.
You don’t even have to re-write your explanation, just post the link to it in this thread, we’ll find it.
I doubt you understand it well enough to write a coherent explanation, actually. It takes a really good understanding to explain something to others.
sukabi
@Amir Khalid: the one thing we KNOW about drumpf is that he likes to spend money ON HIMSELF. Probably a big part of his business failures stem from his taking money OUT of the businesses, rather than properly managing them, paying the bills, and reinvesting in the business… that’s my guess, since he’s a well known deadbeat when it comes to bill paying.