Taibbi: Trump Is Just One Player in a Much, Much Larger Tax Story

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

When New York Times reporters David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner published their exhaustive, gazillion-word expose on the Trump family tax practices last week, there was only one word for it.

“Tax bombshell,” blared Yahoo!

By my count, this was roughly the 4,790th “bombshell” of the Trump presidency, but one of the few to deserve the title. The Times story is an extraordinary piece of investigative reporting and a monument to the kind of work we all should be doing.

The parts I found most interesting were less about the rapaciousness of the Trump family per se than the myriad opportunities for gaming the system one presumes is available to everyone of this income level. The ordinary person cannot hire an outside appraiser to tell the IRS what it thinks he or she is worth, but the Trumps could systematically undervalue their properties for tax purposes (and then go back and overvalue them when it served their public relations needs).

The timidity that enforcement officials show toward the very wealthy is also a running theme in the story. When the Trump family claimed a $17.9 million building had fallen to $2.9 million, supposedly losing 83 percent of its value in just 18 days, the IRS auditor who caught it made them push the value back up by just $100,000.

The infamous $3.35 million casino chip scheme — an illegal multi-million-dollar loan under New Jersey law — inspired just a $65,000 fine.

There is a lot in the piece that testifies to Trump’s keen understanding of the media and how he knew he and his father could exploit it. Donald Trump, the bold filthy-rich investor, has always been a media creation. At an early age he realized reporters were basically dupes (and, usually, poorly paid dupes) who were easily conned into thinking a person was fantastically wealthy just by taking a ride past a few construction sites.

Donald and Daddy Fred furthermore understood that you can win an accomplice for life in the press just by telling a reporter something he or she thinks is a secret. In this piece, they’re shown pulling various insider-trading/greenmailing schemes, with Fred buying stakes in companies like Time, Inc. just before Donald would whisper to a reporter that he was “taking a sizable stake” in the company. Shares then jumped and Daddy cashed out with a $41K profit, which was probably enough for lunch, at least.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-tax-fraud-735710/

[Hotler]

1. +1 nt

[soryang]

2. So true

People think it's just this one person? It's the whole system.

But the time to sound the alarm about this was decades ago. Trump voters might have been more receptive to this kind of reporting back then, before we institutionalized corporate and high net-worth individual tax avoidance. In fact, the longstanding inattention of both parties and the commercial media to this kind of behavior perversely became part of Trump’s messaging in 2016.

Taibbi alludes to the giant US multinational corporations who have been doing this for decades. It's also tied in with the labor arbitrage outsourcing overseas where the profits get laundered in tax havens. Then people blame China for the trade deficit. Who do they think is doing business with China?

[shanny]

3. Preach.

Rump isn't the problem he's a symptom of it, and not just here. Around the world governments have lost the ability to tax the rich and so we have rising inequality and democracies in crisis. The election of the tangerine twitler was a primal scream; we need to listen.