Month: October 2016

A shocking statistic 

by digby

From Nicholas Confessorre at the New York Times, this number is so shocking I had to read it twice:

More than 500,000 individual taxpayers took advantage of the same tax rule as Mr. Trump in 1995, according to the Internal Revenue Service. The average loss they claimed, however, was just $97,600. Mr. Trump’s $916 million loss accounted for almost 2 percent of the national total. 

“He likes to say he does things in a big way, but I doubt he would boast about having what was likely the biggest net operating loss in the economy,” said Lily Batchelder, a law and public policy professor at New York University.

Giuliani said today that what he meant when he called Trump a genius that he meant great men have great failures and Trump had a great failure which makes him great.

The American economy is yuuuuuge. If Trump accounted for 2% of the nation’s reported losses, the biggest net operating loss in the whole economy, we are talking about an epic failure.

Update: A helpful little fact check in the Donald’s claims about his great failure

TRUMP: “The news media is now obsessed with an alleged tax filing from the 1990s at the end of one of the most brutal economic downturns in our country’s history. If you remember the early ’90s, other than I would say 1928, there was nothing even close,” Trump said. He later called the early ’90s “an economic depression.”

THE FACTS: The early 1990s might have been more painful for Trump, but for the vast majority of Americans, the Great Recession, which began in 2007, was much worse. Total employment fell by 8.7 million jobs nationwide — compared with just 1.6 million jobs lost during the early 1990s. The jobs reduction during the Great Recession was more than 4 times greater as a proportion of the labor force. The Great Recession also lasted for 18 months — more than double the length of the downturn Trump cited as worse.

For Trump to blame his personal financial woes largely on the recession of the 1990s is also a stretch. Toward the end of the 1980s, Trump borrowed large amounts of money at steep interest rates to pay for expensive, and ultimately unsuccessful, properties. One of his casinos, the Trump Castle, defaulted on debt payments in June 1990 — a month before that recession even began.

Trump’s problem there wasn’t that visitors to Atlantic City suddenly stopped gambling — the city’s gaming revenues rose every year in the 1990s. It had more to do with Trump’s past mistakes, such as selling junk bonds with a 14 percent interest rate and overbuilding.

Also, the Great Depression began after the stock market crash of 1929, not 1928.

___

TRUMP: “I have a fiduciary responsibility to pay no more tax than is legally required like anybody else.”

THE FACTS: Corporate executives have justified tax avoidance by citing their fiduciary duty for years, but Trump’s use of the term might be the most creative misapplication of the term yet. A fiduciary, by definition and by law, is a person who must act in the best interest of another party. It’s the highest possible legal standard of care for another person’s finances.

Public company executives have thrown around the term loosely in recent years, arguing that they are obligated to maximize shareholder profits however possible. Trump’s statement goes even further, saying he has a fiduciary responsibility to himself.

Other presidential candidates, including Mitt Romney in 2012, intentionally opted not to take certain tax deductions, meaning they ended up paying more than necessary in the strict legal sense. Trump might not want to pay taxes. He might not even have to. But he certainly has no fiduciary responsibility to minimize his personal tax burden.

___

TRUMP: “Some of the biggest and strongest people and companies went absolutely bankrupt, which I never did. By the way, are you proud of me? Would have loved to use that card, but I just didn’t want to do it.”

THE FACTS: Trump did use that card with his businesses. While he did not personally file for bankruptcy, his companies filed for Chapter 11 protection six times between 1991 and 2009. During a Republican primary debate last year, Trump acknowledged his role in the corporate bankruptcies, but left out a couple. “I’ve done it four times out of hundreds, and I’m glad I did it. I used the laws of the country to my benefit,” he said.

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Pence’s creepy bigotry exposed

by digby

Just watch this segment of All In with Chris Hayes to see what a federal court had to say about Pence’s bigoted fearmongering:

CHRIS HAYES (HOST): So, one day before the big faceoff between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence, a huge appellate court ruling came down. The timing, we can assume, was coincidental. The message was deliberate and clear. Indiana Governor Mike Pence has no legal authority to stop the resettlement of Syrian refugees in his state. According to a ruling by a three judge panel on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the court sharply criticized Pence’s rationale for banning Syrian refugees due to terrorism, saying it was evidence-free, quote, “nightmare speculation.” Judge Richard Posner writing, quote, “that’s the equivalent of his saying (not that he does say) that he wants to forbid black people to settle in Indiana, not because they’re black, but because he’s afraid of them. But that of course would be racial discrimination, just as his targeting Syrian refugees is discrimination on the basis of nationality.” The three-judge panel, which unanimously ruled against Mike Pence’s discriminatory stance on Syrian refugees is also notable for this reason: All three judges are well-known conservatives appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and one of them, Judge Diane Sykes, is on Donald Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist.

This is a just devastating:

“[T]hat’s the equivalent of his saying (not that he does say) that he wants to forbid black people to settle in Indiana, not because they’re black, but because he’s afraid of them. But that of course would be racial discrimination, just as his targeting Syrian refugees is discrimination on the basis of nationality.”

That is exactly the case with Trump’s entire campaign against immigrants, refugees and Muslims in general.

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Today’s “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes”

by digby

John Amato caught GOP official and Trump aide Sean Spicer lying through his teeth:

On CNN’s New Day, Spicer joined host Chris Cuomo to discuss the new Tim Kaine ad. After showing it on air, Cuomo asked, “This ad is being likened to Willie Horton ads from back in the day, although you did have some white defendants who were at play as well. What’s the point of this ad? What’s the attack angle?” 

Spicer seemed flabbergasted and said, “Anyone who compares it to Willie Horton either hasn’t seen the ad or doesn’t understand history.”

Uhm …

Spicer has since deleted the tweet from his account.  The GOP twitter account also tweeted it out and then deleted it.

Chris Cuomo’s argument was spot on even though he didn’t catch the Spicer lie. This hit on Kaine is truly daft, but it’s not uncommon. Republicans are now routinely denying judgeships and federal appointments to anyone who worked as defense attorney under this premise that anyone who defends an accused criminal is basically … a criminal. It’s yet another way in which the right is propagandizing against our system and violating the norms under which we’ve operated since the beginning.

For all their blather about “freedom” the only freedom they care about is their own. They are essentially authoritarians which explains why they have rallied around Trump. He may not be a “movement conservative” but he promises to use the power of the state to bring the hammer down on foreigners and fellow Americans alike.

That’s what this election is all about.

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I suppose it was inevitable that with Hillary Clinton on the ballot we’d be spending some time looking back at the 1990s. It’s fair enough that her record as first lady and work within her husband’s administration would be examined. And yes, it was probably always in the cards that the right wing would break out the old scandal machinery to rehash some of the titillating sexcapades of yesteryear. It’s always seemed to stimulate them.

Trump has taken it to a new level, of course. He is a boorish misogynist whose closest advisers are Roger Stone, a dirty-tricks master who wrote a work of fiction about Clinton’s sex life; Roger Ailes, a legendary media strategist and recently revealed sexual harasser of epic proportions; Kellyanne Conway, one of the original Clinton character assassins; and David Bossie, whose career has been devoted to the destruction of Bill and Hillary Clinton. These are professional partisan operatives who have been working in the right-wing fever swamp for years. Of course they’d wind up working for Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton. It’s what they do.

But I have to admit I find it just a little bit hilarious to see some of the Republican establishment figures of that period wringing their hands over what Trump has done to their party, as if there were absolutely no precedent for such tacky behavior. There absolutely is. I seem to recall that during those earlier times we had dignified statesmen like Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., who called the president a “scumbag” and famously “investigated” whether he or first lady Hillary Clinton had White House aide Vince Foster murdered by shooting a watermelon in his backyard. And then there was the gracious Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., who suggested that President Clinton shouldn’t come to any military bases in North Carolina without a bodyguard.

Those are just a couple of the colorful members of Congress who elevated the discourse back in those more genteel days before Trump came along and made everything so uncivil. And that was before independent counsel Kenneth Starr launched his crusade to bring down the president, in the process turning cable news into a cross between Jerry Springer and soft-core “Skinemax” movies.

Starr had been brought in after the first independent counsel, Robert Fisk, had failed to find any wrongdoing, which was unacceptable to the Republicans. So a partisan judicial panel fired Fisk and brought on Starr with a clear mandate to find something — or else. As independent counsel, he had unlimited authority and budget to investigate the president and anything he found in the course of that investigation. With the help of a network of Republican legal operatives and a couple of thoroughly odious backstabbers named Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg, they managed to catch Clinton lying about an affair with a young White House employee named Monica Lewinsky. (She was not in fact an intern.) And the rest is history.

Starr’s office leaked like a sieve throughout the investigation, dribbling out lurid details on a daily basis for an endless parade of former female prosecutors to pick over on cable news that night. From excited speculation about the famous blue dress to ruminating about whether the president had Peyronie’s disease (you can Google it), these people spent months talking about sex on TV, all while adopting a laughably fatuous pose of moral superiority. It was an amazing spectacle.

But nothing could have prepared the nation for the official Starr Report that was delivered to Congress and immediately distributed on the internet. Instead of a dry legal brief, Starr, the former judge and Christian conservative who stood for rectitude, respectability and moral standards, had written a torrid, bodice-ripping romance novel. Here’s a short excerpt:

According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President kissed. She unbuttoned her jacket; either she unhooked her bra or he lifted her bra up; and he touched her breasts with his hands and mouth. Ms. Lewinsky testified: “I believe he took a phone call … and so we moved from the hallway into the back office …. [H]e put his hand down my pants and stimulated me manually in the genital area.” While the President continued talking on the phone (Ms. Lewinsky understood that the caller was a Member of Congress or a Senator), she performed oral sex on him. He finished his call, and, a moment later, told Ms. Lewinsky to stop. In her recollection: “I told him that I wanted … to complete that. And he said … that he needed to wait until he trusted me more. And then I think he made a joke … that he hadn’t had that in a long time.”

Everyone in the whole country gasped in horror as they devoured the “report” from the first page to the last. It was one of the most surreal episodes in American political history, right up there with 2016 and Donald Trump.

Let’s just say that the “discourse” throughout this sorry episode wasn’t exactly elevating, so perhaps it’s fair to be a little bit jaundiced about the news that Starr nowbemoans the decline of civility in presidential politics and claims he has deep regrets for what his prosecutorial zeal did to the legacy of Bill Clinton. He said, “It’s sad that the chapter is so rooted in the unpleasantness, as I used to call it, the recent unpleasantness.”

“The unpleasantness” is one way to describe an out-of-control prosecutor who used every lever of state power to intimidate and coerce anyone he thought might be willing to testify against the president of the United States. It was very “unpleasant” for the people whose lives he destroyed in that process.

But as with so many of the Clinton accusers of that period, Ken Starr is now facing his own crucible. Hillary Clinton, the woman Starr humiliated before the whole world by putting his poorly written erotica about her husband’s extramarital affair out for everyone to see, may be about to become the first woman president in history. Starr is facing an embarrassing sex scandal of his own from his time as chancellor of Baylor University, where he was accused of covering up rampant sexual assault by the football team. This stunning denouement has cost the former scourge of the Clinton administration his job and his reputation. At the risk of further polluting the discourse, I can’t help but point out that karma’s a bitch.

About all those other taxes he supposedly paid

by digby

This is from a few months back but it has new relevance today:

Back in 1986 and likely for many years before, Donald Trump colluded in tax evasion with Bulgari Jewelry Store in New York, a high-end posh location with tony clientele right out ofLifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Here’s how the scam worked:

Trump would go into the store with his wife, his girlfriend, his…whatever (to use his vernacular). He would then buy her an expensive necklace or wristwatch. Normally, such a transaction would face the New York city and state sales tax, which would be pretty high on luxury jewelry.

In an illegal attempt to evade the tax, Trump “asked” the store to instead ship the jewelry to an out of state location, where no New York sales tax could be collected. In fact, the store would merely send an empty jewelry box to the location, while Trump and his lady friends walked out the door with the jewelry that very day.

The state and city tax collectors eventually caught onto this scheme, and Trump promptly testified against his erstwhile tax evasion colluding partners at the jewelry store in order to save his own skin.

The empty box scam is just the most colorful example of Trump’s history of crossing the line from legal tax avoidance to illegal tax evasion. Many other such stories can be told about his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida by local reporterFrank Cerabino.

The first Palm Beach story is interesting. Trump bought the property from the estate of breakfast cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. He got it for a relative bargain at $7.5 million, something he bragged about in The Art of the Deal. Yet he refused for years to pay local property taxes on the actual value of the property, $11.5 million at the time he bought it. He tried to have it both ways–buy the property for a steep discount and also pay property taxes at that under-valued level.

Try that with your town’s property tax assessor sometime and see what he says.

He isn’t just a tax evader. He’s a straight up tax cheat.

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Opportunity costs
by Tom Sullivan

“TRUMP” truck I spotted yesterday downtown.

Donald Trump likes to blast rally goers with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” That sentiment may be sinking in with some Bernie Sanders supporters as well. A Sanders activist still opposed the “neoliberal warmonger” is nevertheless distributing Clinton yard signs here this week. (Campaign veterans can take the yard signs discussion offline.)

Maybe the “TRUMP” truck got to him.

Perhaps it wasn’t Hillary Clinton’s debate performance last week, but Trump’s, that is closing Hillary Clinton’s “enthusiasm gap.” Polls out yesterday show Clinton opening a national lead of five points (CNN/ORC) to six points (CBS/NYT ) over Trump. CNN reports:

Clinton’s boost in the race stems largely from gains on Trump among men (from a 22-point deficit with that group in early September to just a 5-point one now) and sharply increased support from independents, who broke heavily in Trump’s favor in the early September poll but now tilt Clinton, 44% to 37%.

Although the CNN poll may not have capture reaction to the Trump tax leak, news that Trump may have avoided paying taxes for nearly two decades will not help him. CNN again:

Voters are in near-universal agreement, though, that paying taxes is every American’s civic duty. Nearly 9-in-10 feel that way while just 12% say they see taxes as an unnecessary burden to be avoided. Even among Trump backers, 79% see them as a civic duty.

The poll, conducted entirely after last Monday’s presidential debate, finds Clinton’s supporters increasingly enthusiastic about voting for president this year (50% are extremely or very enthusiastic now, up from 46% earlier in the month), while Trump backers’ enthusiasm has ticked downward, from 58% to 56%.

Real Clear Politics averages yesterday morning when I saw the TRUMP truck showed Trump ahead in North Carolina by 0.3 points. By dinnertime, Clinton had moved ahead by 0.2. In the “newly insane state of North Carolina,” you can’t always get what you want and, sometimes, you take what you can get.

Yes, there are those among us that want to “send a message” with out votes (whether or not anyone can hear it). Brian Beutler noted how after stating plainly that Donald Trump is unfit to be president and Hillary Clinton is “undeniably capable of leading the United States,” the Chicago Tribune nonetheless endorsed Gary Johnson, the Libertarian, hoping “Johnson does well enough that Republicans and Democrats get the message.” About something.

Some may see the election as an opportunity to “send a message,” but may miss their chance to send the right one. Beutler writes:

One downside of the Tribune’s pox-on-both-houses argument is that if Johnson has a strong showing in November—say, 17 percent to Clinton’s 41 and Trump’s 40—that would send a message that a coin-toss between a fit and unfit candidate is an acceptable risk for the country. But the most important downside would be the opportunity cost of denying Trump the ass-kicking he deserves.

The Republican Party nominated an ignorant, bigoted, authoritarian candidate to be president of the United States. The best message that the country can send with the popular vote is that if you try to win the presidency by stoking race hatred and promising to degrade the Constitution, you will lose and lose badly—that a fascist does not have an even-odds chance of becoming the most powerful person in the world.

Amen. To that end, one Bernie activist here is trying to send that message … with 2,000 Clinton yard signs.

Trump’s history of filing for bankruptcy

by digby

This is Trump today on the stump talking about the early 1990s which he characterizes as the worst economic slump since the great depression (which is total bullshit.) Then he said this, which is simply delusional:

Trump said today that in early 1990s many of his competitors declared bankruptcy, but he never did. Trump declared bankruptcy in ’91 & ’92. pic.twitter.com/kBPq36XFG8

— John Aravosis (@aravosis) October 3, 2016

Snopes:

Trump-controlled businesses have sought bankruptcy protection several times after those entities — nearly all of them casino properties — were several hundreds of millions of dollars or more in debt (although the exact number of bankruptcies tied to Trump is debatable, as his spokespeople routinely disclaim that “many of the filings occurred when Trump was no longer involved in the businesses”):
#1) Trump Taj Mahal (1991):   The Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City opened in 1990, with Trump financing the completion of its construction with $675 million in junk bonds at 14% interest. By the following year the casino itself was in debt to the tune of $3 billion, while Trump himself owed some $900 million in personal liabilities.
In order to keep the Taj Mahal afloat, Trump struck a deal with his lenders in which he gave up half his ownership share and equity in the casino, sold his Trump Shuttle airline and his Trump Princess 220-foot yacht, and agreed to a bank-set limit on his personal spending in exchange for a lower interest rate and additional time to make his loan payments. 

#2 and #3) Trump’s Castle and Trump Plaza Casinos (1992):   Less than a year after the Taj Mahal bankruptcy Trump filed for Chapter 11 protection again for two more Atlantic City hotel-casinos, the Trump Plaza and Trump’s Castle, over their inability to make principal and interest payments on bonds. The Plaza ($550 million in debt) and the Castle ($338 million in debt) were competing against each other, as well as against the Taj Mahal, and Trump gave up a 50% share in exchange for more favorable terms on the debts. 

#4) Trump Plaza Hotel (1992):   Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy protection a third time in 1992 over the Trump Plaza Hotel on New York’s famous Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park in midtown Manhattan. Once again, Trump gave up a 49% stake in the property to secure more favorable terms from lenders on the luxury hotel’s debt of more than $550 million. 

#5) Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts (2004):   In 1995, Donald Trump established Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts as a publicly traded company, an entity that eventually consolidated his three Atlantic City casinos (Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Castle, and Trump Plaza), along with other properties, under one company. In 2004, Trump sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for the company, with filings listing about $1.8 billion in debt. Yet again, Trump’s ownership in the business was reduced, from 47% to 27%, in order to obtain more favorable terms from lenders. 

#6) Trump Entertainment Resorts (2009):   After its 2004 bankruptcy, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts was renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts (TER), and that latter entity went Chapter 11 in 2009 with a debt of $1.2 billion. Trump fought with his board of directors over how to restructure the company and ended up reducing his ownership share of the business once again (to 10%) and resigning as chairman of the board.

And then there’s this:

Donald Trump has undertaken a number of business projects that ultimately failed (or failed to live up to his lofty projections) without resulting in bankrupcties, including:

Trump SteaksGoTrump (online travel site)
Trump AirlinesTrump VodkaTrump MortgageTrump: The GameTrump MagazineTrump UniversityTrump Ice (bottled water)
The New Jersey Generals (pro football team)
Tour de Trump (bicycle race)
Trump Network (nutritional supplements)
Trumped! (syndicated radio spot)

The sniffing revelation

by digby

The Reverend Pat Robertson, a man who has won Republican presidential primaries, explained Donald Trump’s sniffing:

“Trump sniffing may have been a sign of the Holy Spirit coming out of him.The Holy Spirit affects people in strange ways. Some people go into a frenzy, some people start laughing uncontrollably, some people bark like dogs. Apparently, Trump sniffs.”

Sure, why not?

😉

The female Donald

by digby

I haven’t commented much on the Trump and his daughter Ivanka stuff because it’s creepy speculation and I have no way of knowing what it’s all about. But there’s no doubt that his relationship with her has had an erotic component. There are a bunch of pictures like this out there.

This incident is particularly weird:

In 2013, Trump and 31-year-old Ivanka went on Wendy to promote the most recent season of The Apprentice. During the show, Wendy Williams had them play what should have been a harmless, not-at-all sexualized game in any normal situation. That is not what happened. 

When asked about his favorite thing he has in common with his daughter, Trump answered with a smirk: “Well, I was going to say “sex,” but I can’t relate that to her.”

weird https://t.co/Blv5wX7GVP pic.twitter.com/hNCKVPC5Ob— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) October 3, 2016

?????

I have no idea what’s actually between them. It could just be a result of Trump’s general view of women which is very simple: fuckable and unfuckable. Only the former are worthy so maybe his love for his daughter requires him to see her in those terms, I don’t know.

But I also think his view of his daughter is rooted in narcissism and his creepy eugenics philosophy. She’s the female Donald:

You know who is one of the great beauties of the world, and I helped create her? Ivanka. My daughter, Ivanka. She’s six feet tall. She’s got the best body. She made a lot of money as a model—a tremendous amount. 

He sees her as a reflection of him and a natural consequence of his superior genes.  Again, this belief in eugenics is one reason why the white supremacists love him so much.

Trump the “economic genius”


by digby

I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

According to focus groups, the exchange in last Monday’s campaign debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump that really offended people of all political stripes was not Trump’s revolting attitudes about women, although that was plenty offensive. It was the “taxes comment.” The Washington Post’s report on its focus group of undecided voters in North Carolina had this headline: “When Trump said that not paying taxes ‘makes me smart,’ undecided voters in N.C. gasped”:

“That’s offensive. I pay taxes,” said Townley, 52, a program ­director for a local council of governments. 

“Another person would be in jail for that,” said Jamilla Hawkins, 33, who was sitting beside him in the Crescent conference room at the Embassy Suites in this city of 150,000 near Raleigh.

Pollster Frank Luntz’s dial-o-meter focus group also showed a sharp plunge for Trump when the tax discussion came up. After the debate Trump even denied saying it, which was ridiculous since more than 80 million people watched him do it.

Clinton was correct when she said that what little we knew from the few of Trump’s tax returns previously made public for various reasons was that he often pays little or no federal taxes. Over the weekend, the New York Times published abombshell article featuring Trump’s 1995 tax returns from several states, which had been delivered anonymously to the paper. It not only showed that Trump had paid no federal income tax that year but that he had claimed nearly a billion dollars in losses. Tax experts told the Times that could mean he wrote off $50 million per year ever since. This certainly lends credibility to the speculation that he has refused to release his returns for that reason — because he has rarely or never paid even a nickel in federal income tax. Obviously, if he wants to end that speculation and prove everyone wrong, he could simply release the returns.

The Times had asked Trump for comment, so he undoubtedly knew this story was going to break before he took the stage at his Saturday night rally in Pennsylvania, where he proceeded to deliver one of his most unhinged rants in many months. Trump accused Hillary Clinton of being unfaithful to her husband and performed an imitation of her fainting spell to illustrate that she’s weak, saying, “She’s supposed to fight all these different things and she can’t make it 15 feet to her car.” (He must have skipped the chapter on Franklin D. Roosevelt in high school history class.) Between his disastrous debate performance and this news,which cuts to the heart of his main argument for the presidency, Trump ended a very bad week with a very, very bad night.

His surrogates were rattled as well. On Sunday morning they sent out their big guns, the people reportedly closest to Trump at the moment, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. The two of them put on performances that would be career-enders if they hadn’t already ended them by taking on the roles of Trump majordomos. They both made the rounds to declare that Trump is a “genius,” with Christie declaring that the tax revelation is “a very good story” for Trump because it shows him as the comeback kid. Giuliani compared Trump to Winston Churchill and Steve Jobs, saying that like them, “He had some failures and then he built an empire.” He asked thefundamental question: “Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman?”

The idea that a man whose business has gone bankrupt four times, who has stiffed thousands of small business owners, who has been sued all over the country for fraud, who used his charity as a slush fund and who now has been revealed to have reported to the government that he lost more than $915 million — in a year in which the stock market gained 37 percent! — is an economic genius could only be true in Bizarro World.

Trump himself tweeted, “I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them.” In fact, Trump’s tax plan is standard-issue GOP Club for Growth trickle-down. It’s the most conventional aspect of his entire platform. And the fact that he’s a card-carrying member of the 1 percent means that he’s proposed a tax plan that will benefit him and his family “big league.” He would drastically cut corporate taxes, reduce the top rates and eliminate the estate tax, providing a windfall for his children. And then there’s this little noticed provision, via the Washington Post’s Wonkblog:

Trump’s plan would dramatically reduce taxes on what is known in tax circles as “pass-through” entities, which do not pay corporate income taxes, but whose owners are taxed at individual rates on their share of profits. Those entities are the most common structure for small businesses and increasingly popular for larger ones as well. They are also a cornerstone of the Trump Organization. On his 2015 presidential financial disclosure report, Trump listed holdings of more than 200 limited liability corporations, which is a form of pass-through.

This is unusual. Recent GOP nominees have simply proposed reducing the top tax rate, which would effectively lower the pass-through rate. Mitt Romney wanted to lower it to 28 percent, John McCain picked 35 percent and George W. Bush proposed 33 percent. Trump wants to lower that rate to 15 percent. I’ll leave it to the experts to sort out why he thinks that’s a good idea, but suffice to say it’s clear that he would personally benefit from it.

It should be pointed out that Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has proposed a tax plan that would create a new top bracket of 43.6 percent and a minimum tax rate of 30 percent for anyone making more than $1 million. She would also raise the estate tax. None of this benefits her or her family. In fact, one of he most glaring differences between these two wealthy candidates is that Bill and Hillary Clinton go out of their way to pay substantially more in taxes than is necessary. They can afford it, certainly. They are reportedly worth more than $100 million. But it does show a very different philosophy than Donald Trump, whose alleged $10 billion fortune is vastly larger. He apparently feels that paying no taxes makes him smarter than all of us dumb citizens who do.

If you think Trump is a genius for gaming the system so that he never has to pay federal income tax, that’s your prerogative. But please don’t ever say another word about “makers and takers” or the 47 percent again. We taxpayers have been carrying Donald Trump for 30 years while he was living in his golden palace. He’s the biggest welfare queen in the world.

Brutal new ad from the Clinton campaign on Trump’s tax avoidance… pic.twitter.com/L360MOWTbp

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) October 3, 2016